Babies Across Borders: Problems for Women's History in the Study of Transborder Adoption: Introduction

Adoption, historian Ellen Herman suggests, is good to think with. Drawing from Korean, North American, Chinese, Guatemalan, and Cuban histories, this roundtable uses the complex legal and social practices of child adoption to think about family, motherhood, gender, nation, and race. Participants in this roundtable join a veritable explosion of scholarship, interdisciplinary and international, about adoption, which is clearly also about many other things as well.

Histories of adoption, of course, are also histories of women. How could this be otherwise, as adoption involves women centrally as mothers (birth and adoptive), social workers, and representatives of the "ideal" family that is being created, recreated, protected, or challenged in various adoption scenarios. At the same time, because adoption forces us to explore the construction of such fundamental and naturalized concepts, child adoption is a critical part of the gendered and racialized narratives of nation and identity that create social meaning, now and in the past.

Historian Barbara Melosh argues that all adoptions exist in the borderland of society, and all are thus in some sense border-crossing.¹ The scholars represented in this roundtable place borders and border-crossing adoption at the center of their stories, generally here understood as the borders of nation and race. Our work on the North American baby "black market" of the 1950s, the cultural representation of adoptees in Korea, the plight of Chinese birthmothers, the social meaning of "child," and the preponderance of rescue and kidnap narratives, as well as the complicated regulatory regimes in transnational adoption, raises a host of challenging questions.

To explore these questions, adoption researchers are in the process of creating that elusive but cherished entity—a community of scholars—engaged in an extended global conversation. As part of this community, our conversation here explores various national adoption laws and practices, with customary and contested understandings of family and motherhood, and with several generations of border-crossings in adoption that have created a rich and often painful archive of experiences. We look at border-crossing adoptions from the perspective of relinquishing mothers and relinquishing cultures, from the perspective of receiving families and receiving nations, and from the viewpoint of social agencies and transnational organizations that have attempted to mediate these relationships. All of these short interventions are moments along the way toward larger projects. Adoption has moved rapidly from a topic with limited academic concern and virtually no social presence to a high profile, contested, and vibrant field of intellectual and political inquiry and debate.