Revisiting the Right to Know: The Transnational Adoptee and the Moral Economy of ‘Return’

ABSTRACT

In this article I examine regulatory regimes of mobility through the case of transnational adoption. In particular, I focus on ‘return’ journeys by adoptees and their entanglement the ‘right to know’. Backed up by international law, the right to know in the adoption context includes the right to know one’s biological parents, one’s birth culture, and the right to information (for instance, medical information). At large, the ‘right to know’ signals a valuation of openness. But what are the problems that come with knowledge and information? What does the imperative of openness do to kinship relations? Looking at a number of instances where institutions discuss the necessities and implications of return journeys, I demonstrate in this article that ‘the right to know’ is inextricably linked to moral economies of kinship. Returns make visible the transaction of adoption and the exchangeability of the adoptee body. I discuss how adoptees are implicated in this moral economy but also how they, as subjects, negotiate, destabilise, or refuse openness as imperative. I argue that in the end, while the ‘right to know’ allows the discovery of relations, it also fails to acknowledge the invention of relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational adoption
• knowledge
• rights
• identity
• kinship
• mobility
• migration

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Sonja van Wichelen is Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Her research broadly engages with the body, law, and science in the age of globalisation and the effects that changes in these areas have on our understanding of citizenship. Her current project (funded by the Australian Research Council) investigates the impact of globalisation and biomedicine on the legal governance of family life. She is the director of the Biopolitics of Science Research Network and co-editor of the Book Series Biolegalities: Law and Bioscience in the twenty-first Century (Palgrave Macmillan). She is the author of Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (Routledge, 2010), co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and publishes widely on the topic of law and family life, global reproduction, religion and the body, migration and citizenship.

Notes

1. For the complete text of the Hague Adoption Convention, see: https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions/full-text/?cid=69.

2. During my empirical research I spoke with many other adult adoptees about their ‘searches’ and ‘return’ journeys. I chose to single out Tino’s story to provide a deeper and more biographical analysis to some of the institutional narratives around cross-border adoption. Moreover, as a professional photographer who examined his adoptive history through art, his case provides a unique opportunity for analytical and theoretical reflection by engaging not only with his accounts but also with his cultural productions about adoption.

3. See the creative work of Mihee Nathalie Lemoine or the documentaries by Deann Borshay Liem.

4. For instance, during the time of my empirical research, some states in the US allowed the adoption of children who were are as old as 12 years (India), 13 years (China), or 15 years (Columbia), in the Netherlands the maximum age for children to be adopted internationally was 6 years (with the exception of sibling adoptions).

5. For an account of forced removals in Australia see Van Krieken (1999) and Cuthbert and Quartly (2013); in Canada see Strong-Boag (2006); in the US see Fessler (2006); in the UK see Keating (2009). For an account of the politics of transracial adoption in the US see Patton (2000) and Rothman (2004).

6. See the full text of the 1993 Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, available at https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions/full-text/?cid=69.

7. A range of activities evolved around ‘culture keeping’ in adoption, ranging from Chinese New Year celebrations and language courses to ‘roots’ or ‘motherland’ visits and birth searches. Although often underfunded, post-adoption services include the organisation of these cultural travels and in some instances, agencies also assisted in finding biological relatives. More often, however, third party services were involved to assist with birth searches, particularly the media. As such, television programmes such as Spoorloos (KRO) in the Netherlands or I Miss That Person (KBS Global) in South Korea have become popular mediums through which to find birthparents and extended family.

8. The film Adopted by Barb Lee (2006) evidences this turn in adoptive families; that socialisation and adaptation must come from both sides.

9. Many thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers who clarified this point for me.

10. Tino Djumini, my interview, Jakarta, 28 May 2005, tape recording, transcription. The trope of the ‘unfilial child’, anak derhaka in Malay or Indonesian, is dominant in public discourse and used to refer to the child that turns against her family as well as her nation. For an elaboration, see Chin and Haji Mohd Daud (2015).

11. Scholars in the so-called ‘New Kinship Studies’ have studied people’s urges to seek out relatives beyond the nuclear family in order to recover information about themselves and their medical prospects (Dolgin 2000; Finkler 2000). Many are simply searching to gain (medical or genetic) information and give little regards to the possibilities of starting up relationships with them. This creates genetic families whose members are first and foremost linked through the information their bodies hold about one another and genetic ties can therefore be disarticulated and severed from social ones.

12. The publicness of Tino’s reunion was evident in Indonesia as well as the Netherlands. While the popular magazine Wanita Indonesia documented his story, the documentary Tijn … Tino made by the filmmaker Carina Ellemers (Humanistische omroep 2007) was aired on Dutch national television.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DE140100348].