’My Faith in Americans is Renewed with every Adoption’: Transnational and Transracial Adoptions in Postwar America (original) (raw)
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The American Historical Review, 2009
's study of adoption in the modern United States focuses on the rise of "kinship by design": the concerted attempt to reduce or eliminate uncertainty and risk in adoption through public regulation, professional standards, and expert knowledge. Beginning in the early twentieth century, promoters of design-at first philanthropic amateurs, then child welfare reformers and policymakers at the state and federal levels, newly professionalized social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians-claimed that when families were deliberately made the potential for things to go wrong was so high that expert intervention was crucial. To avert the serious social and personal problems that might result from bad adoptions, proponents of kinship by design developed four strategies: regulation, interpretation, standardization, and naturalization. Herman discusses the first two strategies in Part 1, which covers the period 1900-1945, and the last two in Part 2, covering the period 1930-1960. Adoption reformers opposed the forms of child placement (commercial and sentimental) that existed before the twentieth century. When children were placed in families merely out of altruistic or economic motives, the risks were considerable. In the early twentieth century, the main fears were that "normal" and deserving parents might adopt a defective or racially mixed child and that unscrupulous or cruel adults might abuse vulnerable children. To make adoption safe (or at least safer) for all parties involved, reformers endeavored to regulate it and establish minimum standards having to do with the qualities or conditions that made children and parents suitable for adoption, the keeping of records, and the training of staff. Child welfare reformers in this "antiadoption era" (p. 30) nevertheless believed that the child's tie to the birth mother must be maintained at all costs, and thus viewed adoption as an inferior alternative. For social workers influenced by Freudian theories, the psychological investigation and interpretation of the personalities and motivations of every participant in adoption were essential to making adoptive families "real" families. Interpretation was important because people were unaware of their unconscious desires and motivations. Herman shows how interpretation led to a new understanding of the adults involved in adoption. Rather than a feebleminded girl of loose morals, the (white) unmarried birth mother was seen as a neurotic or hysterical woman who unconsciously wished to become pregnant and who would make a terrible mother. Couples who applied to become adoptive parents were subjected to interpretation too, as they did not know their true motivations and needed help dealing with infertility. Whereas in the early twentieth century eugenic fears dictated that infant adoptions were inadvisableto know that a child was normal and completely white, one had to wait-by mid-century, research on attachment and early deprivation as well as the new stress on love and feelings of belonging between parents and children made early placements acceptable and even preferable for adoption professionals (as they had long been for adoptive parents). A central element of kinship by design was the hope to erase or conceal the difference between adoptive and nonadoptive families by making the former resemble "natural" families as much as possible. Herman's discussion of "matching" reveals the various concerns, interests, desires, and prejudices that informed this ideology and the involvement of scientists and practitioners (such as the prominent child expert Arnold Gesell) in the effort to ensure the
History of Cross-Country Adoption and Fostering
Oxford Bibliographies, Childhood Studies. General Editor Heather Montgomery, 2013
The movement of abandoned, neglected or surplus children from one family or group to another that has a perceived shortage is a phenomenon widely documented from many different historical periods and cultures. What is relatively new is the way children now cross international borders. Surplus children might be created by, for instance, a culture that does not permit unmarried women to bring up their “illegitimate” babies, as with the movement in the 1950s of children from Catholic Quebec in Canada to Jewish couples in the United States. The Korean War in the early 1950s gave rise to a generation of Korean American babies, many thousands of whom were placed for adoption overseas. A similar process followed the Vietnam War in the 1970s. China’s one-child policy has produced a “surplus” of girls, many thousands of whom have been adopted by North American, European, and Australian families. International adoption is controversial, because underlying the humanitarian motivation to give disadvantaged children a better life there are issues of international politics, commercialization, and commoditization. Adoption can be a profitable business, and there is an underworld of kidnapping and child trafficking. As adoptees reach adulthood there is also reflection on the psychological challenge of growing up in a new culture, often with an unknown personal history. Similar issues are often faced by transracial adoptees, and a section on transracial adoption has therefore been included. Internationally recognized and local legal frameworks, in particular The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (1993), represent attempts to mitigate the worst excesses of unregulated international adoptions and to ensure that the interests of the children concerned remain paramount. Such frameworks are, however, predicated on a Western notion of the individual and of the nuclear family. They do not sit well with cultural practices in which child rearing is often shared, temporary, flexible, and pragmatic. Whether due to poverty, indigenous kinship norms, or attempts to maximize a child’s opportunities, in many parts of Africa, South America, and Asia, children are frequently reared for some or all of their childhood by people other than their biological parents. When these practices are mistaken for abandonment, or when an informal foster situation is translated into permanent adoption, there is an often painful clash of cultures. Anthropological accounts have therefore been included that enable social policy research to be seen within a broader cultural context.
Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America by Catherine Ceniza Choy
Social transformations journal of the global south, 2015
Perhaps one of the more popular, contemporary images of international adoption is that of Angelina Jolie's family of six kids, three of whom are adoptees from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. eir story foregrounds the phenomenon of international adoption through the framework of global family making, which, as de ned by Catherine Choy in her new book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America, involves "the decisions made and actions taken by people who create and sustain a family by consciously crossing national and often racial borders" (9). Choy explores the historical background of international adoption in the United States and uncovers a multifaceted phenomenon that looks beyond US foreign relations and cultural imperialism to include a broader and deeper understanding of how migration, race, global family making, identity making, and intimacy converge to shape the dynamics of international adoption. International adoption in the United States came to prominence after the Second World War, which saw the rise of orphans and mixedrace children born to American servicemen and Asian, European, and African women. In particular, the reception of mixed-race children from Korea and Japan (biracial individuals are called "hafu," meaning half-Japanese) proved unfavorable because of prejudice against cross-cultural marriages. e American media highlighted this discrimination as an expression of a "backward" Asian society, while they rescued mixed-race children and provided them a better life through adoption in the more prosperous United States. Choy sees this as a awed re ection of a "progressive" American society, who also
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2011
This essay explores the recent surge in US parental memories of adoption from Russia and Ukraine. This analysis of the most influential works speculatively highlights underexamined connections between the US media focus on adoption failures and the centrality of race in adoption from Eastern Europe. In the memoirs under examination, parents eschew the traditional humanitarian narrative of adoption and portray themselves as consumers who have the right to select "white" children from an international adoption market in order to form families whose members look as though they could be biologically related. The authors' belief that they share a preexisting racial identity with children from Eastern Europe expands to the global plane the US notion that "whiteness" accords racial and economic privilege to all those of European descent in the United States. While the myth of a shared racial identity confers immense and immediate privilege onto Eastern European adoptees even before their arrival in the United States, it also enables parents to ignore their children's national differences as well as the neoliberal transformations in the former USSR that have shaped the conditions for their children's relinquishment and displacement from their birth countries, languages, and cultures through transnational adoption. Coupled with the emergence of a neoliberal adoption market, the focus on adoptive invisibility may help explain the significant numbers of abuse and death cases of Eastern European adoptees at the hands of their US parents as compared to other adoptee populations.
Children in Tatters across the Earth: Intercountry Adoptions, Intercultural Discriminations
Calumet - Intercultural Law and Humanities Review, 2019
The essay focuses on a different perspective of the child in the assessment of her/his best interests regarding the practice of international adoption. Specifically, it will be argued that the child who is the object of adoption should be understood in terms of his/her 'relational being,' rather than as an a priori reified entity. This perspective allows for a 'lateral gaze' on the interplay between the cultural characteristics of children and the intercultural meaning of intercountry adoption. The most important implication of such an approach is the relativization of 'blood ties' as the natural source of the parental relationship and responsibilities. The argument is further developed through a retrospective analysis of the cultural-religious sources of Western imagery concerning the idea of the "natural family" and its allegedly genetic roots. Jesus's self-definition as a 'Son of man' serves as a fulcrum for an unorthodox journey through the Western cultural and legal tradition, which unexpectedly ends up subverting its inclination to ontologize the 'blood family.' At the same time, this 'unfamiliar' reconstruction gives rise to a new post-colonial, antiracist and non-ethnocentric configuration containing the seeds of a universal responsibility of adult human beings for all the children living on the Earth regardless of their genetic descent or geographical location. All this subverts, in a sense, the hierarchical relations between 'blood parentage' and 'adoptive parentage' paving a possible new path toward their future developments. Even so, the essay strives to leverage the same cultural-religious origins of the Western tradition and the (allegedly) secularized values/principals underpinning the international and national legal features of adoption and its intercountry projections while exploring more nuanced and fruitful alternatives.
Book Chapter - Creating (Un)equal Families in the Child Citizenship Act
This essay interrogates the U.S. Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (CCA) through legal and discursive analysis of the congressional hearings, records, and the act itself to understand the ways in which citizenship and adoption are discussed and practiced as liberal gifts from the West to needy orphans of the Third World. The CCA was a response, in part, to the deportation of adult adoptees who did not have U.S. citizenship and had committed minor crimes that are deemed deportable offenses due to terrorism and anti-immigrations laws passed in 1996. I show how the law attempts to equalize and legitimate adoptive families. Yet, in vying for equal status, the law and its proponents further marginalize birth families and non-adopted immigrant families, who do not have privileged access and can still be deported. Ultimately, the final version of the CCA also highlights the requirement for adult immigrants, adopted (and no longer “helpless orphans” in need of rescue) or not, to be proper neoliberal subjects. It further demonstrates the ways in which certain subjects can, on the one hand be celebrated by and “belong” to the nation as part of “forever families,” and on the other, still be so easily expelled.