After reading Lisa’s post on politicizing kids, Z of It’s the Thought that Counts sent in this screenshot of political birth announcements found on the sidebar at FiveThirtyEight.com, accouncing kids as “Our Littlest Democrat” or “Our Littlest Republican”:
Z points out the company “only offers Republican and Democrat announcements — no Libertarians, or Greens, or anything else.”
I went to the website where you can buy these announcements, and I noticed that they had a section for adoption announcements, so I clicked on it. Here is one of the three options:
The other two also showed infants, and one of them also included text about the child being born in China.
I’m a volunteer court advocate for children in foster care in Las Vegas, so my immediate reaction was annoyance that the announcements all focused on the adoption of infants, without a single image of an older child, which sort of normalizes one type of adoption (of newborns) while ignoring the other. But I also realized there were only three of them, so whatever. But then I googled “adoption announcements” and looked around. And there are adoption announcement websites that show older kids and sibling groups.
In my search I came across this website, where you can buy customized announcements that have images representing the country your internationally-adopted child is from, with your child’s photo next to it and the announcement text on the back. Here is the image for Brazil:
Colombia:
Honduras:
One of the images available for Russia:
Vietnam:
This really creeped me out–it’s like you’re sending a 1970s-era postcard that romanticizes the “traditional culture” of a country, and also, “Look what we got while we were here–a kid! Just like these!”
I think the idea is probably to celebrate or acknowledge an adopted child’s origins, but it comes off as a weird exoticization–linking your adopted child to people working in rice paddies or a dancing Russian doll. There is also the issue of how all these images depict the country as preciously pre-modern and rural (the girl carrying fruit on her head, the wagon pulled by oxen). On the one hand, none of the pictures have any clearly negative portrayals of these countries (the images all depict the home countries as very cute, really), but the message is also, implicitly, that these children, since they’ve been adopted by Americans, are being saved from lives in these cute but undeveloped nations, where they might end up working in rice paddies.
I have a couple of distant relations who have adopted children from other countries, and I’ve noticed that other family members often talk about this in terms of them “saving” these children from a presumably dismal life in those countries. So it’s not just about adopting a child you will love; it’s also about the White American as savior, giving a child not just a loving family but a modern American lifestyle. I’ve specifically heard this attached to ideas about how girls are supposedly treated in China (from family members who, to my knowledge, know nothing about China except what the average person can pick up on the news, and also don’t show much concern about gender inequality more broadly)–that if the little girl hadn’t been adopted, she’d have suffered a horrible life in China because they “treat girls like dirt” there, etc. And though cutesy, I think these images sort of play into this same discourse about other countries as backward (or, to use a more positive word, “traditional”) in comparison to our modern culture.
Anyway, thanks to Z. for pointing to one form of labeling of children (politically) that led me to another form–labeling kids as exotic and inherently “ethnic.”
UPDATE: In a comment, Elena brought my attention to one I didn’t post. This is one of the images available for India:
If you look closely, this appears to be a picture of colonial-era India, where a dark-skinned Indian is rowing a boat while two White men gaze at the people on shore. What a great sentiment to use to announce you’ve adopted a child from India!
Thanks, Elena!
8 Comments
Great post. I’m an adoptive mom and we belong to a social group for adoptive families. At our last get-together, one of the dads turned to me and said “I just thought ‘Wow, just think of the lives these kids would have had if we hadn’t done what we did”. He was clearly miffed that I didn’t express my immediate and enthusiastic agreement - I couldn’t figure out how to respond substantively, so I just sort of stared at him.
There’s worse. The Korean clipart features some cottages with thatched roofs. Seoul actually looks like this. South Korea has the highest penetration rate of broadband in the world, 90% of the households have DSL connection to the Internet, for goodness’ sake. They’re not Confucian country bumpkins.
Also, did you look at the graphics for India? One comes from colonial times, the other has the Taj Mahal. Which is a tomb. So cheery for an announcement ¬_¬;;
Regarding the political birth announcements, Gilbert and Sullivan were satirising the same attitude in Iolanthe (first produced 1882):
I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
I think it’s interesting that they included girls (or “gals”, anyway) when no women would have the vote in Britain for another 36 years.
I’ve never seen anything like the “adotion cards” and I’m frankly speechless.
I’m pretty speechless at the pictures as well. All I can think of is that newspapers are trying to use images that are no longer in copyright and so this was all they could find? Not that that justifies it…
As for the “saving” kids trope, my aunt and uncle adopted quite a few children from overseas (not mentioning the country because I’d rather not be too identifying). And they and other family members constantly mention the horrific life the kids would have had if they hadn’t been “rescued”. In their case, I can kind of see where they are coming from, in that two of the older girls were living in a prison with their mother, who had been jailed for murdering their father (in front of them), and were being used as prostitutes by the prison guards. One of the younger boys, in an orphanage, was only weeks away from death by starvation, and nearly died even after adoption and access to enough food.
On the other hand, all the kids are now being raised in a family that in my opinion does not have enough money to give them a standard of living usual in our country (they all share a room, they are expected to leave school at 16 and get a job where they pay the majority of the money to their parents to cover living expenses, etc). They have not had therapy to deal with their experiences, and several of the older kids have attempted suicide. The younger ones are being brought up as homeschooled creationists with no access to social situations outside their right-wing evangelical church.
I understand that objectively this is still far preferable to death and prostitution, but these things are happily glossed over and their current lives are romanticised. The situation is just so much more complex than the “rescuing” trope would lead someone to believe, even though these are the sort of international adoptions where there is clear objective evidence that the children would have been in great danger if left where they were.
Fascinating story, styleygeek, which sort of gets at some of the complexities of international adoption.
Just to be clear, these images were from a website selling “adoption announcement” cards, not from a newspaper. A lot of the adoption announcement card websites were kind of weird, but this one was by far the worst.
Sorry - shouldn’t skim-read. I thought they were pictures to accompany announcements in the “births” column of a newspaper.
an FYI you misspelled Colombia the country as both “Columbia” like the river, both in the post and in the tagging.
Thanks, Emily! My students would love that, as I am a stickler for spelling and typos in their written work.
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