Capturing Kinship: Visualizing the History of Chinese Adoption in Canada

Abstract

The Chinese government enacted the one-child policy during the late 1970s and early 1980s to curb the growth of the country’s swelling population. This extreme form of family planning marked the beginning of a radical social experiment that profoundly affected Canada’s social and familial landscape. In the forty years since China instituted its one-child policy, Western media remains obsessed with narratives about saving girls from China’s draconian state policies. As such, my MA research asks what claims images of needy children have made on Canadian audiences, and to what degree their meanings and interpretations were contoured by broader processes and ideologies. Special attention is paid to how the presence and visibility of the female Chinese adoptee have altered notions of Chinese Canadian identity, international humanitarianism, and interracial kinship, through a visual discursive analysis of the images that have saturated our national retina and animated the practice of Chinese adoption in Canada. I will demonstrate how visual mediums are historically rooted communication structures that act as alternative sites of ideological production and exchange, whereby constructions of needy children are transformed through a complex matrix of image-making and image-consuming practices. In this way, the visual representation of the Chinese adoptee becomes an opening through which to investigate both the historical record of intercountry adoption in Canada and the timeless power of symbolic children. Exploring Chinese adoption in Canada at the intersection of transnational adoption scholarship, visual discourse analysis, and adoptee subjectivities is a novel way of grappling with the history of intercountry adoption. In other words, surveying the visual landscape of adoption and its reciprocal constitutions is a way of getting at the public debates Chinese adoption has engendered, the actions and interests of private actors, and the collective memories and mythologies held by adoptees.