Can First Parents Speak? A Spivakean Reading of First Parents’ Agency and Resistance in Transnational Adoption

Genealogy Pub Date : 2024-01-15 DOI:10.3390/genealogy8010008
Atamhi Cawayu, H. Sacré
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Abstract

This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals. Filling in this gap, we discuss the search strategies employed by first families in Bolivia who desire a reunion with their child. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s feminist postcolonial theory, we analyse ethnographic fieldwork with fourteen first families in Bolivia. We read how the agency of first parents, severely limited by the loss of legal rights through the adoption system, is caught in a double bind of dependency and possibility. While hegemonic adoption discourse portrays first parents as passive and consenting to the adoption system, the results of our study complicate this picture. Moreover, we argue that the search activity of the first parents can be read as a claim and request to revise and negotiate their consent to transnational adoption. Ultimately, we read first parents’ search efforts as resistance to the closed nature of the adoption system, which restricts them in their search for their children.
第一父母能说话吗?从斯皮瓦克角度解读跨国收养中第一父母的代理权和阻力
本文分析了玻利维亚第一家庭通过跨国收养对其子女分离提出异议的寻找策略。领养政策和学术研究在很大程度上忽视了这些第一家庭对可见性和认可的诉求,历来将领养国的行为者(如养父母和领养专业人士)的观点置于优先地位。为了填补这一空白,我们讨论了玻利维亚渴望与孩子团聚的第一家庭所采用的寻找策略。我们借鉴盖特丽-查克拉沃蒂-斯皮瓦克(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)的女性主义后殖民理论,对玻利维亚 14 个第一家庭的人种学实地调查进行了分析。我们了解到,由于丧失了收养制度赋予的合法权利,第一位父母的能动性受到了严重限制,他们陷入了依赖性和可能性的双重束缚之中。虽然霸权的收养论述将第一父母描绘成被动的、同意收养制度的人,但我们的研究结果却使这一描述变得复杂。此外,我们认为,初为父母者的寻找活动可以被解读为一种主张和要求,即修改和协商他们对跨国收养的同意。最终,我们将第一对父母的搜寻努力解读为对收养制度封闭性的抵制,这种封闭性限制了他们对子女的搜寻。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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