Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship Book

Dorow focuses specifically on the adoption of Chinese children by American couples/individuals, and works to show how certain narratives about adoption (we were made for each other, it was fate, etc.) obscure a host of transational processes and cultural/national ideas about gender, sex, and family that facilitate the adoption process, and that "make" rather than "find" both suitable adoptees and adopters. She investigates the various impossibilities that the process negotiates (adoption is at once a commercial enterprise and an expression of care, for instance), and ends by examining the methods parents use to navigate these various impossibilities, especially with regards to the problem of the child's racial/cultural difference. Though Dorow occasionally gets bogged down in the intricacy of her topic, resulting in vague, thick analysis, this is a nice overview of the players, factors, and strategies necessarily intertwine within and shape transnational adoption.