ABSTRACT
In popular discourse as in academic analysis, 1 ‘transnational adoption’ is often figured in reference to ideas of new forms of relatedness, kinning and sociality, while simultaneously conjuring up the spectre of illegitimate appropriation, unscrupulous commerce and degrading commodification of underprivileged bodies and persons moving across transnational circuits through uneven, unequal and non-reciprocal relations of exchange. As Briggs argues, it may initially appear counterintuitive to study the ‘hard politics’ of neoliberal globalization — and post-conflict adjustment — through ‘soft subjects’ like the family, reproduction and by analytical extension and abstraction, gender and sexuality (Briggs 2009, 2010: 49). ‘Transnational adoption’, as an assemblage of situated cultural forms, political and legal technologies of governing, social relations and subjectivities, directly connects to processes of economic, political and legal restructuring 2 that have taken place periodically since the debt crisis of the 1980s through policies associated with the Washington Consensus. 3 Thus, transnational adoption, as a peculiar form of intimate labour through which the act of bearing children on others’ behalf is commodified, marketized and, crucially, made the object of inequitable and non-rescindable relations of ownership and exchange — is a particularly poignant point of entry for an inquiry into how transnational processes and dynamics associated with neoliberalism play out in contradictory and complex ways (Briggs 2009, 2010, 2012; Marre and Briggs 2009; Posocco 2011) and connect to life/death problematics.
