On the queer necropolitics of transnational adoption in Guatemala

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.…”

“…Derridean ideas concerning the status of the trace and the relations between representation and difference, and between legibility and deferral, have very productively exceeded the confines of the philosophy of language. Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence in the context of Western philosophy opens up questions as to the status of traces, how traces should be handled, and what it might mean to archive, hold, occlude, or foreground relations and subjects 'sous rature' (see also Kelly & Morton, 2004;Posocco, 2014b). These are questions that have been skillfully tackled by geographers, as the work of Withers (2002) and Rose (2003) on the figure of the archive in the geographical canon illustrates well.…”

“…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.…”

“…I specifically refer to a case of forced removal of a group of children from their families and their relocation from Guatemala to Europe through transnational adoption circuits during the Guatemalan conflict, to show how birth families' quests to reconnect with them profoundly unsettle the meaning and status of analogies that unproblematically conjoin adoption to migration. I argue that struggles for 'searches' and 'reunions' in contemporary Guatemala overtly challenge the status of kinning and enfleshment produced through securitized privileged access to the law, technology, and the market (see Fonseca, 2008;Posocco, 2014b), as well as forms of sociality and relatedness where a culturally and historically specific convergence is invoked between models of property and value, and models of the person and the family. 'Searches' and 'reunions' initiated by individuals, families, and communities of origin directly problematize those discourses, practices, and meanings of sociality, kinship, and personhood that over time have engendered and sustained the system of largely extrajudicial, privatized, and progressively commodified transnational adoptions that took place in Guatemala in the second half of the twentieth century.…”

Against Extraction in Guatemala

“…From the mid-twentieth century through to what Salvadó et al have termed the cycle of neocolonial recomposition , Guatemala became a key exporter of adoptees. The country consistently ranked as the top Latin American 'sending country' of adoptees during the last three decades of the 20th century (Briggs 2010, Posocco 2014. Sizable transnational adoption flows intensified during the course of the Guatemalan conflict (1960 -1996).…”