In Victorian England, the phrase “little stranger” was used to refer to the unborn child one had not yet met. Though it has fallen out of use today, the expression is not inapt for describing the children who enter new families, new ethnic or cultural identities, new social classes, and new nations via international adoption. Over time, and through a series of social practices designed both to “kin” the child and parents, siblings, and other relatives and to explain the child's presence to an inquisitive public, the “little stranger” comes to be more or less incorporated and acculturated: less strange, more familiar. Because international adoption makes those processes visible through its very unfamiliarity and its recourse to legal and cultural strategies, it has become a centerpiece of recent writing on kinship, reproduction, and childhood (Yngvesson Reference Yngvesson2010; Marre and Briggs Reference Marre and Briggs2009; Kim Reference Kim2010; Wade Reference Wade2007; Howell Reference Howell2006; Marre and Bestard Reference Marre and Bestard2004; Dorow Reference Dorow2006; Bowie Reference Bowie2004; Volkman Reference Volkman2005; Howell Reference Howell2009; Leinaweaver and Seligmann Reference Leinaweaver and Seligmann2009; Hübinette and Tigervall Reference Hübinette and Tigervall2009; Briggs Reference Briggs2012).

In the past decade in the United States, international adoption has suddenly received more than its fair share not just of scholarly interest but of media attention as well. Although international adoptions are a minority of all adoptions that take place in the United States, one would not know it from glancing at supermarket tabloids, where Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, or Katherine Heigl and Josh Kelley among others have appeared with their “Benetton children.” Whether the disproportionate media coverage springs from the visual power of beautiful white celebrities with their children of color, and the way such images shore up ideologies of rescue, as historian Karen Dubinsky suggests, or is because newspaper readers and international adopters both tend to be middle-class and educated, as anthropologist Christine Ward Gailey argues, the effect is the same: international adoption is a widely familiar subject.

Scholars have recently turned to exploring the effects of international adoption, perhaps in part because of the same appeal that draws public interest, but also because international adoption is a phenomenon that allows us to effectively plumb several aspects of contemporary life. Research on international adoption reveals how kinship is formed across national borders and between (or excluding) people of widely discrepant means and stations, and it lets us talk about nationalism, race, class, gender, kinship, imperialism, and myriad links between each of these that might otherwise escape our scrutiny. For instance, the qualitative sociologist Heather Jacobson quotes an adoptive mother justifying her cultural engagement with China by saying of her children: “‘When they look in the mirror, they can see that they're different and they know that they're from China’” (p. 71). Such a statement conflates race (phenotypical difference glossed as looking in the mirror), nation (being from China), and culture (a mother's deliberate actions taken in response to the child's recognition of difference) with relative ease, yet requires exhaustive scholarly work to disentangle.

One productive direction in recent work on international adoption has been to disentangle such claims through expanding, rather than narrowing, the scholarly focus. So, for example, Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus have compared adoption, donor gametes, and immigration in Norway (Reference Howell, Melhuus and Wade2007). Two of the three books under review here take special care to identify the broader comparative frame within which their analyses of international adoption unfold. In the work of both Dubinsky, the historian, and Gailey, the anthropologist, international adoption is explicitly one piece of the larger picture they are considering.Footnote ¹ Dubinsky and Gailey have the right idea here: transnational adoption cannot be understood in isolation. As Dubinsky suggests, international adoption makes sense only as part of an analysis that also scrutinizes child migration and the transracial adoption of internally colonized subjects. Dubinsky's book thus pans out to identify the way that children have historically been used as political symbols and the effects that the spread of a globalized notion of “the child” has had on children themselves. One effect is simply that international adoption has become imaginable; as Dubinsky shows, if prospective parents did not believe that children were the same everywhere, they could not hope to bring home children from distant countries and integrate them seamlessly into the parents' (overwhelmingly) white middle-class existence.

Although international adoption is thus founded on the premise that children are at some important level the same everywhere—fungible, one might say—it is also complicated by the reality of racial and ethnic difference. One reason that race is ultimately so central to each of the three books is because adoption is about family, and family is where the “native kinship theory” of the United States expects race to be reproduced. (The three books discussed all focus mainly on international adoption to the United States, which is the most significant “receiving country” by sheer numbers of children, and thus their analyses concentrate on issues particular to what Schneider (Reference Schneider1980[1968]) called “American kinship.”)Footnote ² In other words, one is thought to inherit one's race from one's parents; the “one-drop rule” infamous in the history of U.S. racial segregation references the notion that blood is brought forward through the generations and itself represents racial difference. It is not surprising, then, that much transracial adoption has faced strong opposition, a history which each author treats, Dubinsky in the most detail.

The importance of race in contemporary international adoption is addressed most directly in Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference.Footnote ³ Heather Jacobson contrasts women who adopted from China with those who adopted from Russia, the two major sending countries for U.S. international adoptions during the time of her research.Footnote ⁴ She highlights a practice she labels “culture keeping,” ensuring that children are cognizant of certain aspects of the culture they might have grown up with had they not been adopted; I am inclined to label this “enculturation.” Rather than keeping a bona-fide culture that a child has brought around him or herself to the United States like some kind of containment field, these mothers are instilling their understanding of that culture into children that were overwhelmingly too young to have begun to learn it before they left their countries of origin. The idea of “culture keeping” is fraught with complications from the start: it draws attention to white mothers' wishes to provide their children with access to what Jacobson calls their “ethnic pasts” but which is revealed in the course of the book to be, more complicatedly but far more intriguingly, the information that white strangers would expect the child to have based on assumptions about the child's race.

That culture is at least in part a coded way of referring to race helps to explain why “culture keeping” is promoted far more in the China program than in the Russia program: white parents of children with Chinese origins want to teach their children “ethnic pride,” partly in order to counter any negative messages they will receive from the dominant society as they grow. Jacobson calls this, nicely, a “China-adoptive ethnicity” (141), one that, crucially, is established as elective: the children as they grow can choose which aspects of it, if any, to retain alongside their unmarked (hence white) Americanness. “Culture keeping” is a key piece of the transnational/transracial adoptive parent's toolkit, because, as Jacobson convincingly argues, it acknowledges the child's racial difference without threatening the all-important exclusive kinship relationship that—as Gailey also recognizes—is central to why these parents adopt internationally. In fact, precisely because it is not phrased in racial terms, “culture keeping” is a concept that captures how white parents of Chinese children understand their actions: as being about heritage, a notion comprising ethnicity, culture, and language, rather than as solely about race.

Race appears more overtly, no longer disguised as culture, in the justifications parents offered for the country from which they chose to adopt. Parents adopting from Russia felt that a phenotypical similarity would ease the child's integration into the extended family. Parents adopting from China justified their choice in terms of race as well but took the opposite tack: they felt that obvious phenotypical difference between themselves and their children would announce the fact of adoption to the public (and, not inconsequentially, to other adoptive families, paving the way for a support community to form). It would prevent a situation where they would have to choose whether or not to reveal that the child had been adopted, something which itself might lead to a sense that adoption was somehow second-best.Footnote ⁵ (The flip side of this obvious phenotypical difference, of course, is “interracial surveillance”: the questions about how the child and parents can fit together, which range from bumbling to insensitive to outright offensive.) The conclusion from a China-Russia comparison, perhaps not surprisingly, is that race matters a lot. It would be interesting, then, to compare “culture keeping” done by mothers of internationally adopted children perceived as white (e.g., Russian or Colombian), or by mothers of internationally adopted children perceived not to be white (e.g., Chinese or Indian) to see what differences emerge that are not primarily about race.

Nonetheless, race is clearly central to these analyses of international adoption, which in many cases might be productively analyzed as interracial adoption with a transnational twist (Seligmann Reference Seligmann2009). Dubinsky notes that interracial adoption has been framed as solidarity in the optimistic view, but “cultural annihilation” in the negative. For white parents to adopt a child of another race or ethnicity invokes the notion that parents of color are incapable and, equally problematic, precludes any form of economic or social support for marginalized families. It also suggests that their new children can be racially sanitized through the process of separation, adoption, and reintegration. After Jacobson's careful analysis of the importance of race (framed as culture) for China-adoptive and Russia-adoptive parents, it may be a surprise to see Dubinsky argue that international adoption became possible through the creation of a discourse of pity and rescue which had to produce adoptable children as both needy and race-less. And yet it is their very race-less-ness that is rechanneled into the keeping of culture (rather than race) in Jacobson's analysis. Such children are adoptable by virtue of their non-threatening, race-less qualities. It is not hard to imagine the shock to this system when adoptees are no longer cute children holding the hands of their white parents but rather young adults of color attempting to navigate U.S. racial hierarchies. So, importantly, transnational adoption is an opportunity for its mostly white practitioners to begin to think about, and confront, race and racism in the contemporary United States and to do so from the privileged, because naturalized and intimate, sphere of kinship—paradoxically, because it is precisely within kinship that race is thought to be reproduced. Rather than being too self-congratulatory about international adoption as racially progressive, then, it is important to consider what the consequences of such a narrative are for the other people involved, the people we do not hear from in these books.

For these books, like the vast majority of scholarly literature on transnational adoption, are fairly one-sided. They make no pretense of being otherwise, and this is not a criticism of the authors' abilities to achieve their stated aims, but rather an observation of the broader field within which they are situated. Discussions of international adoption in two of the books are based entirely on interviews (with a few dozen New England parents in Jacobson's, with parents and a few supplementary others such as lawyers and social workers in Gailey's). Dubinsky's analysis of international adoption is based on archival analysis of public discourses about international adoption that are accessible through media forms. This methodological and subject bias shows the heightened difficulty of getting more intimate access into the world of post-adoption. Participant-observation, the hallmark of anthropology and also an important feature of the qualitative sociology that Jacobson practices, is nowhere to be found in these texts. Why might this be? Privileged, well-off, North American interlocutors are not so likely to permit our intrusions into their lives as are marginalized parents elsewhere in the world. And they would be intrusions: adoptive kinship unfolds in the home, in such intimate acts as combing a child's hair or displaying cultural artifacts from the child's country of origin, much more so than it does in public spaces.

Perhaps even more to the point, our scholarly knowledge of adoption is still largely reliant upon adoptive parents and public discourses. The authors lament the unheard voices; Gailey calls the perspective of birth mothers in sending countries “a story waiting to be written” (101), and Dubinsky writes, “Real people, particularly birth parents, disappear when the story is told too abstractly” (21). But they do not, or cannot, remedy that absence. I am deeply sympathetic to this situation: it is much harder to access either birth parents or adopted children, for a variety of structural reasons. Birth parents in sending countries do not often form an organized cohort as do either internationally adoptive parents in the United States or the North American birthmothers that Judith Schachter has studied (Modell Reference Modell1994), and the children themselves are too young to speak (or so we imagine, further marginalizing them by reproducing them as silent), or too vulnerable to be permitted to do so, in the estimation of our Institutional Review Boards. The stories of birth parents and kin, and the stories of the young adoptees themselves, must wait for another day to be fully told.

Another reason we have so far been more likely to hear the perspectives of adoptive parents is that many of the scholars working on international adoption are themselves parents via international adoption. They have already identified the issues and tensions that shape their own experiences of parenting, and as scholars they recognize that those issues and tensions are fascinating objects of study in their own right. Barbara Yngvesson and Signe Howell, among others, have both self-identified in their recent books as adoptive parents, following current anthropological norms of reflexivity in order that readers can recognize the position from which the author has come to her object of study. In the three books reviewed here, only Dubinsky discloses her status as an adoptive parent, and some readers may wonder whether the others have personal ties to adoption. While many of the scholars currently working on international adoption are adoptive parents, as the first generations of international adoptees come of age and begin to write and speak and insist upon being heard (Trenka, Sudbury, and Shin Reference Trenka, Sudbury and Shin2006), social scientific scholarship on adoption will be transformed just as adoptive parenting is already being transformed in response to, for example, criticisms from adult adoptees from Korea of color-blind parenting (Hübinette and Tigervall Reference Hübinette and Tigervall2009).

Karen Dubinsky is mother to a son born in Guatemala, but she is also a historian who recognizes that her discipline does not always receive warmly those who admit the relationship between their personal experience and their research interests. But her modest personal revelations only serve to make her historical work more compelling, bearing ramifications not only for the history of childhood but also for her own family. In Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas, Dubinsky writes about the central role of children in nation-making and the way that children are symbolic tools in adults' projects. She marshals three instances of border-crossing children to support her argument, each with a clever gloss: “National Baby” refers to those Cuban children who migrate to the United States and simultaneously serve as lightening rods for debates about how to protect children; “Hybrid Baby” labels the black and First Nations children adopted by white parents in Canada, the former a symbol of civil rights and progressiveness, the latter a symbol of internal colonialism; and those children departing from Guatemala in transnational adoptions are characterized as “Missing Baby,” as they appear in public, mediated discourses about transnational adoption in a postwar setting.

Although the first two thirds of Dubinsky's book are not about international adoption per se, they are about two of its close genealogical precursors. Operation Peter Pan, the secret removal of thousands of Cuban children to Miami in the early days of the revolutionary government, required that those children be placed with U.S. foster families, who—like Jacobson's white adoptive mothers who delight in the cosmopolitan identity they derive from “culture keeping”—valued the pleasures of learning about Latin America while confirming their own sense of American freedoms. Meanwhile, interracial adoption during the mid-twentieth century paved the way for international adoption to be thinkable. Some of Dubinsky's most satisfying writing appears in this comparison between white Montrealers who adopted black babies and white Manitobans who adopted Aboriginal children. The former are somewhat self-congratulatory—“Canadians are fond of the high moral ground,” she explains (92) —while the latter are viewed as colonizers, an epithet which highlights that, despite occurring within Canadian borders, adoptions of native children are in many cases actually transnational too. Dubinsky is Canadian, and her discussion of adoption in Canada provides a welcome contrast with the U.S. focus in much of international adoption research.

By reserving her discussion of international adoption for the final chapter, Dubinsky builds a careful case that demonstrates the ways that such children play symbolic roles in the national-level dramas imagined and cast by adults. As with Peter Pan children and interracial adoptees, international adoptees can be imagined to be rescued or kidnapped. In Guatemala, they are the direct inheritors of the mantle of “missingness”; children who in previous decades disappeared or were orphaned due to the civil war are now disappearing or being placed for adoption due to legacies of violence, racism, marginalization, disempowerment, and sheer poverty. She places Guatemalan adoptions in their political-economic context, noting that children may be viewed as what neoliberal development projects would term a “non-traditional export.” Dubinsky's comparative framework reveals unexpected but convincing similarities between contemporary international adoption, Cold War-era child migration, and post-World War II interracial adoption.

In Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. Adoption Practice, cultural anthropologist Christine Ward Gailey largely concurs with Dubinsky in her position that international adoption is just one facet of adoption in the United States and requires a broader contextual discussion. Gailey's analysis incorporates adoption from the public system, transracial domestic adoption of black children by white parents, and the ways that older adoptees are shaped by gendered violence as they make their way through the public system. Gailey recognizes that adoption occurs within broader reproductive politics more generally; teenage mothers, shifts in welfare policy, and the “stolen generation” all invite reflection.Footnote ⁶ She reserves special criticism for those white parents of black children—few of whom actually existed in her sample—who practice a “color-blind” approach that leaves their growing children unprepared to deal with racism.

Gailey offers readers a classical feminist intersectional analysis on the ways that race, class, and gender work together to shape adoption in the United States. Her work speaks more strongly to class differences than do the other two books. She is certainly interested in race, but argues convincingly that class is notably understudied in adoption practice. From the perspective of the child, adoption almost always signifies class mobility. An older child may be particularly struck by the class-related differences in discipline and parenting practices as well as in the expectations parents hold for their new child. And as Gailey puts it, “For better or worse, working-class adopters were more likely to practice the kind of parenting approaches and discipline found in the child's experience of foster care” (122). She also argues that parents adopt in direct connection with their desire to reproduce within their own social class. Their reproductive work—their parenting practices and expectations they convey to their children—is intimately linked to the class-inflected hopes that they have for their children's futures. Adoption highlights the reproduction of social class, common to other forms of kinship but more visible here, because of the class differences so frequently present between parent and child. Incidentally, the “culture keeping” Jacobson describes is one such class-inflected parenting practice: it is not without its costs, being both literally expensive (as are, for instance, private Mandarin lessons) and taking up valuable time that mothers could spend on other pursuits.

International adoptive parents are often treated as a homogeneous category within the literature. One of the most interesting aspects of Gailey's study from this perspective is that she subdivides her international adoptive subjects into a “business/professional” type, and an “academic/NGO” type.Footnote ⁷ The latter were a snowball sample beginning with people whom she personally knew, all of whom already marked significant connections to the countries from which they ended up adopting. This is an important distinction that might usefully be made in future research on international adoption. Gailey identifies some significant differences between people who adopt out of a previous longstanding connection to a country, and those who are adopting internationally because of the genuine appeal of some of the more problematic aspects of the process itself. The latter include the way that the process essentially forecloses meaningful relationships with a child's birth relatives; how it permits race matching and physiological matching that are no longer practiced in domestic adoptions; and the relative privacy it affords adoptive families, shielding them from criticisms of any dysfunction after the required reports from the first few years are filed.

Of all her subjects, Gailey seems most sympathetic to the working-class adopters, a stance which provides a powerful and positive corrective to some of the ideologies that circulate about adoption as class mobility, but one with the consequence that the better-off and more highly educated “business/professional” international adopters are sometimes portrayed in a harsh light (with, for example, the suggestion that they are in search of a “trophy child”). To demonstrate the diversity among working-class adopters is laudable, but doing so should not require essentializing middle-class adopters.

Gailey's findings leave no doubt that international adoption is hardly a progressive choice that transgresses racialized norms, despite it being portrayed as such in some of the literature (as is the interracial adoption of black children by white parents such as the Montrealers Dubinsky considers). In fact, each of these books argues that transnational adoption is actually a surprisingly conventional approach to family-making. Gailey suggests that compared to other options available to potential white U.S. adopters, such as going through the public foster care system, it is a far more conservative choice in terms of permitting racial matching. Jacobson's book further expands this assessment of international adoption since she analyzes it as conservative not only in racial but also in kinship terms. Kinship scholars make much of the fact that transnational adoption creates expanded forms of kinship, both through adoption itself and through the kin-like connections that adoptive families make with others like them. Yet it is that very expansion of kinship to others “like them” that reinscribes the centrality of racial similarity to kinship: the connections between adoptive families are grounded in the racial and national similarities of the children, reminding us that kinship in the United States still largely unfolds within a racially homogeneous field.

International adoption is not, in sum, a phenomenon that can be celebrated uncritically for expanding our heretofore constrained notions of kinship. Such a stance would presume that “American kinship” is as rigid as its representations suggest. However, because international adoptive kinship is more overtly constructed than other forms of kinship that we imagine to be “natural,” it permits us to see clearly the constructed nature of all kinship, the way that, as the Victorians recognized, all children are “little strangers” in the beginning. The experiences of adoptive families that at first glance seem unusual—such as the surveillance Heather Jacobson remarks upon, where strangers constantly force interracial families to account for their relations to one another—turn out upon closer inspection to be more common. All families run the risk of being scrutinized, held up to some invisible ideal. International adoptive families contribute to the study of kinship by making visible the possibilities of and constraints on contemporary family life that would otherwise go unexamined.