Where She Comes From: Locating Queer Transracial Adoption

This article attempts to answer the oft-asked question of where my daughter—an African American girl with two white, middle-class gay dads—“comes from,” by tracing power constellations that make our family possible. Through critical autoethnography, it interweaves narrative about the evolving relationship we share with her birth family with analysis of intersecting, conflicting histories of U.S. transracial adoption, same-sex family recognition, shrinking public support systems for and growing criminalization of low-income women and families of color, gendered dynamics in parenting, and the shift toward foster-adoption permanency. Utilizing queer, feminist, and critical race theories of kinship, I advocate for “queer transracial family” as a form of differential becoming that is attentive to complex power relations. Queer transracial family as a critical practice seeks to enact a blended, open vision for belonging that contests colorblindness, homonormativity, and the consumerist, privatized family.