Legitimating life : adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology /
Wichelen, Sonja van,
Legitimating life : adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology / Sonja van Wichelen. - New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, (c)2019. - 1 online resource (xii, 207 pages). - Medical anthropology: health, inequality, and social justice .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology -- The ethical market: between reproduction and humanitarianism -- Double movements: international law as transparency device -- Valuing bodies: somatic ethics in the biomedicalization of adoption -- Grievable lives: the adoptee and the child migrant -- Economies of return: openness, knowledge, relations -- Conclusion: legitimating life.
The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial. Throughout the past few decades transnational adoption transformed from a humanitarian response to a means of making family. In this new manifestation, life becomes necessarily economized. While push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for the globalization of adoption, international conventions, scientific knowledge, and the language of human rights universalized the phenomenon. Van Wichelen argues that such technoscientific legitimations of a globalizing practice are rearticulating colonial logics of race and civilization. Yet, she also lets us see beyond the biopolitical project and into alternative ways of making kin.
9781978800557 9781978800533
2018012711
Intercountry adoption.
Human reproductive technology--Social aspects.
Electronic Books.
HV875 / .L445 2019
Legitimating life : adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology / Sonja van Wichelen. - New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, (c)2019. - 1 online resource (xii, 207 pages). - Medical anthropology: health, inequality, and social justice .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology -- The ethical market: between reproduction and humanitarianism -- Double movements: international law as transparency device -- Valuing bodies: somatic ethics in the biomedicalization of adoption -- Grievable lives: the adoptee and the child migrant -- Economies of return: openness, knowledge, relations -- Conclusion: legitimating life.
The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial. Throughout the past few decades transnational adoption transformed from a humanitarian response to a means of making family. In this new manifestation, life becomes necessarily economized. While push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for the globalization of adoption, international conventions, scientific knowledge, and the language of human rights universalized the phenomenon. Van Wichelen argues that such technoscientific legitimations of a globalizing practice are rearticulating colonial logics of race and civilization. Yet, she also lets us see beyond the biopolitical project and into alternative ways of making kin.
9781978800557 9781978800533
2018012711
Intercountry adoption.
Human reproductive technology--Social aspects.
Electronic Books.
HV875 / .L445 2019