Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship (review)

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of transnational adoption around the globe, transferring a growing number of children from the world's poorer countries to its wealthier ones. Americans adopted more than 20,000 foreign children in 2005, and stories in the U.S. media—featuring highly publicized celebrity adoptions, the medical risks of adopting Russian children, the Sinification of white families adopting Chinese baby girls, or the scandals of baby-trafficking in Cambodia—have made this "new" form of family-making ever more visible to the public eye. Transnational adoption, however, is not simply a postmodern phenomenon that reflects our current age of globalization, but, rather, a decades-old practice that traces its origins to the end of WWII, making it a significant part of the modern history of America and international political relations of the post-war period. In spite of this long history, scholars have only recently started to investigate the complex interplay of politics, economics, race, culture, identity, and kinship presented by this modern form of social reproduction.

Chinese adoptions, because of their popularity and expanding numbers (nearly 8,000 in 2005 from 2,000 a decade ago), their racial conspicuousness (adopted predominantly by white parents), their connection to China's family-planning policies (the notorious one-child policy) and cultural patriarchy (95% are girls) and the visible and vocal cultural production among proactive adoptive parent groups (see Volkman 2003), have been the most mediatized of the new wave. Until this latest surge in adoptions from overseas, studies of adoption tended to cast a narrow focus on the clinical and psychological outcomes of the previous generation's Korean adoptees, employing quantitative measures to make general statements about those children's and adolescents' "adjustment" and mental health. This preoccupation with outcomes and the tendency to disembed the phenomenon of transnational adoption from its relevant historical, social, and political contexts is reliant upon a developmentalist framework that understands adoptee adjustment and acculturation to be part of an individualized process of moving from "pre-adoption" traumas of loss and biographical rupture into the "post-adoption" phase of adjusting to a normative kinship structure (presumably middle-class, heterosexual and nuclear).

Drawn to the ways in which transnational adoption pulls into proximity broad political economic forces with the intimate realms of kinship, a growing number of anthropologists, sociologists and other scholars have been examining its social, cultural, historical implications, and their work has come to constitute an emergent subfield (e.g., see Volkman 2005). Sara K. Dorow's Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship is the first full-length ethnographic monograph to examine transnational adoption and her work exists in conversation with scholars such as Ann Anagnost, David Eng, Christine Gailey, Nancy Riley, Toby Volkman, Barbara Yngvesson, and others who have been casting a critical eye on the political economic and cultural dimensions of this practice.

Dorow, a sociologist, provides a qualitative analysis of China-U.S. adoption that weaves together in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation and engages theoretical concerns with the intersections of race, gender, and class in conjuncture with nation and kinship in the reckoning of the Chinese adoptee's social identifications and belonging. Borrowing from a diverse set of theorists, including Avery Gordon, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Judith Butler, Dorow attempts to grasp the values and meanings that attach to the adoptee as she moves between national and familial locations and the prior histories and relationships that risk being marginalized, erased or devalued in her radical transformation from needy third world infant to privileged first world citizen. Dorow introduces three "impossible contradictions" of the child's identifications and belonging—named as impossible because they can neither be resolved nor disregarded (17). The first is organized around the child as the object of exchange, caught up in dynamics of commodification and care, the impersonal assignment of market values and the romance of humanitarian rescue. The second deals with the problematic...