Barbara Sumner

The Illegitimate Other: adoptology and the manufacture of identity. A study of the structures, functions, and purpose of human adoption in society.

Commenced 2021

Barbara is the author of Tree of Strangers (Massey University Press), an investigative memoir of forced stranger adoption. She is actively engaged in political discourse and activism on issues affecting the lives of adopted adults. She is working to make birth identity a fundamental right and to situate New Zealand within the global movement for equal rights with the non-adopted and emancipation for adults adopted as infants. She coined the neologism ‘adoptology’ to define the study of the structures, functions and purpose of human adoption in society.

Barbara is a multi-award-winning, Oscar-short-listed documentary filmmaker, a former magazine features writer, mother and grandmother.

Barbara was a Michael King Writers Centre Resident in 2024. In May 2024, Pantera Press published her historical novel The Gallows Bird.

Barbara writes: '"The Illegitimate Other: Adoption and the Manufacture of Identity" is a hybrid thesis combining creative writing and critical research. In the form of a series of essays, it addresses a range of adoption-related issues. These include multiple legislation controlling the lives of adopted adults, the role of consent in the irrevocable, lifetime adoption contract, and Aotearoa's stolen baby era. This thesis explores adoption's history and social experience from the adopted adult’s perspective. It is a work of research and reclamation.'

Read more:

Tree of Strangers (Massey University Press)

The Gallows Bird (Pantera Press)