Expedientes: Fissured Legality and Affective States in the Transnational Adoption Archives in Guatemala

Abstract

The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have “fissured” the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the “prior” histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics inherent in these legal documents, and the legal frameworks regulating the production of adoption paperwork, the article offers a critical insight into the extra-judicial processes and forms of “exceptionalism” that made transnational adoptions possible in the thirty-year period between 1977 and 2007. At the same time, the analysis of declarations and disclaimers brings to light how the technologies of their production allow the emergence of “anti-social affects” that saturate, and internally disrupt, transnational adoption files. The article proposes a critical, “anti-social” analysis of international adoption, by illuminating the problems that come from taking for granted the values of futurity and reproduction in adoption studies.

Substance, sign, and trace: performative analogies and technologies of enfleshment in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala

“…The approval of an official in the Procuraduría General de la Nación -the department of the Guatemalan State overseeing all technical and procedural juridical matters -could be accomplished through an act of public certification (escritura pública) undertaken by a notary (notario). In view of this, and as I have argued elsewhere (Posocco, 2011(Posocco, , 2014b, the law concerning the Voluntary Jurisdiction of Notaries' Operations amounted to a structurally very significant legal technology of privatization, deregulation, and dejudicialization of the adoption process which was to remain in place for 30 years. The transference of the handling of the process of transnational adoption from the courts to the offices of notaries, and by extension, their clients as either prospective adoptive parents or adoption agencies, established transnational adoption's legal exceptionalism, making the great majority of transnational adoption extrajudicial (Posocco, 2011(Posocco, , 2014bA.A.…”

“…Not all forcefully disappeared children were killed; rather, many were internally displaced. Some were institutionalized and eventually adopted transnationally (ODHAG, 2006, p. 75;Posocco, 2011Posocco, , 2014b. Among those who were internally displaced and those who crossed the Guatemala -Mexican border as refugees during the conflict, children made up the majority of those who died (CEH, 1999, vol.…”

“…The conflict left over 200,000 people dead, the majority Maya, and the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that 'agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Maya people' (CEH, 1999, p. 41) in four specific regions of the country. 2 Kinning in this conflict-torn context refers not only to the construction of new forms of relatedness, but also, crucially, to the suspension and severing of relations, as well as to deeply politically charged claims for the reactivation of connections (Posocco, 2011). Claims for the recovery and reestablishment of connections work against legal technologies that historically have instantiated kinning through heavily commodified, inequitable, and ostensibly non-rescindable relations of ownership and exchange that overwhelmingly favored adoptive parents.…”

Children forever: The search for origins among Chilean adults who were adopted

“…Many individuals and adoption organizations support the sealing of records, arguing that opening them would harm the institution of adoption and constitute a violation of the confidentiality promised to adoptive and birth parents. In this sense, documents are not simply instruments of information, but, rather, are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, affections, practices, subjectivities, objects, and even the organizations themselves (Hull, 2012;Posocco, 2011). In this sense, documents are not simply instruments of information, but, rather, are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, affections, practices, subjectivities, objects, and even the organizations themselves (Hull, 2012;Posocco, 2011).…”

Teorias Não-Representacionais Na Geografia Ii: Métodos Para Uma Geografia Do Que Acontece

“…Hoje, através da lente das teorias não-representacionais, abordam-se temas tão diversos como as geografias dos transportes e mobilidades (Bissel, 2010;Vannini, 2012;stewart, 2014), interfaces tecnológicos (ash, 2015, o papel dos sentidos na experiência geográfica (Middleton, 2010), doenças mentais (Blackman, 2010;Beljaars, 2015), adições (Bøhling, 2015), processos legais como adopções (Posocco, 2011); tortura de prisioneiros polí-ticos (anderson, 2014), preparações governamentais para emergências futuras (anderson, 2010), ou fenómenos económicos como a inflação (McCormack, 2015b). apesar disto, existem algumas críticas que têm sido apontadas à aplicação das teorias não-representacionais na geografia.…”