Identity Work and Transnational Adoption: Discursive Representations of the ‘Adoptive-Parent-To-Be’ in the Satellite Texts of a Danish TV Documentary Series

In the Scandinavian countries, transnational adoption is state controlled and subject to an official institutional procedure with various gate-keeping phases. For instance, prospective adopters have to produce detailed applications and various legally binding documents in which they show that they qualify — legally, financially and emotionally — to adopt (McIlvenny and Raudaskoski, 2005a; Rygvold, Dalen and Sætersdal, 1999). They also meet with social workers for interviews, home assessments and discussions (cf. Hall and Slembrouck, 2001). Adoption is, moreover, a highly affective process for the applicants, and hence their decision-making to adopt is usually troubled in many respects. The process involves at least a ‘traversal’ (Lemke, 2002) from the presumed ‘normal’ course of biological parenthood to a set of practices and concerns they might not have been aware of at all (Daly, 1988; Farber et al., 2003; Throsby, 2002). Once occupied in the official institutional process, the prospective adoptive parents wait for the official decision about whether or not they qualify to adopt, and later, after selecting an approved adoption agency, they wait for the referral of a child from their selected ‘sending’ country (Telfer, 1998). In this complex process, the prospective adoptive parents engage in situated and mediated discussions with a range of actors, such as state and agency officials and other adopters, and their discursive nexus is thus effectively and voluntarily enlarged.