Abstract:
Sweden is one of the world’s leading demand countries on the international adoption market, with Swedes having adopted more foreign children per capita than anywhere else on earth. The international adoption project, largely unproblematised in Sweden, takes place in a discursive setting where fantasies of ‘colour-blindness’ and of being ‘post-race’ see adoptees being both desired for their (racial/ethnic) difference and having this difference strongly disavowed. This article utilises Bhabha’s concept of mimicry to critically discuss how the international transracial adoptee is discursively shaped in Swedish adoption narratives against a pro-adoption, colour-blind backdrop. Through an analysis of three Swedish adoption texts, the article explores the process and implications of the adoptee’s body being translated from complete otherness into (almost) Swedishness. The article suggests that mimicry emerges as a process beginning with the adoptee being desired as a body of difference that can potentially become an almost Swede. The adoptee, with a difference that is visible but disavowed and a sameness that is over-communicated but misrecognised, becomes trapped in a constant negotiation of identity, as they slip between being desired as an authorised version of otherness and being an isolated subject of racism, alienated from belonging to a recognised minority or marginalised group. The adoptee’s mimicry is prone to turn into menace, posing a threat to the identity of the white Swede and meanings of white Swedishness, and potentially even to the mission of adoption itself. This may go some way to understanding violent reactions to adult adoptees’ critical reflections on the structural problems of international adoption.
