Contingent Kinship by Kathryn A. Mariner

Author:Kathryn A. Mariner [Mariner, Kathryn A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780520299566
Google: ACaGDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2019-04-30T03:32:29+00:00

A complex intersection of economic, political, cultural, and emotional labor by the formal facilitators of adoption buffers the production of kinship from the raced, gendered, and classed excesses of marketized relations that would make parent and child into consumer and consumed. (72)

In a similar vein, Goodwin (2010: 2) argues, “The free market in children, as a concept, is rejected based on what it symbolizes, including its argued resemblance to slavery or the auction block.” A sort of discursive money-laundering, moral maintenance is involved in the disavowal of adoption as being in any way economized. When I asked Stella to differentiate adoption and child-buying, she argued that several aspects of child trafficking were absent from legitimate adoption: spontaneous or unexplained fees, working with noncertified facilitators, and absence of paperwork. In Stella’s view, the line between adoption and illicit trafficking was marked by a lack of regulation, a defining trait of what Goodwin (2010) has termed “baby markets” (see also Raleigh 2017).

State regulation of adoption—in particular, the restrictions placed on “legally allowable birth parent expenses”—constitutes another form of moral maintenance in which the state intervenes in order to prevent the sale—or the appearance of the sale—of children. Take, for example, the following excerpts from Illinois law regarding these expenses:

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