The War At Home: Affective Economics and Transnationally Adoptive Families in the United States

Abstract

The question of how to best conduct post-placement interventions for transnationally adoptive families at risk of dissolution (legal annulment) is an emerging issue in the United States. The current popular trend for adoptive families to pursue biomedical post-placement interventions, despite a lack of proof that such interventions actually work to keep the adoptive family intact, suggests the need for a more phenomenological approach to understanding both adoptive parents’ and transnational adoptees’ post-placement experiences. This study examines the empirical experiences of adoptive families at risk of dissolution in the United States who attempt to define and navigate the path toward family stability after adopting. From the coding of this data set emerge some routes through and by which emotions circulate between adoptive parents and transnational adoptees through the family body and the family social. Particularly, it investigates one post-placement “affective economy” at work in which adoptive parents attempt, through the expression of particular forms of parental love, to align adoptees as subjects of the private, nuclear American family, while adoptees more often attempt to create space for more heterogeneous forms of family, ones that include birth parents and other kin-like relations in their countries of origin. Ultimately, it illuminates some vastly different and sometimes contradictory ways that adoptive parents and adoptees can interpret family through emotional lenses, ones that can prevent a smooth post-placement transition for adoption actors. An understanding of these differences and how they shape, and are shaped by, the post-placement affective economy within families at risk of dissolution may aid in locating indicators for adoption dissolution, and possibly, designing more effective post-placement interventions for families struggling in the aftermath of adoption. It may also help scholars begin to think about the construction and impact of affective economies in the realm of adoption more generally.

Attachment and adaptive skills in children of international adoption

“…These difficulties have not been officially measured or informed but several studies report adoption disruption rates between 2% and 20%, depending on the research and the samples (Berástegui 2003;Stryker 2011). Berástegui (2003) found the disruption rate between 1997 and 1999 in Spain to be 1.5%, growing to 6.7% when the age at adoption was 6 or older.…”

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

“…Within the context of treatment at ACE in the 1990s, it is difficult to say, because much of what the children seemed to understand as agency was pathologized by therapists. However, in my additional work with adoptees diagnosed and treated for RAD (Stryker, 2011), I demonstrate that children diagnosed with RAD often utilize a sophisticated form of what Sabine Mannitz has referred to as 'double cultural agency ' (2005: 25), or the skills one uses to imagine for oneself the social fields that cross ontological boundaries and then the strategic positioning of oneself within those fields. In many cases, they use double cultural agency to manage interstitial positions between their birth and adoptive families, and between their biological and geographic origins and expected destinations.…”

Feminism and transnational adoption: Poverty, precarity, and the politics of raising (other people’s?) children

“…While some of these directors were supportive of the dilemmas faced by poor parents, all were critical of such parents' use of children's homes for extended periods of support in raising their children. Liem (2000) and Stryker (2011) describe related situations in which adopting families presume or are told their child is an 'orphan', only to discover later that the child has a living parent or parents, considered by the child to be its mother or father (and see Aronson, 1997). Clearly this is a complex issue, raising serious questions about what constitutes parental care.…”