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Claudia Castañeda,
"Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption"
(page 5 of 5)
The continual disavowal of race through recourse to culture that
works as a technology of race in adoption prompts me to ask: what is the
problem of race in trans-racial adoption? In the end, it seems to me
that it is precisely the problem of racism. Non-white children must
face and negotiate this problem whether they are adopted or not, and
white families who adopt children of color, like all white people, can
either take on this problem or ignore it. How they take on the
problem is, of course, significant—as I hope my discussion shows. The
options are neither limitless nor pre-ordained by some biological truth
of race. White adoptive adults, families, and communities may employ
existing technologies of re-racialization that tend to obscure racism,
or they may adopt new ones that undermine white privilege and
afford children more open and positive ways of inhabiting the world by
recognizing the workings of racism and other inequalities.
I have used the term "adopt" in the prior sentence deliberately, to
emphasize the potential that is generated by the process of adoption as
compared to biological reproduction as a way of making families. On one
hand, trans-racial adoption by white families potentially
condenses racism for the adoptee, by situating the child
as a child and the only "other" in the heart of whiteness, the
domestic space of the nuclear family. In U.S. multicultural forms of
difference, whiteness can be re-racialized in a new way, "no longer
solely created in opposition to nonwhites, but rather through
incorporating ... parts of a nonwhite culture into family
identities.[13]
The child, as I have argued elsewhere, is among the least threatening of
such incorporable entities.[14]
On the other hand, trans-racial adoption at least potentially offers
the possibility of different kinds of re-racialization that open
up that very same nuclear family to different kinds of affiliation.
Barbara Yngversson further suggests that "[r]oots trips" back the
child's country of origin can enable alternative forms of engagement
with otherness for adoptees and their families. To do so effectively
requires that adoptees and their families enter into the "eye of the
storm" that makes visible all of the inequalities at work—between the
birth and adoptive mother/parents, between poor and rich
nations.[15]
Travel to the birth country does not by itself guarantee such entry.
While "benevolent feelings" about the birth mother, country, or culture
"evoke the sense that the eye of a storm is a site of calm," entering
the eye of storm entails experiencing the "chaos, [the] shaking up (and
opening up [of]) families, persons and nations" that result from taking risks
"that we will lose our boundaries, the edges that make our families
complete."[16]
What Yngversson calls the "refiguring" of relatedness
in this process both takes up and reworks aspects of relatedness "in
ways that have the potential to create new forms of consciousness as
well as to transform everyday practices of relatedness."[17]
The case of Chinese adoptees who return with their families to spend
time playing with children at the orphanages where they were once housed
suggests some possibilities for such transformation. As Yngversson
suggests, the forging of the adoptees' relationship to China explicitly
and frankly makes visible the very particular and material conditions of
their existence, before and after adoption: they were children
relinquished for adoption under the one-child policy in China, who are
now relatively privileged U.S. children in white families. They
and their families create a relationship with the child's
conditions of birth not through a reified notion of Chinese culture, but
through engagement with their counterparts in the Chinese orphanage in
real time and space. (Perhaps this is part of what Falvey means by
"authenticity.") In the scheme of things, where the inequalities on
many levels that enable and produce trans-racial and trans-national
adoption are at work, this approach seems at the very least a step in
the right direction. Confronting issues of racism on a global
and local scale could certainly form part of the engagement that
these families undertake.
Such an engagement might include constituting trans-racial adoption
as a technology that re-racializes not only the adoptee, but also the
white family. Anagnost suggests that even in China-U.S. adoptions, which
benefit from the "flexible racialization" of Asianness, "the haunting of
difference" can "pull parents into initial and uncomfortable encounters
with white privilege and racial inequalities at home" that can, little
by little, work toward a "dismantling of the racial assumptions that
gird the 'baggage-free' child and celebrated multicultural family."[18]
In this case, the shift is from hegemonic whiteness to an "other" kind
of whiteness, one that is potentially resistant to the hegemonic form,
one that is no longer assumed as the given against which the
trans-racial adoptee's must be "colored in," so to speak. Instead, this
whiteness is self-consciously white, and resistant to the
hegemonic mode.
Trans-racial adoption in no way guarantees nor requires such
transformation, but white adoptive parents and families may arguably
re-racialize themselves in a resistant mode before, during, and/or after
the adoption process begins, in ways that can only benefit their newly
adoptive child and the worlds they all inhabit. Remembering that
trans-racially adoptive parents do not by themselves create the
conditions under which they must negotiate race, this is not a task
simply for these parents. It is a task for everyone who occupies a
position of privilege in a society where the ugly fact of racism
remains, and where technological innovations in the making of racial
hierarchies continue to proliferate.
Podcast
Listen using the player above or
visit BCRW on iTunes
to download or subscribe to BCRW's podcasts.
Global Dimensions of ART - Podcast Description
Iris Lopez introduces and moderates this panel
discussion on "Global Dimensions" of ART practices which features
speakers Dana-Ain Davis, Laura Briggs and Claudia
Castañeda. Increased demand for assisted reproductive technology (ART)
and transnational adoption has been propelled by a number of factors,
including the development of new technologies and changes in familial
form - such as childrearing in second or third marriages; lesbian, gay,
and transgendered families; and delays in childbearing and subsequent
difficulties in conception - that make ART helpful. Other relevant
factors include environmental changes that have negatively affected
fertility levels, new levels of transnational migration and interaction
that have fueled awareness of babies available for and in need of
adoption, and concerns about genetic diseases and disabilities.
Effectively, the various imperatives and the desires, both cultural and
personal, that the use of ART fosters and responds to, have created a
"baby business" that is largely unregulated and that raises a number of
important social and ethical questions. Do these new technologies place
women and children at risk? How should we respond ethically to the
ability of these technologies to test for genetic illnesses? And how can
we ensure that marginalized individuals, for example, people with
disabilities, women of color, and low-income women, have equal access to
these new technologies and adoption practices? And, similarly, how do we
ensure that transnational surrogacy and adoption practices are not
exploitative? These questions and many others on the global social,
economic and political repercussions of these new forms of reproduction
were the focus of this year's Scholar and Feminist Conference, "The
Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life," which took place on
February 28, 2009 at Barnard College.
Endnotes
1. Zoe Sofia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion,
Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism," Diacritics
14 (1984): 47-59. [Return to text]
2. Sarah Dorow, Transnational Adoption: A
Cultural Economy of Race (New York: New York University Press,
2006): 216. [Return to text]
3. However, the phenomenon of black and other
non-white children claiming that they are white or expressing the desire
to be white is (or at least was at one time) not unusual. I think here
of Whoopi Goldberg's famous sketch where she plays a nine-year-old black
girl who bathes in Clorox and covers her head with a white skirt,
wishing to become white with long, beautiful flowing
hair. [Return to text]
4. Sarah Dorow, "Racialized Choices: Chinese
Adoption and the 'White Noise' of Blackness," Critical Sociology
32.2-3 (2006): 357-379. [Return to text]
5. David Eng, "Transnational Adoption and Queer
Diasporas," Social Text 76 (2003): 12. [Return to text]
6. Lisa Falvey, "Rejecting Assimilation, Immersion
and Chinoserie: Reconstructing Identity for Children Adopted from
China," Journal of Chinese Overseas 4.2 (2008): 275-286. [Return to text]
7. Andrea Louie, "Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, oh
my! How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness," Journal of
Asian American Studies 12.3 (2009): 286. [Return to text]
8. See Falvey above. [Return to text]
9. Ann Anagnost, "Scenes of Misrecognition:
Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,"
positions 8.2 (2000): 391. [Return to text]
10. M. Elizabeth Vonk, "Cultural Competence for
Transracial Adoptive Parents, Social Work 46.3 (2001): 236. [Return to text]
11. See Falvey above. [Return to text]
12. Louie, 301. [Return to text]
13. Louie, 294. [Return to text]
14. Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child,
Bodies, Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). [Return to text]
15. Barbara Yngvesson, "Going 'Home:' Adoption,
Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots," Social Text 74
(2003): 24. [Return to text]
16. Yngversson, 24. [Return to text]
17. Barbara Yngvesson, "Placing the 'Gift Child'
in Transnational Adoption," Law & Society Review 36.2 (2002):
227-256. [Return to text]
18. Anagnost, 375. [Return to text]
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