The Politics of Adoption: Gender and the Making of French Citizenship

4 Administering Parenthood

4 Administering Parenthood Risk, as such, doesn’t exist, there are just historically and culturally specific ways of perceiving situations involving uncertainty. —Pierre Lascoumes, “Construction sociale des risques et contrôle du vivant”1 The field of adoption includes players from varying backgrounds and careers: local and national administrative personnel, independent psychologists and psychiatrists, volunteers in humanitarian organizations, activists for parental causes, journalists, and so on. Adoption is nevertheless meticulously administered. Each player develops operational skills that become the yardstick of his or her professional recognition. In order to come to terms with situations involving uncertain matches of child to parent(s), these players tend to view—within their own sphere and according to their own constraints—adoption as “risky.” The concept of risk simultaneously justifies social intervention and sustains the ability to act. By dramatizing the stakes of their actions, the players place themselves in situations of responsibility. This chapter will look at how this discourse has filtered through French child welfare agencies from the standpoints of both organization and practice.2 I will show that the spread of the concept of parenthood , which arose from psychosocial aid to poor or isolated families, has served as a technical guide for administrative agents and social workers, enabling them to find a common denominator—namely, the principle of “social precaution.” Parenthood refers to the ability to perform the role of parent “correctly,” and it seeks to protect the child from all risks of poor treatment. Media attention in France has nevertheless extended the use of the term “parenthood” (parentalité) to cover “nonstandard” family configurations, such as single parenthood, multiple parenthood, homosexual parenthood, and so on. And yet these families have not succeeded in changing the content of the concept of parenthood; it is even 74 Chapter 4 possible to argue that they sometimes reinforce old stereotypes. Parenthood thereby puts a new yet equally hierarchical twist on traditional gender roles. Child Welfare Agencies This section is based on fieldwork—observation, interviews, archives— carried out between January 2003 and July 2006 in the adoption bureaus of two local child welfare administrations.3 The following data and analyses therefore reflect the way they functioned during that period. The first one I studied was the Paris adoption bureau, the largest such adoption office in terms of number of applications for approval, number of approvals awarded (427 in 2006), and number of adoptions carried out. The Paris adoption bureau grants a very high number of approvals in proportion to its population (37 for every 100,000 adults between the ages of twenty -five and fifty-nine), even though other administrative départements award a higher total (Nord, Maine-et-Loire, and others). The second adoption office was located in the département of Saône-et-Loire in the Burgundy region, representing an average-sized unit with a team whose task specifically focuses on adoption but that handles a relatively small number of cases each year (26 in 2006). Furthermore, with only fifteen approvals for every 100,000 adults ages twenty-five to fifty-nine, Saôneet -Loire has one of the lowest rates in France. My empirical research reveals the weight of hierarchical domination in these administrative units. Most full-time civil servants feel they have valuable skills, hence have a recognizable role, yet they become powerless in the face of the “expertise” of psychologists, psychiatrists, public officials, and even representatives of the main associations that occupy the media scene.4 They experience a structural parallel between their own relatively low status and the disadvantaged environments they confront in their practice (or confronted during their training). The structural parallel does not operate uniformly, however; the most mobile professions (those based on recognition beyond the field of adoption itself) largely escape this self-deprecating loop. In other words, the institutional centrality of child welfare staffers masks a certain marginality with respect to the hierarchy of administrative skills. This observation is all the more significant in that the efficient operation of adoption bureaus is not only linked to their financial resources—which are miniscule with respect to the overall social welfare budgets of French départements5 —but dependent above all on their ability to project a professionally recognizable image. Administering Parenthood 75 Teamwork In Paris, the adoption bureau functions autonomously with respect to other child welfare services; its staff handles only issues related to adoption. There are two teams within the bureau, an eleven-person...