ABSTRACT
As adoption becomes a public, state-regulated institution explicitly aimed at family-making in the 1910s and 1920s, it more self-consciously produces the norms by which individual lives are cultivated, shaped, and made into proper persons. The shift toward state and federal involvement in the construction of adoption was in part a reaction to the often unregulated practices by evangelical reformers and religious institutions mentioned earlier. The exacting standards held by adoption professionals reaches into the motives and interior selves of both prospective adopters and potential adoptees. Adoption practices produce the norms for who can relate to whom and for the conditions of individuation by regulating the identifications between parent and child. The policy of matching encapsulates this production of race as a negotiation of projections. It developed as a practice of placing children with parents based on similarities in race, religion, intelligence, personality, temperament, and a host of other factors.
