Fostering a Dark Side: The Role of Adopting-out in Contemporary Portrayals of Abandoned or Lost Children in Star Wars

Abstract

abstract: The following paper draws attention to a lesser-studied subject in Critical Adoption Studies: foster care. I argue that this lack of attentiveness towards systems of care and the experiences of fostered children mirror a societal trend in which traditional ideals of the biological family and more recent post-biological ideals in the form of adoptive practices have created an ideological construct in which foster subjectivities are seen as identity-less. That is, the two poles of "biological family" and "adoptive family" support a particular normativity centered on a nuclear family ideal which then excludes foster families/children from membership—stereotyping foster care as inherently incapable of providing children a full and meaningful life. Ultimately, this ideological system prefers adoption, presenting it as the solution to all experiences of fostered and orphaned children. And nowhere is this ideology more present than in our society's most revered cultural productions—where orphans and foster children are continuously disparaged or misrepresented. My target for analysis in this paper will be the monumental Star Wars franchise, and in particular its three main trilogies, The Skywalker Saga . I will show how its most recent trilogy (2015–2019) embodies the transition from a biocentric normativity excluding all nonbiological families, to a status quo which has normalized adoptive-family making. Alongside a traditional biological familial ideal, adoptive families are regarded as a conventional family , and are thus capable of offering otherwise down-and-out children with meaningful lives and full identities. As this new ideological structure (what I refer to below as the ideological dyad ) becomes more entrenched in our culture, little room is left for an alternative understanding for how the systemic issues associated with a system like foster care might be addressed.