Adoption as Political History

A number of academic books published in the last decade have told the history of the politics of transnational and transracial adoption, but few have told political history through adoption. These are, of course, two sides of the same coin, and Laura Briggs accomplishes both. Somebody's Children recounts the fraught and sometimes violent political economies of significant periods in U.S. domestic and transnational adoption over the last century. What weaves these various moments together is suggested in the title of the book: the contexts and experiences of the particular somebodies whose children are rendered "adoptable." For example, two different instances conventionally framed as a battle over who should adopt what babies—the response of the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) to the adoption of black children in the 1970s and the battle to keep Guatemala "open" for adoption several decades later—become linked via detailed accounts of a battle for justice for the (poor, female, non-white, single) parents whose children are taken away. These and other accounts address, head on, how children come to be undone from their birth families and birth countries, establishing Briggs as a whistle-blower of historic proportion.

By viewing political history through the lens of adoption, Somebody's Children turns conventional methodologies of adoption inside out. Briggs first disassembles the misguided ideological distinction between "good adopters and bad adopters, child rescuers and child stealers" (p. 3), exemplified by the popular discourses surrounding adoptions by Angelina Jolie and Madonna, respectively. Out of the rubble she reassembles the symbolic and material importance of adoption to the ideological work of anticommunism, evangelical and liberation theologies, and neoliberal globalization. The book thus makes a significant contribution to a growing body of scholarship that recognizes that the story of struggles over kinship is also the story of institutional and international configurations of power and of raced, classed, and gendered productions of subjectivity. It does so by setting its sights squarely on "the politics of how these mothers come to lose their children" (p. 6).

The chapters of Somebody's Children are a comprehensive reimagining of Briggs' notable contributions to adoption research over the last decade, organized here both historically and geographically. The book's first section is on transracial domestic adoption in the United States; its second section moves to transnational adoption from Latin America; and the final chapter and epilogue return to the United States and what Briggs terms "emerging fights" over the politics of gay and lesbian adoption and over the precarious position of undocumented immigrants relative to their children. I read the epilogue first, curious where Briggs was headed, and I was riveted. The potential for U.S. citizens to claim immigrants' children for adoption sharply brings home the book's argument that "the production of adoptable children is an index of vulnerability, particularly of single mothers" (p. 282). This loaded statement rings profoundly true by the time one has read the book in its entirety.

The experiences of undocumented immigrants are frighteningly close to the kind of adoption future Briggs warns of in her introduction, where she sets up the book's main themes: the policing of vulnerable mothers, the centrality of adoption politics to the rise of neoliberal globalization, the variable fates of marginalized groups across time and context, and the pathways by which assumptions about single motherhood and needy children make their way into political practice. The introduction is also where Briggs establishes public adoption commentator Elizabeth Bartholet as her foil. While not heavy-handed about it, Briggs takes Bartholet to task for the terms on which she advocates for transracial adoption. In constructing children as "languishing" or in need of "rescue," argues Briggs, Bartholet radically reduces or even erases the histories and experiences of their mothers. Indeed, Somebody's Children is a direct reappropriation of the title of Bartholet's influential book Nobody's Children.

The first two chapters address the racial politics of African American and Native American children with the...