Legitimating Life

Sonja van Wichelen is a senior research fellow with the department of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body.

• ContentsList of figures, tables and images                                                                                          Acknowledgements                                                                                                               Introduction: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology                             The Ethical Market: Between Reproduction and Humanitarianism                          Double Movements: International Law as Transparency Device                              Valuing Bodies: Somatic Ethics in the Biomedicalization of Adoption                   Grievable Lives: The Adoptee and the Child Migrant                                              Economies of Return: Openness, Knowledge, Relations                                          Conclusion: Legitimating Life                                                                                               Bibliography                                                                                                                          Index

"Van Wichelen offers a captivating and capacious framework for understanding global reproduction and modern family formation. Using ethnographic moments in international adoption as a launch point, she develops a sophisticated critique of the interrelations among humanitarianism, rights, and biomedicalization."— Sara Dorow, author of Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship"In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen provides a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of international adoption into a technology of reproduction through the imposition of a legal 'clean break' that decouples the child from its family and community of origin so that it can become a global resource for producing 'as-if-begotten' families in Europe and North America. Legitimating Life makes a compelling case for a new politics of international adoption that opens up a landscape for 'the doing and desiring of kinship otherwise,' even as it secures the right of every child to family life, as mandated by international law."— Barbara Yngvesson, author of Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption