Political Economics of Passion: Transnational Adoption and Global Woman: Roundtable on Global Woman

Abstract

Discourses on globalization have largely been examined under the lens of political rather than affective economies. What would be at stake were we to try to render visible the emotional labor that often accompanies the importation of physical labor from the global South to the global North? I approach these questions through an analysis of transnational adoption. Often excluded from critical discussions of nannies, maids, sex workers, nurses, migrant laborers, and mail-order brides in the New Economy, the transnational adoptee nevertheless might be considered a symptomatic member of this gendered constellation. Unlike domestic caretakers, who are exploited for both their wage labor and their affective work, the transnational adoptee performs a different kind of labor. Her exploitation is largely an emotional affair: in an age of “moral” and “family values”, she helps to consolidate and to reify the white middle-class nuclear family.