Transnational Adoption and European Immigration Politics: Producing the National Body in Sweden
This article explores the role of transnational adoption in the production of a multicultural but Swedish national body during the second half of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Sweden became a multiethnic, multicultural, and racially divided country. I examine the development of international adoption policies in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, emphasizing the erasure of the child's connection to a preadoptive past, even as the child's cultural difference was celebrated in adopting nations. In Sweden, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s had the world's highest adoption ratio (number of transnational adoptions per 1000 live births), debates about the Swedishness of the adoptee and the difference of the immigrant child underscored the assumption that the former but not the latter could become completely Swedish, while hinting at the (in)significance of race in constituting Swedish identity. My research situates transnational adoption in the context of technologies of exclusion that regulate the national body and the complex position of the adoptee as an incorporated but excluded other in adopting nations.
Imageries of family and nation: A comparative analysis of transnational adoption and care for unaccompanied minors in Belgium
Drawing on empirical research completed in Belgium, this article presents a comparative analysis of the care regimes for two categories of children: transnational adoptees and unaccompanied minors. Although state immigration policies consider the two groups of minors as humanitarian exceptions that require preferential treatment, the kind of humanitarian help and social investment they are believed to deserve differs dramatically. Ideologies of relational exclusivity and fixed belonging differently structure the investment of care that the two groups are believed to need, dependent on their ability to be read as freestanding, cultureless individuals, assimilable to the host nation.
Adoptions, 2000–2001
ABSTRACT The number of domestic adoptions has remained relatively constant over the past 15 years, varying between 121,000 and 127,000, but placements have increasingly been completed by public agencies. Adoption of foreign-born children in the United States has nearly tripled in the past 20 years. Despite the increased national interest in adoption in the past decade and the efforts of many dedicated individuals and agencies, it is still difficult to determine the total number of adoptions in the United States. No one agency is charged with compiling adoption information on all adoptions in the United States, and the agencies that do have access to some types of adoption information have no mandate or incentive to compile that information so that it could be integrated with other sources of adoption information.