TORONTO LAUNCH: Frances Latchford - Steeped in Blood

Glad Day Bookshop , 499 Church Street, Toronto, ON
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Join Frances Latchford for the launch of her new book, Steeped in Blood: Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family. This is a joint event with John Grundy, who is launching Bureaucratic Manoeuvres: The Contested Administration of the Unemployed (University of Toronto Press).

Frances J. Latchford is associate professor of philosophy in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at York University. John Grundy is faculty awards specialist at the College of Engineering, Purdue University.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Upending our established values and beliefs about what makes a family, Steeped in Blood examines the social and political devaluation of adoptive ties. It takes readers on an intellectual journey through accepted wisdom about adoption, twins, kinship, and incest, and challenges our naturalistic and individualistic assumptions about identity and the biological ties that bind us, sometimes violently, to our families. Latchford exposes how our desire for bio-genealogical knowledge, understood as it is by family and adoption experts, pathologizes adoptees by posing the biological tie as a necessary condition for normal identity formation. Rejecting the idea that a love of the self-same is fundamental to family bonds, her book is a reaction to the wounds families suffer whenever they dare to revel in their difference.