The Politics of Adoption ─ Gender and the Making of French Citizenship

In May 2013, after months of controversy, France legalized same-sex marriage andadoption by homosexual couples. Obstacles to adoption and parenting equality remain, however -- manyof them in the form of cultural and political norms reflected and expressed in French adoptionpolicies. In The Politics of Adoption, Bruno Perreau describes the evolution ofthese policies. In the past thirty years, Perreau explains, political and intellectual life inFrance have been dominated by debates over how to preserve "Frenchness," and these debateshave driven policy making. Adoption policies, he argues, link adoption to citizenship, reflectingand enforcing the postcolonial state's notions of parenthood, gender, and Frenchness. Afterreviewing the complex history of adoption, Perreau examines French political debates over adoption,noting, among other things, that intercountry adoptions stirred far less controversy than thedifference between the sexes in an adopting couple. He also discusses judicial action on adoption;child welfare agencies as gatekeepers to parenthood (as defined by experts); the approval processfrom the viewpoints of social workers and applicants; and adoption's link to citizenship, and itsuse as a metaphor for belonging. Adopting a Foucaultian perspective, Perreau calls the biopoliticsof adoption "pastoral": it manages the individual for the good of the collective"flock"; it considers itself outside politics; and it considers not so much the realbehavior of individuals as an allegorical representation of them. His argument sheds new light onAmerican debates on bioethics, identity, and citizenship.

Bruno Perreau is Associate Professor of French Studies at MIT, Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University's Center for European Studies, and Research Associate at Jesus College at the University of Cambridge.