Legitimating life : adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Legitimating life : adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology
（Medical anthropology : health, inequality, and social justice / series editor Lenore Manderson）
Rutgers University Press, c2019
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p.181-198) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of figures, tables and images
Acknowledgements
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
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
