ABSTRACT
Ever since the institutionalization of transnational (intercountry) adoption as a child welfare practice, as a reproductive technique, and as an international migration phenomenon (see Chapter 1), the subject of transnational adoptees of color and race has with few exceptions been glossed over or even ignored by researchers studying adoption, while adoptees have not merited any particular interest from ethnic and migration studies scholars. This omission becomes even more puzzling in light of the fact that domestic transracial adoption has been highly contested in decades-long debates in countries like the USA and the UK, with race as a central issue. The aim of this chapter is to try to understand why issues of race and the non-white bodies of transnational adoptees have received so little attention in adoption research. Race within adoption research can almost be compared to “the elephant in the room”—an obvious and uncomfortable topic that everyone avoids. The chapter begins with an attempt at understanding the relative invisibility of race within adoption research as a reflection of a hegemonic color-blindness which in its turn can be explained by the ideology of post-racial utopianism that surrounds transnational adoption as a field, continues with a summary of the existing research on transnational adoptees of color and race, and ends with a concluding discussion. Finally I criticize the tendency to pathologize and medicalize adoptees and argue for a stronger bridging of quantitative and qualitative adoption research.
