Abstract
Drawing on bell hooks’ classic essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, this article discusses ethnic consumption fantasies of white Swedish international adopters. The article uses deconstructive narrative analysis techniques to explore racial desires concealed and revealed in adopters’ descriptions of international transracial adoptee bodies in published Swedish adoption texts. Taking the use of food race metaphors (for example, almond eyes, chocolate skin) as a “positive” means of describing race differences in a supposedly post-race, colour-blind discourse as a starting point, the article discusses how ethnic consumption desires are reflective of white adopter fantasies of becoming something more than white Swedish, and even a bit “Other” themselves. The symbolic consumption of both the adoptee and the first mother enable the adopter to imagine internalising a spirit of primordial Otherness, which can fundamentally change them and enable them to step outside the confines of Swedish whiteness. It also gives them a claim to a connection with the adoptee that goes beyond biology. While the desire to consume the adoptee-Other body is imagined as progressive and anti-racist, this paper argues that such fantasies are dependent on maintaining and reinforcing the status quo of the white supremacist patriarchal structures that enable international adoption in the first place.
Highlights
With over 60,000 foreign children adopted by Swedish parents since the 1960s, Sweden is recognised as having one of the highest rates of international adoptees per capita, and was instrumental in the establishment of the global adoption industry (Hübinette 2006; Yngvesson 2010)
The on-going promotion of adoption, and sensitivity towards critique may well be indicative of its central role in national myths of Swedish “goodness”, whereby international adoption is seen as being a pivotal part of the imagination of Sweden as the globally good nation
Swedish international adoption is generally transracial, and takes place in an extreme colour-blind discourse where race and racial physical differences are supposedly not seen or mentioned (Osanami Törngren et al 2018, p. 4)
Summary
With over 60,000 foreign children adopted by Swedish parents since the 1960s, Sweden is recognised as having one of the highest rates of international adoptees per capita, and was instrumental in the establishment of the global adoption industry (Hübinette 2006; Yngvesson 2010). These metaphors function as coded racial markers that, in signifying desire and affection, are accepted as being positive race language, safe to use in a colour-blind discourse. Addressing such food metaphors as a starting point, this article will explore white adopter desires and fantasies that descriptions of transracial adoptee bodies can conceal and reveal. Analysing examples from published adoptee and adopter narratives, and using bell hooks’ Eating the Other (hooks 1992) as a framework for investigating ethnic consumption desires, my overriding aim is to explore what food metaphors can reveal about the nature of Swedish international transracial adoption desire, and to discuss how this ties in to the bigger picture of white adopter desiring fantasies. The narratives honed in on from the texts are used as a means of accessing the wider adoption discourse, and the texts were chosen on the basis of their visibility and accessibility, as well as their nature of capturing a range of adoption voices, those of white Swedish adopters of children of colour, over a timeline of almost two decades
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