Abstract:
Globally the international adoption industry is in a time of crisis, beset by a steady stream of corruption and abuse scandals, and criticised by some as a racist and exploitative trade in children of colour. Yet, in Sweden, arguably the world’s leading adopting nation, international adoption remains celebrated, wrapped up in national myths of anti-racism and goodness. This thesis critically explores the unique nature of Swedish international transracial adoption desire, examining how the adoptee body is deployed in national myth building and in fantasies of colour-blindness and white cosmopolitanism.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Ghassan Hage, bell hooks and Homi K Bhabha, the thesis uses deconstructive narrative analysis techniques to explore meanings and desires concealed beneath the surface of published texts and images. Analysing a range of sources, from commercials to popular adopter and adoptee autobiographies, it seeks to deconstruct narratives of adoption and goodness, and build a new understanding of white adopters’ racial desires and their roles in maintaining a status quo of patriarchal white supremacy.
The thesis argues that the body of the transracial adoptee is used to signify a uniquely Swedish national goodness, and serves to unite a divided nation by symbolically connecting white Swedish subjects to a mythical glorious past, when white Swedes could have complete control over the positioning of bodies of colour in white national space. The adoptee body symbolises a safe version of multiculturalism, where a non-white body can be observed, controlled and consumed legitimately. It can also carry the possibility of white fantasies of being progressive, cosmopolitan digressive desiring subjects who are able to step out of whiteness to experience a world of Otherness.
However, while the adoptee body is central to upholding myths of Swedish goodness and exceptionalism it also troubles them: for it simultaneously carries hidden histories of Sweden’s colonial past and racist present, which its presence forever threatens to reveal. The adoptee body therefore risks exposing the inauthenticity of Swedish virtue and the good white Swedish subject, and the histories of eugenics, racism and colonialism that good Sweden and the international adoption project are built on.