Little Strangers: International Adoption and American Kinship. A Review Essay

Abstract

In Victorian England, the phrase “little stranger” was used to refer to the unborn child one had not yet met. Though it has fallen out of use today, the expression is not inapt for describing the children who enter new families, new ethnic or cultural identities, new social classes, and new nations via international adoption. Over time, and through a series of social practices designed both to “kin” the child and parents, siblings, and other relatives and to explain the child's presence to an inquisitive public, the “little stranger” comes to be more or less incorporated and acculturated: less strange, more familiar. Because international adoption makes those processes visible through its very unfamiliarity and its recourse to legal and cultural strategies, it has become a centerpiece of recent writing on kinship, reproduction, and childhood (Yngvesson 2010; Marre and Briggs 2009; Kim 2010; Wade 2007; Howell 2006; Marre and Bestard 2004; Dorow 2006; Bowie 2004; Volkman 2005; Howell 2009; Leinaweaver and Seligmann 2009; Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Briggs 2012).