Movement without movement: ‘RAD kids’ as circulatory problems in United States adoption pipelines

Abstract

This article explores Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) diagnosis and early popular forms of the Evergreen model of attachment therapy popular in the 1990s. It argues that the Evergreen model operated as part of a biomedical knowledge regime designed to mediate and remediate flows of adoptable children in the United States. The article juxtaposes attachment therapists' understandings of child circulation via adoption with adoptees' experiences of their own circulation to illuminate the ways in which early attachment therapists pathologized children's attempts to exert agency within the limited scope of their own circulation and during treatment. The article elaborates on the adult-centric notion of linear flows of circulation via adoption vs. some children's 'ambi-valent' experience of their own circulation. Ethnographic attention to such paradoxes within child circulation is important for illuminating how knowledge regimes attempt to smooth child circulation routes when children present as 'circulatory problems'; it also asks by what processes children's assertion of agency is constructed as a problem more broadly in the United States.

Attachment as Affective Assimilation: Discourses on Love and Kinship in the Context of Transnational Adoption in Denmark

“…Our theoretical framework borrows from critical adoption scholarship that specifically focuses on the affective biopolitics of adoption (Eng, 2003;Myers, 2013a;Stryker, 2010Stryker, , 2013van Wichelen, 2014) and feminist studies of "humanizing" affects such as love, compassion, and empathy (Ahmed, 2004;Berlant, 2001). Our analysis seeks to unpack the logics associated with attachment and love in order to reflect on the significance of these logics for the biopolitical administration of transnational adoption.…”

“…The analysis aims to conceptualize attachment as constituting a specific affective realm in which the subject is oriented and orients themself according to specific ideals of love. What we offer is thus a detailed understanding of the way in which the attachment paradigm functions as a form of biomedical technology (Stryker, 2013), and we argue that this may be indicative of how a dominant focus on the adoptee's linguistic, racial, and cultural adaptability in a Danish context (Myong, 2009) has been replaced by a focus on the adoptee's affective (love) potential and ability to attach themself to the adoptive family. Following from this, we argue that the renewed interest in attachment may be conceptualized as instigating a shift between two related paradigms of assimilation, namely from cultural assimilation to affective assimilation.…”