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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 11 (4) (January 1906): 445. 2. Marriage makes the homosexuality of the applicants more obvious and visible when first introduced to a prospective child, according to experience in Belgium. See Hugues Dorzee,“Parents homosexuels, inégaux devant la loi,” Le Soir, February 18, 2013. 3. The Turkish deputy prime minister, Bekir Bozdağ, launched a campaign to repatriate a Turkish-born child adopted by a lesbian couple in the Netherlands. On February 18, 2013, he declared that “Turkish families don’t want to give their children to homosexual couples,” and that “it is important that these children be raised in an environment similar to their family culture.” On June 21, 2013, the Russian Duma voted to outlaw the adoption of Russian children by single foreigners and homosexual couples in countries where gay adoption is legal. 4. See Bruno Perreau,“The Political Economy of Marriage,” forthcoming in Contemporary French Civilization 39 (1) (Spring 2014). 5. Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13 (1) (2002): 14–44. 6. See Didier Eribon, D’une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris: Leo Scheer, 2007). 7. My research follows in a direct line from historian Joan W. Scott’s critical analyses of male-female parity and secular culture in France. See her Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) and The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 8. With the abolition of the monarchy—where the king was the incarnation of the collective body—the French Republic had to invent other corporeal homologies that would create a link between citizens and the national community. These homologies are now taking new forms: the imaginative construct of the body is henceforth less centered on bodily strength and hygiene (glorification of the power of labor, the value of sacrifice during periods of war, public hygiene, 152 Notes repression of affronts to public decency, etc.) than on its authenticity (the importance of genealogy, the psychological significance of relationships to the group, and so on). On the history of the imagination of the social body in France, see Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 9. These rituals often involve the body and entail a “codifying” of the world, but they are never reduced to fertilization alone. See Edmund Leach, “The Physiological Basis of Sign/Symbol Sets,” Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols Are Connected, An Introduction the Use of Structuralist Analysis in Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 47–50. 10. AFCARS Report #19, Children’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/afcarsreport19.pdf, accessed June 18, 2013. 11. See chapter 1. 12. See Lauren Berlant, “Notes on Diva Citizenship,” The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 237. 13. Press release, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, February 6, 2009. 14. Members of the association were indicted for the “kidnapping of children with intent to undermine their civic status, forging public documents, and nonpayment of debts,” according to instructions delivered to the prosecutor in N’Djamena, Chad, on December 7, 2007. 15. Jean-Philippe Rémy, “L’Arche de Zoé: étrange équipée,” Le Monde: Dossiers & Documents 370 (December 2007), 7. 16. The story was filed by two reporters, Marc Garmirian and Jean-Daniel Gillou , and was aired on the M6 television station on November 4, 2007, as part of its 66 Minutes program. Excerpts can be viewed on the CAPA website. 17. Article 225–11 of the Code de l’Action Sociale et des Familles places responsibility for such accreditation with the president of the county council (Conseil Général). 18. This plan offered a good example of a political public relations tactic that seeks to reinforce the authority of a decision by exploiting an incident with high emotional impact. See Philippe Braud, L’Émotion en politique (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1996). 19. The France 2 TV station nevertheless aired another story on the successful adoption of a Chadian child as a prelude to the L’Arche de Zoé story in the 8:00 p.m. newscast on November 9, 2007. 20. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings...