Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families
Article note [1]
This article examines the politics of family by focusing on
the politics of reproduction. These politics are brought into
focus when family members or 'dependents' require care; when individuals
or couples want to 'start a family;' or when families are forcibly
broken apart. In the examples I've chosen to illustrate these issues, I have
centered on family choices that are associated with the white
middle-class—hiring childcare, entering into surrogacy, or
international adoption—and I have drawn from media representations
in order to do so. This is because, as Laura Briggs recently wrote
in S&F Online,
in order to make
sense of the differential values attributed to infants and adult women
from the same Third World nations, one must analyze them alongside the
value placed on the white, middle-class women who adopt the first and
employ the second.[2]
Caring for a Family
I will first consider the challenges
of caring for one's dependent family members, wherever they may live. I
use the example of childcare, but many of these points are also
applicable to those who care for aging parents, parents-in-law, or other
disabled family members. The classic example anthropologists of
reproduction use to illustrate this comes from the work of Shellee
Colen, who studied childcare workers from the West Indies employed in
Manhattan.[3]
Colen tells us that white, middle-class New York women saw West Indian women as
phenomenal nannies, perhaps due to their upbringing in a cultural
context where child-raising and children are highly valued. This fact,
along with the hiring of the women themselves, has three important
implications. First, if children are highly valued in the West Indies,
it is probable that most of the migrant women have left behind children
on whose behalf they are quite explicitly laboring (relying on the good
will of female relatives to care for the children, most likely, and
hence, they too are struggling to care for their dependents as best they
can). Second, if the Manhattan moms were hiring childcare workers, it is
likely because many of them planned to work outside the home. This
speaks both to the devaluing of reproductive labor in the Manhattan
context (in that women, to be fulfilled, needed to find paid work rather
than be 'just a mom') and to the economics of reproduction. In other
words, it can cost less to 'outsource' childcare to an employee than to
give up an income. Finally, a further implication of hiring childcare
workers is the existence of a child—and here, we can note that despite
the devaluing of reproductive labor, there is still something of a cult
of motherhood in which babies are a fashionable and necessary commodity.
The concept that Colen comes up with to explain this chain of unequal
reproductive decisions is "stratified reproduction." By using this term,
she draws our attention to the ways that reproductive labor is
differentiated, and differently valued, according to inequalities of
gender, class, race, nationality, and other cross-cutting strata. When
West Indian women work as nannies for white children in Manhattan, they
are performing stratified reproductive labor. They are caring for
someone else's children. The reason they're caring for the kids of
Manhattan moms, and not the other way around, has to do most of all with
globalized inequalities between nations. That means, for example, that
you can make a lot more money in Manhattan than in the West Indies. But
race and class are also implicated. When the female relatives of the
West Indian nannies care for those nannies' children back home, they are
also involved in a chain of stratified reproduction, in that they are
lower in the global hierarchy of nations, and they didn't have the
capital (economic or social) to migrate themselves. The transnational
system in which different households have vastly different access to
resources stratifies experiences of reproduction for workers and
employers.
In the remainder of this article, I examine how Colen's insights
about stratified reproduction can shed light on two other aspects of the
politics of family: making a family, and disassembling one. In both of
those projects, how are the different roles that people occupy when
making or disassembling a family differently valued depending on the
various inequalities and hierarchies within which they occur?
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