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

5 What Approval Means

5 What Approval Means The ordeal of being labeled by the law of the group is strangely accompanied by the bliss of being recognized . . . , of becoming an identifiable, legible word with a societal language. —Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien I1 During the nineteenth century, Western societies sought to enhance surveillance of fringe groups by anticipating the danger represented by the latter.2 They drew support from a new notion based on probability and abstraction, namely, risk.3 Similarly, adoption approval procedures assess parental practices that have not yet occurred; comparing an individual’s history against various behavioral archetypes leads to a deduction about who may or may not be a “good parent.”This process requires applicants for approval to presents themselves as individuals motivated by a coherent , controlled psychology. As Robert Castel has noted,“This is the foundation of a decomposition of the social policies and actions of the welfare state (‘the active socializing state’) via the activation of individuals. Political governance adopts the goal of working on the individual, which also means making individuals work on themselves, holding them responsible for their social career and ultimately turning them into entrepreneurs of their own selves and their lives.”4 Pastoral governance of kinship, meanwhile , tries to potentiate individuals within the boundaries of a given family model, boundaries patrolled by the “risk police.” This chapter will initially address the task of self-presentation within the approval process. It is based on thirty semi-directive interviews with applicants—single, married, homosexual, heterosexual, male, female.5 The moment when potential adopters meet child welfare workers is much more than a rite of passage: often, it is a form of social certification or recognition sought by the candidates, which is why they may take a rejection so hard. Atypical applicants are particularly concerned by this 98 Chapter 5 situation—although they sense what their break with the established order may cost them, they have difficulty putting their initial acceptance of that order in abeyance. This tension between hope and circumspection with regard to the institution often reactivates a primal social attitude of subjection. But the tension can also spark a special clear-sightedness that challenges administrative modes of reasoning. This chapter will thus go on to analyze the vocabulary typically used by administrative personnel when questioned about their own practices, shedding light on the way in which gender categories lend a decision its performative power. I will show that adoption’s lexical range is generally depreciatory, rendering the stakes of institutional intervention that much more dramatic. More specifically, I argue that such intervention follows a mode of reasoning that suggests that the validity of desirable applications can be inferred from a rejection of reprobate figures. And a tension is created whenever these simultaneously negative and ghostly figures loom behind the candidacy of an individual or couple whose personal history directly echoes that negativity. The resulting dissonance weakens the chain of administrative reasoning and explains the development of a rhetoric of precaution. Creating Your Own Narrative Approval for adoption in France is a unilateral administrative act delivered by a single authority: the president of the local Conseil Général (county council). An executive order dated October 17, 2006, laid down specific forms that the approval must take (official registration, length of validity of approval, etc.) and specified the details to be appended to the approval document, such as the number, age, and other characteristics of the desired children. In practice, approval is a negotiated procedure subject to frequent arrangements. Personnel at Aide Sociale à l’Enfance (ASE, or Child Welfare Agency) admit to taking liberties with the procedure: There was a time when I defended a certain number of things before the Conseil de Famille [Family Advisory Council] even though representatives of the ASE are usually only there to present the cases. In agreement with the director of the ASE—who therefore represented the Conseil Général—we adopted the practice of identifying, fairly quickly, the applicants on the list for approval who looked interesting, and therefore of paying little attention to the chronological order of applications. . . . Because I personally thought it was a pity to see the best applicants head for intercountry adoption right away.6 What Approval Means 99 Applicants for approval are themselves obliged to negotiate their way through the administrative process. What follows are the accounts of two single homosexual males, the first living in the...