The Distance Traveled: Reading Leinaweaver and Castañeda on Politics,
Privilege, and Race in Transnational Adoption
This article is a response to Claudia Castañeda's
"Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption" and Jessaca Leinaweaver's
"Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families" in this issue.
I sit on the porch of a rented bungalow in the Catskills, watching my
nine-year-old daughter play with a Playmobil camper—little plastic white
people, a big camping trailer, the kind I associate with middle America
on summer vacation. The camper set was a gift from my sister's
mother-in-law; my daughter has been playing with it, by herself,
whenever she's not running around like a wild thing with the two other
girls she's befriended here. As the plastic white people sit around
their tiny picnic table, eating their miniature hot dogs, I remember
how, when we looked at the website photos of this somewhat run-down,
old-fashioned bungalow community, she asked me, "how come most of them
are white people?"
I had asked the owners pretty much the same question. Satisfied that
it was multi-cultural "enough" for us and our friends to feel
"comfortable"—there were a couple of biracial families, various friends
of color visiting, a "progressive" vibe—I asked her, "Do you think we
should we go even though it doesn't looked very mixed?" She responded,
"Yeah. I guess so. It looks pretty. They have a pool." So here we are,
sitting on the porch in a summer community where she is currently the
only child of color, and we are the only biracial family, and as I write
I find myself wondering: if I were raising a white child, would she have
noticed that it didn't look "right," and would I have taken so much care
to be sure that she did?
Such questions come into focus reading the very generative papers in
this issue by Jessaca Leinaweaver and
Claudia Castañeda about the
politics and technologies of race, love, and suffering in transnational
and transracial families. When I was asked to comment on these papers, I
was intrigued, but apprehensive. I am a white, single, American adoptive
parent of a nine-year-old Guatemalan daughter. I am a feminist professor
and a psychotherapist, and adoption is neither my academic nor clinical
specialty—yet I think about it all the time. This seemed like an
opportunity to grapple with critical issues at once personal and
political (the intrigue), in a very public way (the apprehension). My
own daughter is not at all sure she wants me writing about this subject;
she alternately believes it is "none of anyone's beeswax," and
understands the important, if confusing to her, reasons for sharing our
stories.
"Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families,"
by Leinaweaver, and
"Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption" by
Castañeda, call on "us" (read: academics/ feminists/ adoptive
parents / white people) to recognize the deep inequalities that penetrate
transnational and transracial adoption, to acknowledge that these are
built upon what Leinaweaver calls the "unstable foundation of other
people's suffering" and Castañeda refers to as the adoptive
child's "conditions of birth." These authors challenge the dominant
discourse of "saving" needy children through transnational-transracial
adoption, and question the ways what David Eng has called "new global
families" may do the ideological work of naturalizing racial oppression
and global injustices—or un-do it. I'd like to consider their papers in
terms of how they can contribute to the radical, political,
project of raising consciousness of racism and exploitation among their
white, middle-class subjects in support of what Eng terms an "ethical
multiculturalism," and whether their insights hold potential for
mobilizing adoptive families around global and local movements for
social and economic justice—good work for feminists.[1]
Leinaweaver's paper sets out to address the "politics of the modern
family"—a big topic. Taking the reader through maids from the Caribbean
and surrogates in India, she arrives at transnational adoption, with a
focus on pop icon Madonna and her adoption of children from Malawi.
It's here that I'll concentrate my comments. Following Shellee Colen's
(1995) concept of "stratified reproduction," Leinaweaver brings into
view the ways global inequalities of power and wealth serve to break
down ("disassemble") families in some nations (primarily the global
South), while providing adoptable children to "make" families in others
(the global North), and she reiterates some of the unacknowledged ways
in which the privileged create and sustain our lives through the labor,
including the reproductive labor, of the poor in the intimate, political
spaces of the family.[2]
Leinaweaver frames her argument about adoption with Colen's study of
"Manhattan mothers" and their use of West Indian nannies to care for
their homes and children. Drawing a parallel between power relations in
adoption and domestic work, she makes a valuable intervention into
discourse that often substitutes the good intentions of adoptive parents
for attention to the needs, capacities, and human rights of mothers in
impoverished "sending" nations. Hers is fundamentally an ethical
argument about certain forms of family, reproductive labor, and
transnational adoption. I was disappointed, then, to find Leinaweaver
undermine the strength of her argument by choosing a rhetorical strategy
that relies on the figure of the white, professional, "Manhattan
mother," along with that of pop icon Madonna, to critique transnational
adoption. This limited sample of adoptive mothers stands in for
transnationally adopting parents more broadly, and Leinaweaver's
argument directs us toward women as key beneficiaries and perpetrators
of other women's exploitation. The well-off "Manhattan moms" make easy
marks: she points to them as self-congratulatory women who often desire
a child as a fashionable "commodity," and are resistant to seeing their
own choices as "made at the expense of another woman's reproductive
integrity." This rhetoric extends to feminists who, she contends in a
striking generalization, tend to find arguments about the global
inequalities that undergird new family configurations "upsetting"
because they "are convinced that these 'choices' are the only ones that
will allow them to do what they want to do".[3]
By targeting
self-serving families led by "Manhattan mothers" and celebrities, as
well as feminists who turn a blind eye to other women's suffering,
Leinaweaver misses the opportunity to call to account the government
policies and agency practices around transnational adoption that guide
adoptive families toward particular countries, and support deep,
structural inequality, injustice, and corruption.
Leinaweaver's language betrays a deep (and understandable) impatience
for privileged white parents (read: women) who adopt without regard to
ethics, history, or material conditions, and for the entitlement of a
(female) celebrity able to bypass law and custom to adopt in Malawi. I
am not unsympathetic to this feeling (though I object to what reads as
implicit woman-blaming, despite Leinaweaver's attempt to guard against
it). Just recently, in the "Lives" column of the Sunday New York
Times Magazine, a Brandeis University poetry fellow, Melanie
Braverman, wrote a stunningly solipsistic essay about her response to
her young adopted son's first questions about his birth mother: "To
Molly and me, our children are so completely ours it feels impossible
that anyone else had anything to do with them."[4]
Though she notes
that her son was drawn to the romantic notion that he came from an
(unnamed—Caribbean? Asian?) island, and was just beginning to show
interest in the fact that another mother gave birth to him, she herself
is happy to completely erase the first mother as no more than a vehicle,
telling her two adopted sons "the truth as I see it: 'Some babies come
out of their mommies, and some come through other bodies to get to their
mommies. My body couldn't make babies, so we had to find another way to
get you here.'"[5]
Braverman acknowledges that her five-year-old must begin to create
his own narrative of origins, but so contented is she with the
"relentless perfection" of their summer (and their lives), she seems
unable to recognize what he himself names: the terrible distance he
traveled (metaphorically and literally) to get from his first to these
second mothers: "... they weren't my mommies ... I swam a hundred miles to get
home," he tells his friend.[6]
In crafting a narrative to shield their
children, and apparently especially themselves, from the truly difficult
and complicated "truths" at the heart of adoption, Braverman and her
partner have done violence to another woman's story—and to their child's
story. Theirs is a balder version of the sentimental, "you were meant
to be my baby" narrative embraced by many adopters trying to naturalize
their non-biological, affective tie to their child (and sometimes to
rationalize years of failed infertility treatments); this story implies,
of course, that another woman, somewhere, was "meant" to have a baby
that she would relinquish to complete the happy adoptive family in the
U.S. (Braverman's essay rightly occasioned many angry, online comments
from other adoptive parents who have struggled to create narratives that
honor the place of another mother in their family's collective
psyche.)[7]
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