Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption
Claudia Castañeda participated in "Global Dimensions of ART,"
a panel discussion at The Scholar & Feminist Conference 2009,
"The Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life," held on
February 28 at Barnard College in New York
City.
Listen to a podcast of
"Global Dimensions of ART."
In the discourse of reproductive technologies, both within and
outside the academy, adoption is the poor relation. This is partly due
to the privileging of nature or the natural over the social: of blood,
genes and flesh—or rather certain blood genes and flesh—over
what in contrast becomes the "merely" social bond of nurture. In the
curious world of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), this very
same privileging ushers in a valuing of the high-tech over the low-tech:
ART over turkey baster, (dubiously effective) reproductive technologies
over adoption or—gasp!—childlessness. Taking these unequal
investments together with Zoe Sofia's suggestion that "every technology
is a reproductive technology,"[1]
I will look at trans-racial adoption
as a question of reproductive technology. That is: what is reproduced,
specifically with regard to race, if we consider adoption as a
technology, and how is this accomplished?
To ask the question in this way is not just a conceit, not just a way
of jazzing up adoption by linking it to technology. Instead, I use the
concept of technology to emphasize the reproductive power of
adoption alongside that of other reproductive technologies. To think of
adoption as a technology of race is to identify the process of
racialization that takes place through adoption, understood as a
specific—and often material or materializing—set of practices. It is
to understand adoption not simply as "reflecting" existing forms of
racial categorization and attribution, but as one among many other sites
in the U.S. that "makes" race in particular ways. This approach does
not address the biological truth of race—it has none—but the ways in
which race and its categories are given semiotic and material
existence in adoption discourse.
As many others writing on adoption have carefully noted, to analyze
the ways adoption practices make race (and other categories of embodied
difference) is not to place responsibility on adoptive parents for the
nexus of social pressures they must negotiate. They do not inaugurate
these processes, and though they may well participate in—or
resist—them in various ways, they do not do so more or less than others who
occupy similar positions of privilege. Furthermore, there is no
question that the local and global conditions of inequality that make
Korean, Chinese, Latin American, Eastern European, and other children
"available" for trans-national adoption in the United States are neither
created nor solved by the practice of adoption. And while there are
many important issues that come, in a sense, "before" the question of
race in trans-national adoption—many of which the articles in this
special issue eloquently address—this question remains significant,
not least because it forms part of the wider spectrum of reproductive
"choices" and their imbrication in questions of relatedness, from blood
to genes, and from kinship ties to citizenship and the nation.
To begin with, trans-racial adoption in the U.S. has become almost
coterminous with trans-national adoption since the 1990s, when
predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexual couples began to adopt
children from other parts of the world in record numbers. Many
different factors drive the "choice" to adopt trans-nationally,
including the age and health of available children in the U.S. and
abroad, and the global economic position of the "sending" countries as
well as their (sometimes shifting) adoption polices. So too, given the
dominant U.S. hierarchy of race, the relative absence of white children
in the U.S. adoption pool, together with the preponderance of black
children, has played a role in the turn to trans-national adoption.
The trans-national adoption market has historically offered relatively
few white children (though this has changed more recently as Eastern
European countries have opened their doors to trans-national adoption),
but many non-black—Asian and Latino—children. To speak of
trans-racial adoption in the U.S. is therefore to speak primarily of
trans-racial and trans-national adoption, and of white families who
adopt Korean, Chinese, Latin American, and Eastern European (who may be
"racially" white, or Asian, as in the case of Kazakhstan) children.
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