![]() By generating a seemingly neutral political and legal space, the documentary materials of adoption, as “relational objects”-those that specifically “open and control a path of relations toward others” ( Martín 2016, 439)-enable social workers, expectant mothers, and prospective adoptive parents to envision the past and future by reading one another through documents, with immense implications for resulting kinship formations. In advance of the adoptee’s arrival, it is the object of circulation and investment, key to the production of institutional identities and roles ( Carr 2009, 2010 Stoler 2009, 19). In the absence of more widely (and externally) recognizable biological substance and embodiment, adoption documents become the material that not only transforms kinship but also dictates and marks one’s progress (or lack thereof) along the way to parenthood.Īdoption paperwork mediates and facilitates processes of exchange, interaction, and imagination-the stuff of relationships (merging both substance and code of conduct, in a Schneiderian sense). ![]() Heimer (2006, 102), whose work investigates the role of paperwork in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), documents, especially those that materialize around the birth of an infant, “are particularly important in creating the sense of time and historicity that undergirds our understanding of how a human life unfolds.” Though anthropologists have typically examined documents through their bureaucratic role in mediating relationships between individuals and the state, the announcement of a paper pregnancy is not simply a comment on bureaucratic process, but instead signals the arrival of an anticipatory subjectivity: the formal transition to expectant parent, marked by paper-a sort of pre-kinning. The word pregnant itself is defined temporally, deriving from the Latin for “before birth.” According to Carol A. Through the documents, they become parents-to-be in an American cultural context in which pregnancy, birth, and child development are dominated by narratives of linear progress ( Layne 2003). Papers help make kin relations imaginable and then real, allowing the paper pregnant to position themselves temporally with respect to an expected transition and resulting kin relation. 6 The embrace of “paper pregnancies” among prospective American adopters-a document-based version of what Signe Howell (2006) has described as “symbolic pregnancy” among adoptive parents in Norway-highlights the complex role documents play in the interweaving of futurity and kinned subject formation within the adoption process. On the latter, a small printed definition of the concept appears below: “adoption in progress.” 5 At least one shop also offered a men’s T-shirt. 4īy 2018, a shop on the handmade retail outlet Etsy offered two versions of a ladies V-neck shirt designed for prospective adoptive mothers, announcing “Paper Preggers” and “Paper Pregs,” respectively. there will be a new baby in our house.” 3 The descriptor is often used by prospective adoptive mothers, but through the notion of “paper pregnancy,” in which documents become a kind of “prosthetic device,” fathers-to-be can also access a world from which adopters “have been excluded because of their limited biological role in reproduction” ( Sandelowski 1994, 203). 2Īnother prospective adoptive mother clarified: “What it really means is that I have this piece of paper that says I am expecting a baby. This stage can induce some of the same symptoms of pregnancy (nausea, dizziness, etc.), such as the vast quantity of documents needed to be assembled in order to create an adoption dossier. The paperwork stage can be equated with the first trimester of pregnancy, except it usually lasts several months more than that. The phrase paper pregnant is commonly used by prospective adopters in the United States to describe “the stage in which a person or couple receives their official acceptance of their application for adopting a child, prior to the formal adoption.” 1 Using the process-oriented language of a developmental “stage” with an uncertain temporal duration, one adoptive mother and blogger wrote in 2010, “Who you are in these pieces of paper”: Imagining Future Kinship through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States
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