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.

How does racialization take shape in this scenario? Let me begin with two brief personal stories. Here is the first:

In an Introduction to Women's Studies course, the students and I were discussing race. I told the students that I made no assumptions about how they identified themselves racially or culturally, and that I certainly did not assume that I could know this by looking at them. In the course of the ensuing discussion, a student said something like: "I'm white. I was adopted from Korea. But I'm white. I'm white!"

The second story goes like this:

At a meeting for a queer Latino/a organization, I introduced myself to one of the co-chairs. In the course of our discussion, she told me that her parents were white and U.S.-born, and that they adopted her and her brother as babies from Colombia. She went on to say that her parents frequently took her to Colombia throughout her childhood, and that she now went "back home" to Colombia frequently on her own.

These two stories involve young women of roughly the same age, adopted as infants by U.S. families at approximately the same time (the early 1990s). They speak to two ends of the spectrum of the available approaches to race in the recent U.S history of trans-racial adoption practice, namely assimilation (in the first story) and immersion (in the second). In between these two poles lie two other options, "celebrating plurality," and "balancing act" (of two cultures).[2]

All of these approaches involve processes of re-racialization. The child is initially racialized according to a notion of race as a natural substance that is passed from birth mother and father to child, but this substance is seen as largely incidental. In the first story—in the assimilation model—the adoptee's race does not carry any significance beyond the "fact" itself. Consequently, it becomes possible for the adoptee to simply blend into white culture, to be assimilated into whiteness. It is not so much that the adoptee is not seen as being "of" a different race, but rather that in the assimilation model there is no substantial discourse of race in the process of adoption and parenting. The "unmarked" category of whiteness therefore has free rein to do its work. Like my student adopted from Korea, the adoptee is raised in a white family, more often than not in a predominantly white neighborhood, and becomes white through the everyday technologies of childhood that are also technologies of race, or in this case, of whiteness: books, toys, games, media, school curriculum, and everyday interactions in which the entire conceptual and visual field assumes whiteness without ever having to name it as such.

It's hardly surprising, given this process, that my student sees herself—and legitimately so—as white, and insists upon this while also knowing that she is likely to be challenged in this claim. In fact, perhaps the only way in which my student is different from her neighborhood peers is that she actually identifies explicitly as white. She does not have the luxury of simply being white in the same way; she must claim, and in that sense negotiate her whiteness, and race in general. In other words, she identifies as white, but she does not enjoy all of the privileges of whiteness: she must invoke her whiteness.

It is important to note that this might be a far more difficult process for a black or Latino child than for my student adopted from Korea, given the hierarchies of race and racism at work in the U.S.[3] In her incisive work on trans-national adoption, Sarah Dorow has argued that within the black-white U.S. economy of race, Asianness becomes a kind of flexible category of race, edging toward or even classifying as whiteness when juxtaposed against blackness.[4] This flexibility makes it possible to racialize Asian adoptees as white-enough, or as palatably non-white Asian. Addressing the intersectionality of race and gender in the case of Chinese adoptees, who are primarily female, David Eng has further suggested that "the racial management of gender and the gendered management of race" that "assimilate the Asian adoptee into the intimate public sphere of the white nuclear family" are bound up with the model minority myth[5], making Asian children more desirable than their non-white counterparts. Clearly, both the adoptees' and the families' choice of racialization is highly circumscribed by these broader economies of race.

Technologies of racialization are powerful in trans-racial adoption in particular, because:

1. the person in question is a child, who has relatively little power over the conditions of its existence and;
2. because that child is often "the only one," seen as originally racially "other" in relation to the family and often in the larger social world the child inhabits.

The "assimilation" model of trans-racial adoption, exemplified in my first story, has been prevalent in adoption since the 1950s to the 1970s, with the first wave of Korean-to-U.S. adoptions associated with the Korean War.[6] The second story corresponds to more recently developed models, in which technologies of "cultural competence" work to bind adoptees to their cultural "heritage." While culture appears to replace race in this model, here the child also begins with a racial makeup that is established or attributed to it through the logic of biological reproduction and phenotype. The "race" that the child carries as a natural fact then gets linked to a racio-cultural heritage perceived as carrying a force of its own, one that requires action on its behalf.

The second story, like the model to which it corresponds, invokes culture in a way that appears not to have anything to do with race at all. I use the term "racio-cultural" to describe the technological process at work insofar as the child's race becomes the mark of a "different" culture that both already "belongs to" the child and with which it must be imbued. While all adoptees might be seen as carrying with them a different culture than solely that of the adoptive family, by virtue of their birth "elsewhere," in trans-racial trans-national adoption, race comes to require attention in the form of culture. Culture becomes significant because of racial difference; culture stands in for race.

While it may seem that immersion and other culturally based models are preferable to assimilation, they too have their limitations. Making race and culture interchangeable can ultimately entail the displacement of race, and usher in the ugly specter of racism. As Andrea Louie has put it, there can be a tendency for adoptive parents to "educate their children about their 'birth cultures' at the expense of attention to race and other issues of social inequality."[7] Furthermore, in her study of families with children adopted from China, Lisa Falvey proposes that the immersion approach involves exposing girls—again, gender plays a role in the availability of children from China and elsewhere—to Orientalist versions of Chinese culture, including dance and music. She argues that the immersion model "unintentionally stresses the need to accentuate difference as a way to perform it for white culture," and therefore also "reinscribes and reinforces hegemonic anxiety over the [racial and cultural] other."[8] So too, Ann Anagnost has argued that the focus on culture can take the form of a "domestication of differences emptied of history."[9]

The technologies of race employed in culturally based models of adoption are much more explicitly defined that in the immersion model, and not surprisingly, they too re-racialize the adoptee in terms of the very racial or racio-cultural origin—which is itself based on concepts of blood, nation, and so on—that the assimilation model overwhelms, or renders insignificant. The twist on racialization here is that race is simultaneously transformed into culture—it is culturalized, but still bears the mark of race as a feature of the material body of the surface features of skin color, hair texture, and so on. So the foreign adoptee both "is" already raced and cultured by virtue of birth (blood and nation, again), and becomes so through a particular childhood enculturation—trips to the birth country; dolls with appropriate skin and hair color available on adoption websites; culturally matched music; and the learning of language, dance, and holiday rituals.

The second story I have recounted clearly bears the mark of culturally based models, but it also arguably tells a rather different story of the way children can be re-racialized and encultured in these models. Rather than being exposed to a Euro-U.S.-centric version of her own culture, as in the cases Falvey describes, this young woman has developed a relationship with her birth country to the extent that she now sees it as "home." Her bond with Colombia is equally premised on a material racio-cultural origin in Colombia, and her racio-cultural selfhood has been generated through repeated engagement with Colombia in actual time and space. Her own racialization and enculturation have taken place in relation to this engagement, such that her parents see her as "being" Colombian, and they therefore also "make" her Colombian or "sustain" her Colombianness through repeated exposure. She too has been re-racialized, but in a particular and different way from either the Korean young woman in the first story, or the Chinese girls in Falvey's account.

Without the model minority status of Asians, Latino (or indigenous) adoptees, most of whom come from Central America, are not as flexibly re-racialized as their Asian counterparts. In this sense, and in the context of a more culturally oriented approach to trans-national adoption generally, this may exert a greater pressure for Latino adoptees and their parents to embrace the "home" country and culture. At the same time, the self-consciousness of the relevant technologies and practices in the immersion model is partly a result of the gap between seemingly automatic or "natural" forms of racialization that take place in non-adoptive families, and the "unnaturalness" of trans-racially adoptive families. A discussion from the world of domestic U.S. trans-racial adoption about hair among trans-racially adoptive parents of black children, to which entire blogs are devoted, makes this strikingly evident:

If you adopt an African American child or a biracial child, one of the hottest topics is hair care. It's not just a matter of childcare; hair is also a matter of great pride in the African American community. If you take your blonde haired daughter out in public with a head full of messy hair, chances are no one will say anything to you. But if you take your AA [African American] daughter out in public without her hair done, your chances of hearing comments are good, and the chances are especially good if you are a Caucasian mother.

So what's a newly adoptive mom to do?? If you grew up in a traditional Caucasian family, the chances of you knowing anything at all about cornrows, hot combs, relaxers or twists are slim to none. The differences in washing, brushing and care in general are big and there is an outrageous number of products out there for AA hair. Luckily, there are lots of great resources out there, and with a little practice, even this Irish lass can cornrow and twist with the best of them.

What is especially interesting to me about this blog entry is the adoptive mother's willingness to articulate her whiteness and to learn to employ what is for her a new technology of race: corn-rowing and twisting of hair. In employing this new skill, interestingly, she does not see herself as being transformed racially. She is only learning a new skill, and new cultural rules. She remains white while her child becomes, in a sense more properly African American. However, trans-racial adoption (domestic and trans-national) does arguably create the (not necessarily realized) possibility of a re-racialized whiteness.

The conscious articulation and production of race in trans-racial adoption can include an explicit reference not just to culture, but also to racism. In the context of U.S. racism, racio-cultural identity becomes a necessary antidote to the harm that racism will necessarily cause to non-white children adopted into white families. As M. Elizabeth Vonk puts it in an article in the journal Social Work titled "Cultural Competence for Transracial Adoptive Parents":

Both supporters and critics of the practice [of trans-racial adoption] strongly recommend that TRA [trans-racially adoptive] parents need to acquire the attitudes, skills and knowledge that enable them to help their children develop positive racial attitudes and survival skills for life in a racist society."[10]

The turn to "cultural competence" is offered as one way to ensure that children develop such skills. But how effective is this approach?

In her work on Chinese adoptees and their families, Lisa Falvey identifies the problematic assumptions behind the immersion model in cultural terms, writing that:

Although idealistic in nature, to approach "integration," parents must first be willing to understand that culture is not transmitted through commodification. Second, parents must realize that no matter how many Chinese culture classes to which their children are exposed, these classes cannot replace "real" exposure to a culture, Chinese or otherwise. [...] At best, this cultural education cannot make up for actual cultural transmission.

Falvey establishes a difference here between "authentic" and "inauthentic" cultural transmission that has its own problems, but I want to focus on her proposed solution, the "integration" model, which, she argues, "would offer adoptees optimal choices to either embrace or reject identities (either American or their country's of birth) at will." In addition to resolving the problem of imposing an essentialized, Orientalist culture on adoptees who in Falvey's account often actively resist this imposition in favor of claiming an "authentic" American identity, the "integration" model is more explicitly resistant to racism than the immersion model. Falvey writes:

Integration ... asks that adoptive parents begin to challenge sites of difference, to agitate effectively for change, to stand up to Orientalism in all of its forms. Even the most simple act of refusing to answer the "where is she from ... no, where is she really from?" question with anything but the child's American hometown is an act of defiance that shifts the dialogue away from obsessing on "the other." [...] In the end, and most importantly, national origin and ethnicity should not be held as determinants of "Americanness." [...] White families should be motivated to consider how much of their desire to instill Chinese culture is reactionary and how much is based in pride.[11]

It's clear that Falvey's identification of the problems of trans-racial adoption is particular to the case of Chinese adoptions and rightly so. Her articulation of the problem of race as it dovetails with culture also identifies more generally the burden placed on trans-racially adopted children of performing racio-cultural "otherness" for a white audience that denies them the privilege of full belonging and unproblematized national identity offered to their white counterparts.

While Falvey's approach certainly seems like an improvement, it's not clear what would count as "real" exposure to a culture, and how such exposure might help to mitigate against trans-racially adopted children's experience of racism. So long as race can be displaced by culture in the guise of a celebratory multiculturalism that disavows or erases racism, a strictly culturally based approach, whether it seeks to curb or instill culture. Louie notes that even though adoptive parents of Chinese girls "came to the realization that despite the generally positive image of Asian girls, their child could not easily merge into an ethnic American cultural identity because of her racial difference," they were also tempted to "fall back on culture as a means of addressing the potential racism their children may face."[12] Again, as Louie also points out, this aspect of adoption draws from broader U.S. politics that "celebrate culture at the expense of addressing the inequalities surrounding race."

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

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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]