This article developed out of a conversation at a conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the 'Encontro Circulac¸a˜o de Crianc¸as' (The Circulation of Children), which explored questions related to international adoption and other kinds of informal and formal circulation of children, with a particular attention to how birth mothers lose those children. 1 There, a very interesting conversation erupted (in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French) after a young (male) scholar from Scandinavia asked: 'but why have the feminists had nothing to say about adoption?' The debate that followed had a peculiar doubleness about it as we struggled to characterise the position of 'the feminists'. On the one hand, at least half the people at the adoption conference were in fact feminist scholars, but on the other, we recognised that there was a certain justice in the question-we were hard-pressed to say how we were speaking as feminists on adoption questions. Feminist silence around adoption is puzzling, given the centrality of other reproductive rights issues-from abortion to unwanted sterilisation to transnational feminist preoccupations with stratified reproduction-to feminists in diverse places. In part, this may be a symptom of a general neglect of children and childhood within feminist theory, one that has only recently been addressed. As Erica Burman and Jackie Stacey argue in Introduction to the recent Feminist Theory special issue on childhood (2010), feminists have spent so much energy separating ourselves from the normalising conjoining of woman-as-mother-with-child that it has been difficult to find strategies to write as a feminist about children. Burman and Stacey point out that the normative feminist silence about childhood is changing; feminists from Lauren Berlant in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997) to Kathryn Bond Stockton in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth