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Laura Briggs (1964-) is an American Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She researches and teaches on U.S. empire building, U.S. women's history, reproductive politics, gender and science, and U.S.-Latin American relations.

Education
Growing up in the northeast, Briggs completed her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College in 1986. She then went on to acquire a master of theological studies from Harvard University in 1989 and a doctoral degree from Brown University in 1997.

Career
Briggs taught for about fifteen years in the Southwest before accepting her current position at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender/Women's Studies and Associate Dean for Instruction at the University of Arizona, she made a huge contribution to its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department by establishing its first PhD program. An advocate of public higher education, she believes working with state university students has greatly shaped her academic career and that she has learned a lot not only from their intelligent questions inside the classroom but also from their passionate community activism. At the University of Massachusetts, she now hopes to expand its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department and continue to promote its strong emphasis on intersectional analysis (an approach which is critical to her own research).

As a public intellectual, Briggs is deeply and personally invested in reproductive politics and transracial/transnational adoption. She runs a blog named after her most recent scholarly work called Somebody's Children: A Blog about Adoption, ART, and Reproductive Politics. On this public forum, she is currently following and commenting on the Baby Veronica Case.

Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption
Published by Duke University Press in 2012, Somebody's Children provides an intersectional analysis of historical and contemporary politics of transracial and transnational adoption practices. Directly critiquing Elizabeth Bartholet's Nobody's Children, which reproduces the popular narrative of white middle class mothers adopting children across national and racial lines, this text gives voice to the individuals who have been silenced within these popular narratives: mothers of color who lose their children.

Divided into three sections, Somebody's Children examines, in order, transracial adoption, transnational adoption, and the position of gays and lesbians and immigrants in adoption politics. The first section on transracial adoption focuses on African American and Native American children. Briggs historicizes the entrance of children of color into the child welfare system across time (for black children, the first moment came during the civil rights movement when whites attacked unwed black mothers and the second moment came in the 1980s with the "crack baby" crisis; for Native children the first moment happened in the 1950s when the Aid to Dependent Children programs were opened to Native communities and in 1978 with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act). Despite these differences in entrance into the child welfare system, both types of transracial adoption have been and continue to be shaped by the intersection of racism and poverty. Given that scholars like Eleana Kim have thoroughly navigated the history and politics of Asian adoptees, Briggs focuses on Latin America in the transnational adoption section. One of this section's main objectives is to debunk the myth of free will that frequently dominates popular adoption narratives. In the context of transnational adoption between the U.S. and Latin America, whether a mother gives up her child voluntarily or involuntarily or loses her child through kidnapping, disappearance, etc does not take away from the fact that any decision is constrained by material circumstances. Michel Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History theoretically informs the text as a whole but is of particular importance to her discussion of Guatemala's silencing of stories about disappearing children during the 1980s. Most importantly, this section positions transnational adoption within the larger context of the opening and closing of national borders, international relations (specifically the relationships between First and Third World countries), and the negotiation of cultural differences. Instead of discussing a type of adoption, the third section focuses on two groups that have impacted and been impacted by transracial and transnational adoption: gays and lesbians and immigrants. Briggs argues that while gay and lesbian individuals and couples (registered as middle class and white) have gradually become "legitimate" prospective adoptive parents, immigrants are increasingly losing their children to the state at the same time as their own relationship to the state is defined through questions of citizenship, belonging, and deportation.

In conversation with critical race studies, gender/sexuality studies, Latin American studies, family studies, and childhood studies (particularly literature on the politics of adoption), Somebody's Children sheds light on important issues such as the criminalization of single motherhood. In arguing that "losing children is an index of political or social vulnerability", this text presents the right to parent as another lens to rethink the meaning of citizenship and national belonging. Understanding race, gender, sexuality, and class to be intricately bound to the politics of transracial and transnational adoption, this text is truly interdisciplinary.

Other Major Works
Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico explores the colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico through the lens of reproductive politics and ideologies about race, gender, and sexuality. Using historical and literary sources as evidence, Briggs places gender/sexuality studies in conversation with scholarship on U.S. imperialism. By arguing that discourse on the bodies of working-class women in Puerto Rico was essential to U.S. expansionist projects during the twentieth century, this text "reminds us that producing knowledge is a political act" and is therefore a must-read for historians.