Is adoption an environmental threat? Domestication fantasies in Swedish adoption narratives

Abstract

In 2017 Ghassan Hage published Is Racism an Environmental Threat? The book’s question misleads. For Hage does not seek to show that the former leads to the latter, rather, he elucidates the logics of domination that are common to both. Hage states that ‘generalised domestication’ is the clearest optic through which to see both racism reproducing and revitalising itself and violence towards the environment. This is a way of being in the world that seeks to capture, tame, domesticate and control people and non-humans. It seeks to render others docile and to extract value from them. In so doing it leads to the creation of ‘homely spaces’. Following Hage, this article asks: Is adoption an environmental threat? We reflect on the role of international adoption in fantasies of Swedishness using Hage’s concept of domestication to explore the desire for ‘transracial’ bodies of adoptees in white national space. We argue that the adoptee body plays an important role in domesticating the Swedish nation. It is used to represent national myths of goodness, anti-racism and international solidarity; effectively bringing national projects into the home. This is linked to a broader desire for domestication that encompasses colonialism, slavery and species and environmental domination. While our focus is on Sweden – which has the highest per capita adoption rates in the world – we hope that our scholarship can inform adoption issues elsewhere, as well as contribute to sociological debates around extraction and domination in postcolonial contexts more broadly.