Abstract
In 2017 Ghassan Hage published Is Racism an Environmental Threat? The book’s question misleads. For Hage does not seek to show that the former leads to the latter, rather, he elucidates the logics of domination that are common to both. Hage states that ‘generalised domestication’ is the clearest optic through which to see both racism reproducing and revitalising itself and violence towards the environment. This is a way of being in the world that seeks to capture, tame, domesticate and control people and non-humans. It seeks to render others docile and to extract value from them. In so doing it leads to the creation of ‘homely spaces’. Following Hage, this article asks: Is adoption an environmental threat? We reflect on the role of international adoption in fantasies of Swedishness using Hage’s concept of domestication to explore the desire for ‘transracial’ bodies of adoptees in white national space. We argue that the adoptee body plays an important role in domesticating the Swedish nation. It is used to represent national myths of goodness, anti-racism and international solidarity; effectively bringing national projects into the home. This is linked to a broader desire for domestication that encompasses colonialism, slavery and species and environmental domination. While our focus is on Sweden – which has the highest per capita adoption rates in the world – we hope that our scholarship can inform adoption issues elsewhere, as well as contribute to sociological debates around extraction and domination in postcolonial contexts more broadly.
Introduction
People’s desire to have children does not need to be questioned, but HOW we have children today is something we have to talk about, when the most humane and climate-friendly thing to do is to take care of existing children in need of parents. The norm for what is one’s ‘own’ child must change, and adoption can no longer be seen as a last resort.
Swedish celebrity blogger, radio presenter and environmentalist Gurgîn Bakircioglu declared adoption to be a solution to the environmental crisis, a humane and climate-friendly way of having children in a world that is suffering from the ‘over-production of humans’. In an interview with Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, he went on to declare that he planned to sterilise himself for the planet’s sake, as children are not environmentally friendly. However, as a humanist, he said he would adopt in the future (Bakircioglu, 2019; Kvarnsmyr, 2019).
Bakircioglu’s statement joins a growing discourse around the impacts of population growth on the climate (Bailey, 2019; Schneider-Mayerson & Ling, 2020), and corresponds with research that claims that having one less child can reduce personal CO2 emissions in developed countries by an average of 58.6 tonnes per year (Wynes & Nicholas, 2017). Analysts at Morgan Stanley reported that the ‘movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline’ (Shead, 2021). There are ethical questions arising from such claims, but this article’s primary concern is with the disturbing trend that connects adoption with environmentalism. This connection is troubling, given the adoption industry’s history of exploitation, corruption and racism (Wyver, 2021b). There is a danger that this narrative could be used to justify the continuation of international adoption, at a time when there is an increasing understanding of its ethical problems and evidence that the global multi-million dollar adoption industry is in terminal decline (Selman, 2015).
In this article, Bakircioglu’s blog post serves as the entry point to discuss whether adoption should be seen as a problem, rather than as an environmental solution. Building on Ghassan Hage’s work Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017), we explore the links between adoption, racism and environmental exploitation and destruction.
We draw upon a range of public sources that constitute the Swedish discourse on adoption: celebrity blogs, party political advertisements, perennially popular TV sketches and well-known books of collected interviews with adoptees and their adoptive parents. We have chosen them as they are both influential and mainstream, being visible and accessible to most Swedes. These materials either celebrate adoption or view it benignly. The powerful pro-adoption discourse, combined with the centrality of adopters in knowledge production, acts to silence the devastating impacts of adoption on adoptees and first families, by restricting critical voices and research (Wyver, 2021a). We therefore supplement this with the broader literature on critical adoption studies and postcolonial theory. While it can be legitimately argued that any scholarly approach is somewhat subjective and selective, we note that the Swedish state now acknowledges that there is a case to be answered concerning widespread malpractice and corruption in international adoption (Bergsten, 2021). The Korean state has instituted a truth and reconciliation commission into corrupt and illegal adoptions to 11 different countries, Sweden included (Korea Times, 2022). Further, the Chilean state is undertaking a criminal investigation into child trafficking in adoptions to Sweden (Nelson, 2021).
We analyse how international adoption, and more specifically the bodies of international adoptees, are used in national domestication projects that create homely spaces through systems of destruction, extraction and domination (Hage, 2017, p. 91). Domestication is a violence that is imagined as its opposite, as a ‘gentle and cuddly’ homeliness (2017, p. 92). Orthodox definitions of domestication concern human–animal relations, whereas Hage’s generalised domestication is expanded to include the natural world and (racist) human–human relations. However, the consecutive steps featured in conventional definitions remain important to Hage’s theory; named as capture, taming, domesticating and ongoing control. Sándor Bökönyi’s definition illustrates this process: ‘The essence of domestication is the capture and taming by man of animals of a species with particular behavioral characteristics, their removal from their natural living area and breeding community, and the maintenance under controlled breeding conditions for mutual benefits’ (cited in Hage, 2017, p. 88).
We use the terms ‘adoption’ and ‘adoptee’ to indicate international transracial adoption/adoptees unless otherwise stated, in the understanding that Swedish international adoption is generally transracial: children of colour are raised by white adoptive parents. Sweden is our focus given the prevalence of adoption here and its national identity, shared internationally, which encompasses myths of virtuous whiteness, anti-racism and environmentalism. Adoption is core to this image. While international adoption is increasingly being understood as a corrupt and racist trade in the bodies of children of colour, it remains celebrated here. With approximately 60,000 international adoptees, Sweden has the highest per capita adoption rates in the world, and white adoptive parents are prominent in media, entertainment, politics and academia (Yngvesson, 2010). The country is home to the world’s second largest adoption agency (Adoptionscentrum), and as a pioneer in the international adoption industry it has helped shape European adoption laws. Primarily though, Sweden’s powerful pro-adoption discourse stems from adoption’s central role in Swedish national identities and myths of being a fundamentally ‘good’ nation that stands outside European histories of colonialism and racism (Gondouin, 2012). Adoption symbolises anti-racist ‘colour-blind’ love and global solidarity, indicating the irrelevance of race and biological differences in Sweden. However, lived experiences of adoptees indicate otherwise. They are vastly over-represented in suicide rates and most measures of ‘social maladjustment’ (Hjern et al., 2002). They are discriminated against in the labour market (Rooth, 2002), and lead lives shaped by sustained and systemic racism (Hübinette & Tigervall, 2009).
We do not claim to speak on adoptees’ behalf, nor do we seek to question the desires of those choosing to adopt. We are not interested in interrogating the motives behind individuals’ actions or the authenticity of their feelings. Our critical focus is at the structural level: we offer a critique of social systems and their outcomes. While we centre Swedish international transracial adoption, we hope that our scholarship can inform adoption issues elsewhere, as well as contribute to sociological debates around extraction and control in postcolonial contexts more broadly 1 since the common theme of domination is linked to the historical rise and advancement of capitalism, a history that is associated with an ongoing trade in bodies, racism and white power.
Is racism an environmental threat?
Hage (2017, p. 3) argues that racial crises, such as Islamophobia, and the ecological crisis do not simply influence one another, they are effectively the same crisis. This stems from the way that the world is inhabited through systems that simultaneously desire and perform both racial and environmental domination. Hage’s argument is not concerned with racism’s direct impacts on the environment. His causality is more fundamental: racism is an environmental threat as racism ‘reinforces and reproduces the dominance of the basic social structures that are behind the generation of the environmental crisis – which are the structures behind its own generation’ (2017, pp. 14–15).
While connections can be seen between systems of domination through othering and governmentality, and through capitalist colonial exploitation of people and resources, Hage finds that generalised domestication (which can include the above) is the clearest optic through which to see racism continually reproducing and revitalising itself and violence towards the environment (including speciesism) (2017, pp. 15–16). Our analysis utilises Hage’s theory of generalised domestication, which is a way of being in the world that seeks to control, dominate and extract value from it (2017, p. 87). It is both the desire to, and means of, creating a homely space, which is dependent on power and manipulation.
The idea of domination providing mutual benefits is a central feature of generalised domestication. Relationships such as employer and worker; coloniser and colonised; and adopter and adoptee, are all imagined as being beneficial for both parties (2017, p. 91). Hage concedes that some of these dominating relationships are actually experienced as being mutually beneficial (2017, p. 91). Such occurs in many narratives about adoption. Imagined (and sometimes real) mutual benefits conceal the violence of domestication, and are a reminder that domestication is a system of domination that appears to be a relationship of non-domination: its aim is to extract value from domesticated things, environmental, animal or human, and deliver this value in a homely way (2017, p. 93).
Crucially, not all bodies are domesticatable. Some can be captured, tamed, domesticated and controlled. Others are ungovernable. Bodies that are ungovernable are potentially exterminable. The ungovernable is something that we desire to govern fully, but are repeatedly unable to tame (2017, p. 77). The repetitive nature of the failure to domesticate is significant, implying that the ungovernable is something which is within our sphere of imagined governance that we have tried and failed to control. For instance, our sphere of governance could be national white space, the ungovernable could be the Muslim Other. This Other stimulates great fear within the domesticator, exposing their vulnerability and the limitations of their power (2017, p. 81). This can lead to the justification of extermination. In the Swedish context this can be observed in the stark discursive distinction between domesticatable adoptee and ungovernable ‘immigrant’ bodies, which we explore further below.
Domesticating adoptees into the Swedish nation
Adoption follows the classic domestication pattern of capture, taming, domestication and continued domination that Hage outlines (2017, p. 88), a pattern that reflects the trope of adoption as rescue (Briggs, 2003). In adoptee and adopter narratives there are common themes of adoptees suffering pre-adoption (posited as adoption’s justification), before being captured by the adoption industry. The suffering pre- and immediately post-adoption is followed by narratives of the caring actions of adopters (taming), before the adoptee becomes fully Swedish, as Swedish as anybody else – or even more Swedish than anybody else: domesticated. Yet the adoptee is kept in a continued state of being dominated. However Swedish they become, they will never be white. Their hypervisibility in white space and the racism they face prevents them from fully belonging in the white nation (Hübinette & Tigervall, 2009).
When considering the initial ‘capture’ of the adoptee, it should be noted that the demand for adoptees exceeds the supply of available adoptable bodies. Kathryn Joyce connects the demand-driven nature of the adoption industry to the phenomenon of ‘the orphan myth’, the widely shared fantasy that the non-white, non-Western world is overflowing with piteous orphans living in complete isolation, awaiting rescue by a ‘loving family’ (2013, p. 132). She argues that UNICEF’s definition of an orphan as a person under 18 who has lost one or both parents produces a distorted image of the number of orphaned and adoptable children. It conceals the fact that many ‘orphans’ could be being raised by one parent, grandparents, other family members, local communities, or that they could be older children who are above adoptable age (2013, p. 132).
The discrepancy between the numbers of children who cannot be looked after by their families and communities and the demand for foreign children of colour by white parents and would-be parents in the West leads to mass scale child theft and corruption at the supply end. Adoptees’ narratives of searching for their roots commonly mention finding falsified paperwork and altered backgrounds. Through root-searches, DNA testing and collaboration with other adoptees and adoptee rights groups, many adoptees find that they have been stolen from their parents, or had parents tricked or coerced into relinquishing them (see, for example, chileadoption.se). As almost every major sending country has been affected by adoption scandals, it can be claimed that corruption and trafficking are central and necessary to the adoption industry, and should be treated as a normal part of industry practice rather than as occasional aberrations (Joyce, 2013).
Kathryn Joyce (2013) identifies the employment of child finders in Ethiopia and other African adoption supply countries who are paid to remove children from vulnerable parents. Adoption agencies entice African parents with opportunities to send their children to America and Europe for education, then tricking them into signing legal documents that permanently relinquish their children – who then have their names and backgrounds changed and who are adopted by white families. (Lemma, 2013). Baby farms, where children are literally bred for the international adoption market, have operated extensively in Nigeria and Sri Lanka (Pathirana, 2021). In Sweden it has recently been revealed that thousands of children adopted from Chile in the 1980s were stolen from their parents. They were often told that their children had died at birth (Nelson, 2021).
The violence of the capture of adoptees is repackaged as ‘rescue’ at the demand end. As a narrative of colour-blind love and saving children’s lives, the rescue trope is powerful. Indeed, while Swedish adoption has gone through several discursive trends, the rescue narrative remains intact. For example, Gunilla Andersson, a key early actor in Swedish international adoption, explained that her desire to adopt an Indian child began while reading her mother’s Sunday School magazines from the 1910s–1920s. She became fixated with one particular image:
That . . . was a picture of an angel holding the hand of a small child going over a small bridge over a cliff, and this picture of children needing someone helping them not to fall down on the cliffs – this I kept in my mind. When I grew up and read in the newspapers and when television came and showed pictures of children sitting in the orphanages of the world, I said to my husband-to-be that ‘when we marry, I’d like to adopt’. (Andersson in Yngvesson, 2010, p. 15)
The taming and domestication of the adoptee is best seen in removal of first language, erasure of family background, changing of nationality and name. Renaming is a key feature of the domestication of adoptees into Swedishness, with the generation of a ‘white’ Swedish name normal practice. Robert Young describes the renaming of sites in colonial ‘civilising’ projects as an act of power and appropriation, that seeks to desacralise and dominate (2003, p. 141). The same occurs in relation to renaming adoptees, which disregards the possibility that the adoptee’s original name could be auspicious or chosen for ancestral or religious reasons. It also eradicates the significance of the adoptee’s first language, ethnic and national identity and culture. As an act of dominating and claiming ownership, the new name marks a definite end of the adoptee’s belonging to its mother, family, community or nation, and cements its belonging to their adoptive parents and to Sweden.
The Swedish name combined with a non-white appearance renders the adoptee marked clearly as a desirable and domesticated body: it serves to explain and justify the presence of the adoptee’s non-white body in white Swedish space. Yet in adoptee narratives the perceived mismatch between name and body also leads to heightened visibility, and situations where the adoptee is interrogated about their background by strangers who are surprised and intrigued by Swedish-named people of colour (Hübinette & Tigervall, 2009)
In Mary Juusela’s book of interviews with adoptees and adoptive parents (2010), the adoptive father of Gunnar, a 28-year-old Korean adoptee, explains the decision to remove and replace his name, Young-Min, when he came to Sweden: ‘He already looked different and if we could give him a more Swedish name so that he could be as normal as possible we would do it’ (2010, p. 198).
The claim that Gunnar looked ‘different’ reaffirms the shared belief that Swedishness equals whiteness, marking his Korean appearance as abnormal. His domestication into Swedishness is aided through his renaming – but it is not a complete assimilation: he can only ever be ‘as normal as possible’.
Background information on adoptees is usually altered or concealed, through ‘legal’ as well as illegal practices. In Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s (2019) autobiographic work, Palimpsest, she presents her adoption papers in chronological order, showing how she changes from being a child with an accurate date, time and place of birth and two named parents, to officially becoming an orphan with parents ‘unknown’ and birth details ‘presumptive’ (2019, p. 37).
Such erasure – through a legal process that would have been carried out on most Korean adoptees – is part of the domestication process of capture. Once parents are officially deleted from existence, the child becomes ‘adoptable’, and legally available to prospective Swedish parents. This is also an act of taming. The adoptee’s problematised foreign past is erased, preparing it to be shaped into its desired role in Swedishness. Finally, it enables ongoing domination. Altering and falsifying documents makes family searches, connecting with the adoptee’s past, and uncovering and challenging illegalities and corruption in the adoption extremely difficult.
Some adoptees self-describe as ‘100% Swedish’, or are called such by their adoptive families. These are seen as the ultimate success stories of domestication by adoption, proof that the colour-blind post-race Swedish society can love and assimilate bodies that do not look like theirs. Gunnar’s mother, for example, states, ‘searching for his origins is not something that interests Gunnar. He is Swedish and belongs to Sweden and beyond that he does not need to know anything else’ (Juusela, 2010, p. 199). In the same collection of interviews Christoffer, an Indian adoptee, describes himself as ‘Absolutely 100% Swedish in all regards’ and says, ‘my home is Sweden and my parents are Mum and Dad. There is nothing else’ (2010, p. 136). Sarita, also adopted from India, declares, ‘I am Swedish full stop! There are no ties or roots to India’ (2010, p. 96).
While such statements may be celebrated as seamless assimilation into Swedishness, they only give the adoptee access to a circumscribed version of it. Should we reverse the roles in these narratives, replacing the adoptee voice with a white Swedish one, the declaration ‘I am 100% Swedish’ no longer articulates a success story in a progressive anti-racist society, but speaks to small-minded xenophobic nationalism (Wyver, 2021a, p. 143). Yet in terms of the domestication project, it symbolises the optimal domesticated body: captured, tamed and trained into Swedishness, in a process seen as loving, not violent.
Domesticating the Swedish nation through the adoptee
The adoptee and the adoptive family signify a homely national space. By representing a national family transcending blood, biology and borders its use value is its unique ability to signify a homely white national space while simultaneously symbolising a national space that is not exclusively white. This is performed through its role in fantasies of colour-blindness, sentiments that race does not matter. But for this role to work, the adoptee has to be racially different, highly visible, identifiable.
Post World War II, Sweden has nurtured a national self-image as a fundamentally good nation: home of equality and human rights, a neutral actor in global affairs. It is regarded, at home and abroad, as a ‘moral superpower’ (McEachrane, 2021). Though, more accurately, it is seen as the nation of white goodness, where caring for people of colour through comparatively generous refugee policies, anti-racism activities, international adoption and overseas aid helps define white Swedish national characteristics. However, this national virtuous image has been questioned in recent years, with the rise of the far right (particularly the right-wing populist party Sverigedemokraterna [SD], who have roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement), and widespread Islamophobia. National goodness myths have also been undermined by increased voices of people of colour, including transracial adoptees, bearing witness to experiences of systemic racism and questioning the official commitment to a colour-blind discourse. Still, the country continues to top tables of ‘goodness’ (The Good Country Index, 2022), and it remains one of the world’s largest donators of development aid (McEachrane, 2021). Sweden is also seen as the home of environmental good whiteness, with Greta Thunberg the global face of the fight against the climate crisis.
The myth of Swedish Exceptionalism is central to the belief in Swedish good whiteness. In reality Sweden’s history of racism is extensive. It was a key player in the European scramble for colonies. It had its own African and Indian companies, and a colony in the Caribbean, St Barthélemy, whose port was a central node in the slave trade. Sweden was also the global pioneer in race science, home to the world’s first centre for race biology research. Since Linnaeus’s early categorisations of humans into colour-based types, the study of race science and its practical application through eugenics programmes were regarded as an essentially Swedish concern (Broberg & Tydén, 1996, p. 81). Between the 1930s and 1970s Sweden enthusiastically turned its race science traditions onto its population, carrying out eugenicist social reforms that included an extensive sterilisation programme aimed at ridding society of unwanted groups (in particular, the Tattare, seen as a mix of white Swedish and Gypsy or Roma; people with physical disabilities; and the ‘mentally unstable’ – a category which included ‘promiscuous women’). This aimed to protect and strengthen the purity of the white Swedish race (McEachrane, 2018).
The post-war years saw a reimagining of Swedish society, and a total change in the nation’s attitude towards race. Sweden was closely involved in formulating the UNESCO Statement on Race (1950), which dismissed race as a biological concept (Broberg & Tydén, 1996, pp. 130–131). It led to Sweden’s official repudiation of race as a concept. From the 1960s to early 2000s Sweden shifted from being seen as the world leader in eugenics and race science, the ‘whitest of white’ nations, to being framed as an anti-racist, egalitarian, anti-colonial nation where race did not exist. Post-race Sweden was seen as the Third World’s benefactor, the only Western nation in solidarity with global decolonial movements (McEachrane, 2018).
In this reformed society, international adoption had the potential to bring the new-found national identity of global solidarity, anti-racism and colour-blind love into the domestic sphere (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014). The adoptive family became a site of ‘national reproduction’, reshaping the national body. The image of the body of the international transracial adoptee – and significantly the white Swedes around the body – would signify this new Sweden. Yngvesson argues that there was an explicit commitment to the international adoption project as a way of producing a multicultural nation (2012, p. 332). Such commitment is evident in early discussions on the adoption programme, where supporters saw it as introducing a safe version of multiculturalism into the country, arguing that the highly visible presence of transracial adoptees’ bodies would be a means of educating white Swedes about non-white bodies, showing that they were not something to be afraid of. A report by Save the Children [Rädda barnen] in 1963 included the argument that international adoption could provide Swedish citizens with ‘greater knowledge about and understanding of foreign nations; [and] potentially, over time, less repudiation of people whose appearance differs sharply from that of Scandinavians’ (Adoption av utländska barn, 1967, p. 16).
This exemplifies the use value of the adoptee in the Swedish national domestication project. The presence of the adoptee body, visibly different but domesticated into an almost sameness, could turn a cruel, racist society that invented race science and sterilised undesirable sections of society in an effort to protect race purity, into a caring egalitarian good home. It could welcome foreign bodies into its family and spread its virtues and homeliness abroad. The adoptee’s body, by its very presence, could cure Swedes’ racism. Furthermore, it could connect white Swedish families to the ‘Third World’ and to histories of racist oppression, without being implicated as a perpetrator or aggressor (Wyver, 2021a, p. 18).
However, the use of the adoptee in domesticating the Swedish nation, creating a good homely space, was dependent on the violent racism of adoption – the barely imaginable violence of permanently removing children from their mothers and families, transporting them to a country where no one looked like them, and where they lost their names, languages and cultures.
The domesticated and the ungovernable
Not all bodies can be domesticated into the nation through capture and taming: there are also ungovernable Others. In the Swedish context, adoptees are the ideal domesticatable bodies, ‘immigrants’ are the ungovernable. In Swedish colour-blind discourse, race and visible differences are unspoken, supposedly unseen. This is state-sanctioned. Keeping ethnicity data is illegal. The word ‘race’ has been removed from national legislation. Consequently, bodies of colour tend to be called ‘immigrants’, irrespective of actual immigration status. They represent the opposite of white Swedes. ‘Immigrant’ denotes the racial other, while ‘Swede’ is exclusively used to mean white Swede (Lundström, 2017, p. 80).
Although 17% of Swedes are born abroad, and 30% have a foreign background, Lundström notes there is a ‘lingering national and international perception that the country is still relatively homogenous compared to other Western countries’ (2017, p. 80). In the Swedish national imagination, migration is either associated with desperate poverty, large numbers and economic cost; or with vulnerability, racism and a need for help. The concept of ‘the immigrant’ has a focus on the bodies of either refugees or ‘EU Migrants’, a euphemism for beggars, usually of Romanian and/or Roma origin (again, regardless of immigration status) (Lundström, 2017, p. 80).
Generally, the immigrant is seen as undesirable, something that good white Sweden has tried and failed to domesticate. Decades of comparatively generous refugee policies combined with a strong state welfare system have led many Swedes to believe that despite the Swedish state – and the people’s – best efforts, they have rejected Swedishness. The national myth of being an anti-racist, post-race nation means that racism as the causal factor of ongoing inequalities between ‘immigrants’ and Swedes is unthinkable for many. Housing immigrants in out-of-town suburbs, compounded by white flight, renders Sweden one of the most physically segregated countries (Pred, 2000). This segregation leads to imagined ‘no go zones’ for white Swedes: places within their sphere of governance where they are afraid to go, because of the prominence of non-white bodies, and associated assumptions of crime and violence.
The ungovernable immigrant is positioned in sharp contrast to the domesticable adoptee. Arguably the most telling example of this is found in political campaign adverts by SD, the far right populists who are currently Sweden’s second biggest political party. Their propaganda film for the 2010 election unashamedly reflected their racist, anti-immigration ideology. Set in a gloomy public office building, it tells the story of a pursuit for the state budget. It starts by showing officials sitting at desks, counting out in cash the welfare budget to be divided between immigrants and pensioners. A bizarre race ensues, where an old white woman inches towards an emergency brake with the label ‘pensioners’. We understand that pulling the brake will give her access to her welfare benefit. As she nears the brake a group of women in full burkas appear from out of the darkness. Wielding prams like weapons, they are faceless, countless and relentless. They surge past the old woman to another emergency brake labelled ‘immigrant’. The film ends with a final image of hands desperately grasping for each brake (Sverigedemokraterna, 2010).
Many viewers regarded the advert as racist. Multiple complaints led to its banning by the main commercial TV channel, TV4 (Modin, 2010). Despite this, 2010 was SD’s breakthrough year. They entered parliament for the first time, winning 5.7% of the vote (Hellström, 2016, p. 1). Their troubling history as a neo-Nazi group, and their outspoken extreme right policies meant that mainstream media, the general public and other political parties (who initially refused to work with them) continued to see them as ‘evil’ (Hellström, 2016, p. 6).
Following 2010’s success, SD sought to expand their vote beyond their traditional support base, and break into the Swedish mainstream. Their 2014 election campaign demonstrates this. While their policies and ideology remained deeply racist, they were repackaged to appeal to the average white Swede (Hellström, 2016, p. 39). This time, their campaign film, Låt er inte tystas [Don’t let yourselves be silenced], featured adoptees rather than immigrants (Sverigedemokraterna, 2014).
The intimidating office setting was replaced by sunlight and fresh air. The advert begins with a South Asian man and East Asian woman walking down a country lane, dressed in expensive looking white and pastel clothes. ‘Racism is sickening’, the man says. ‘It has caused some of the worst crimes in history.’ The camera moves to a close-up of their faces:
Racism must never be accepted.
Protecting our country, our culture, our history. It’s not racism. Nor is the will to stop honour violence, begging and human trafficking racism. It is caring and humanitarian.
The camera cuts back to their walk, and we see that a third figure has joined them. In between the couple, dressed in crisp white chinos and a black blazer is Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of SD.
Do not let the conversation and debate be silenced by cowardly leaders and thought police who abuse the word [racism].
Dare to stand up against racism.
And dare to stand up for our Sweden. For real.
The film’s effectiveness rests on the white Swedish audience recognising the two people of colour as adoptees: the point being that they are desirable, and do not count as the frightening immigrants that are alluded to when speaking of ‘honour crimes, begging and human trafficking’. They are adoptees, and SD members. The man is adopted from Sri Lanka, the woman from Korea. With adoption central to Swedish life, the audience would be expected to identify them as being of ethnicities associated with adoption rather than refugees. Their ‘perfect’ Swedish accents are also linked to the Swedish whiteness that adoptees are the only people of colour close to: an acknowledgement that while SD and its supporters may be anti-immigrant and Islamophobic, adoptees are to be treated differently, almost as white Swedes. Their expensive looking clothes are middle class markers, which adoptees rather than immigrants are likely to belong to, with Swedish society known for racialised economic segregation (Pred, 2000). Finally, the rural scene could be home to individual adoptees living in affluent white space, as opposed to the outer city suburbs associated with immigrants.
In terms of domestication, the key point is that adoptee bodies are recognisable as desirable, individual exceptions to racism. As long as they are isolated and behave as close to white Swedishness as possible, they are acceptable even to a racist political party. Comparing the adverts illuminates the clear distinction between the two types of body. The immigrant women in the first are an uncountable mass. The countable/uncountable distinction between immigrants and adoptees represents what Hage describes as numerical racism. He uses rabbits to exemplify this. A rabbit in one’s garden could be ‘cute’, and in terms of domestication, harmless or even useful (as it is emotionally pleasing). Ten rabbits appearing would be classified as ‘pests’. The inclusive attitudes aroused when seeing one rabbit quickly turn to exterminating impulses (2017, p. 105). Similarly, adoptees as individuals tend to be accepted, but when they identify with – or are seen as being – immigrants, they become part of an undesired threat.
The fact that the immigrant women are chasing welfare payments, and with prams, indicates that the benevolent Swedish state, representing the nation, has tried its best to take care of them, providing them with homes, healthcare and incomes. Yet their absolute foreignness, their traditional clothes, their supposedly non-Swedish behaviour, shows that hospitality has been abused and domestication has failed.
The adoptees, however, dressed like Jimmie Åkesson, sounding like Jimmie Åkesson and thinking like Jimmie Åkesson, demonstrate that they have not just been domesticated into Swedishness, but that their domestication has been so successful that they can exemplify the most extreme echelons of Swedish nationalism.
Yet the domesticated adoptees stand out from the white Swedes that they are supposed to mimic: they need to be placed in whiteness, as isolated, individual bodies rather than as a collective group. They need Åkesson’s whiteness to justify their presence. In traditional definitions of domestication, the fact that the reproduction of domesticated bodies is is controlled is a significant point when it comes to the analysis of the SD films. The faceless bodies of the women in the 2010 film are de-feminised and de-sexualised by their fully covered bodies in the darkness, by their uncountable huddle, by the focus on their grappling for money. Yet their tank-like prams symbolise the fear of mass non-Western, non-white reproduction. The full prams contrast strikingly with the white pensioner’s skeletal walking frame, signifying the fear of the pure white Swedish race dying out. This fear of degeneration was the driving force behind Sweden’s extensive eugenics programme discussed above (Broberg & Tydén, 1996); but it is also chillingly echoed in Bakircioglu’s blog post: the over-production of humans, the need for sterilisation (2019).
The adoptees in the 2014 advert pose no such threat. With the clear division between their genders, they are not de-sexualised like the immigrant women in 2010, though we might argue that the male adoptee’s pastel outfit and small stature emasculate him when Jimmie Åkesson arrives on the scene, towering protectively over him. Yet there is nothing to signify reproduction, motherhood or fatherhood. As isolated bodies of colour in white space, their ethnic difference may be noticeable, but there is little danger of them reproducing this ethnicity. The expectation would be for them to have white Swedish partners. Furthermore, it could be argued that adoptee bodies do not symbolise potential reproduction, or parenthood at all, as adoptees are usually imagined as perpetual children. This is captured in the tendency to refer to adult adoptees, regardless of age, marital or parental status, as adoptivbarn: adopted children (Walton, 2012).
While the adoptee is accepted as the domesticated Other in white Swedish society, and the immigrant represents the ungovernable, when adoptees’ bodies are placed out of context, they are no longer immediately recognised as something domesticated. Once the adoptee stops being an isolated, recognisable body of visible difference (but cultural and linguistic sameness) in white space, they may be mistaken for an immigrant – their discursive opposite. The fear of this is reiterated throughout adoptee narratives. For example, in Anna von Melen’s 1998 collection of interviews with adult adoptees, being ‘misread’ as an immigrant was a regular annoyance for her informants. Some express the frustration this causes:
The immigrant label makes me very angry. It makes me really, really angry that in surveys I am classified as an immigrant. That makes me feel offended. And what makes me even angrier is that my children will be classified as second generation immigrants. That disturbs me immensely. (Hanna, adopted from India, in von Melen, 1998, p. 107)
Hanna’s statement reflects the negative perception of immigrants, which may explain the passionate need many adoptees and adopters have to keep adoptees separate from immigrant definitions – even though they are immigrants. This strong divide is evident throughout Swedish adoption literature: from Adoptionscentrum former president Madeleine Kats declaring in 1975 that ‘[internationally] adopted children are not immigrant children’ (1975, cited in Yngvesson, 2010, p. 97), to international adoptees expressing their anger that they are ‘mistaken’ for immigrants (von Melen, 1998, p. 107) and adoptive parents insisting that their children are nothing other than ‘100% Swedish’ (Juusela, 2010, p. 199).
Adoptee narratives frequently blame the presence of immigrants for racism, rather than white Swedish perpetrators. This is reflected in accounts of adoptees feeling that when they stood out as individual, racialised bodies in white space they were instantly recognisable as adoptees, and treated as such. However, with increases in numbers of immigrants (of colour), they found that they were more likely to be mistaken for immigrants, and subsequently subjected to more racism. In Anna von Melen’s collection of interviews with adult adoptees (1998) Maja, who is adopted from India, feels that her experiences of racism worsened when immigrants started dressing like white Swedes, blurring the distinction between adoptee and immigrant:
In the past it [racism] was never a problem, for there were almost no immigrants in Skellefteå [Maja’s hometown]. Today it is not possible to distinguish between who is adopted and who is an immigrant. Immigrant girls from Africa, for example, have ordinary clothes, skinny jeans and that sort of thing. People don’t understand at once that you are adopted in the same way that you could before. At the same time, you blend in more, you don’t stand out in the same way you used to. (in von Melen, 1998, pp. 154–155)
The collapsed boundaries between immigrant and adoptee represent more than simple irritation to adoptees. They prove that ultimately the special privileges of the domesticated adoptee count for nothing when it comes to racism. This is seen in adoptee accounts of racism and in statistics that see East Asian adopted females more likely to be subjected to racialised sexual abuse (Lindblad & Signell, 2008). One of von Melen’s informants, Alfred, captures the realisation that his self-identification as a non-immigrant is meaningless when confronted by racists: ‘If racists see me or an immigrant, they don’t come up and ask, “are you adopted?” before they carry out their actions. In this regard I feel as threatened as any immigrant would, even though I don’t see myself as an immigrant at all’ (Alfred, in von Melen, 1998, p. 161).
Alfred’s reflection demonstrates that racism does not necessarily discriminate between desirable domesticated non-white bodies and undesirable ungovernable ones. Indeed, racism is the tie binding adoptees and immigrants together. When adoptees do self-identify as immigrants, as people of colour, as people who are subjected to racism, and whose very presence is dependent on the racism of the adoption system, they threaten notions of white Swedish goodness. This exposes flaws in the domestication project, questioning Swedish goodness and marking the limitations of the power and governance of white Swedes.
Fears and fantasies of reversal
Domestication comes with fears of reversal, whereby the domesticated rise up to overcome and domesticate the domesticator (Hage, 2017, p. 74). In the Swedish context this fear is expressed in comedy, where the loss of white control over non-white bodies in national space is reflected in ‘yellow humour’. This has strong traditions in Swedish entertainment and is a socially accepted type of comedy which involves the humiliation and mockery of East Asians.
Adoptivpäron (adopted/adoptive pears) by 1990s comedy group Killinggänget is one of Sweden’s most popular comedy sketches. Originally airing in 1995, the sketch is so beloved that it is celebrated annually on 29th May, when it is tweeted about, widely shared, and re-shown on primetime television.
In the sketch a young white Swedish man (played by Robert Gustafsson, a much-loved Swedish comedian), reveals that he is adopted by Koreans. His Korean adoptive parents appear on the scene – as enormous pears; the joke here being that the Swedish word for pears is also an informal word for parents (päron). However, these Korean adoptive parents/pears are not päron but pä-l-on, playing on the racist stereotype of Asians not being able to distinguish between R and L. The sketch involves the adoptive pä-l-ons singing Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side in heavy mock ‘Asian’ accents: ‘Ta’e a war’ on the whassssa’. They squint grotesquely and display false buck teeth.
The sketch’s humour comes from the unthinkable absurdity of Asian people adopting a white child, a humour that arises from the fear of this happening. Imagine if power relations were reversed: the Korean (child) became the parent, and we (the white Swedes) became the subordinate child! While the abstract nature of the sketch is used in defence against allegations of racism, examining abstraction is revealing. There is value in analysing the most absurd parts of narratives as they indicate the limits of what is truly permissible within a discourse, and can reveal hidden power structures (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 97). Initially, the absurdity may appear to be in the Korean parents being pears, but the whole scenario is absurd. The inversion of adoptee and adopter roles is extreme, seemingly reversing the deeply structured and entrenched power imbalances between parent–child, adopter–adoptee, Whiteness–Asianness, West–East, adoption receiving countries–adoption supply countries. In fact, the inversion of adoptee–adopter roles is so outrageous it represents an entire turning of global governance status quos and entrenched racialised inequities. It also represents the fears of such reversal happening. The terror of Asian bodies in the West is an age-old tradition, finding current expression in today’s COVID era anti-Asian racism. If there is a fear of not being able to domesticate bodies that we should be able to control, then the fear of such bodies domesticating us must be the greatest fear of all.
However, the inversion of power roles in the sketch operates within safe parameters that reassure the viewer by showing that no real structural change is possible. The inversion of adoptee and adopter is only skin deep. The Korean Pears are presented as childlike, with their silly singing and toy instruments. The white Swedish adoptee plays the adult role: a native speaker, a worker and the protagonist. So while adoptee and adopter are inverted, the white Swede still gets to be the adult, the Koreans the children. With the relationship enacted in white Swedish space, the Swede is in the empowered majority group, the Koreans a minority; through this, power dynamics and national racial inequalities are sustained. Unlike actual international adoption, the adoptee maintains his name, ethnic identity and language. Furthermore, the food-nature of the Korean Pears maintains a gross power dichotomy of white bodies as the consumer, Asian bodies the consumed.
That the Korean bodies are pears is significant beyond a play on words. They represent race as food. In adoption narratives, food analogies are commonly used to describe racialised Other bodies of adoptees as a means of indicating their desirability and difference in a way that is acceptable within colour-blind discourse (Wyver, 2019). When Hage discusses animal–race analogies, he suggests exploring what their usage tells us about the person making the analogy, rather than dwelling on the metaphor’s accuracy. For instance, what does a racist comparing a Jew to a snake tell us about what they perceive to be permissible and acceptable to do to such a body (Hage, 2017, p. 11)? To relate this to food analogies, to describe an Asian child as ‘almond eyed’ or an African child as ‘chocolate skinned’, both of which can be found in Swedish adoption literature, gives an indication of the permissible desire to consume such bodies, showing that these bodies are seen as something sensual and exotic (Wyver, 2019).
The sketch should be placed within the wider tradition of Swedish so-called yellow humour, which tends to be enjoyed uncritically, and interestingly is often performed by white Swedes who are considered to be anti-racists. A further example was seen in 2008, where popular white comedian Sissela Kyle appeared on Allsång på Skansen, a family favourite summertime show that entails a series of broadcasts of live sing-a-longs. Kyle took to the stage dressed as a ‘communist’, waving tiny red flags in jerking, hysterical movements while screaming nonsense in fake Chinese. The show’s white host joined in the hilarity, wearing a rice hat and leading the audience in a synchronised rowing dance (Hübinette & Sjöblom, 2015).
Hübinette and Sjöblom note that over recent decades there have been many more instances of white Swedes performing roles in yellow-face than parts played by Swedish Asian actors. They argue that this has a catastrophic impact on Swedish Asians, with their lives haunted by sketches such as Killinggänget. The authors explain that the sheer sight of them, as Asians in Sweden, propels white (and non-white) Swedes to grin and scream degrading slurs their way. Mainstream yellow humour, they argue, both legitimises and stokes this abuse (Hübinette & Sjöblom, 2015).
The fears of the reversal played out in yellow humour do not end with the performances alone, but take on new levels of oppression and violence when addressed by the domesticated victims. Hübinette describes finding the door of his apartment daubed with stickers from a known Nazi group with a bag of pears hanging from the door after speaking out about the adoptivpäron sketch (Wyver, 2015). Critics of yellow humour have also found a distinct lack of support from ‘anti-racists’, who may not see it as ‘proper racism’. In fact, established white ‘anti-racists’ have been inclined to defend yellow face (Wyver, 2015).
Such reactions are significant because the tradition of yellow face is accepted and above criticism. The challenge to yellow humour, especially when led by adoptees, is symbolic of the domesticated rising up. Deemed ungrateful and not understanding Swedish anti-racism, their challenge has to be crushed. The joke is not funny anymore, in that the worst nightmare captured in the adoptivpäron sketch threatens to become true: the domesticated are telling the domesticator how to behave, and attempting to exert control on white Swedes and white Swedishness.
Conclusion
This article explored the significance of the international transracial adoptee in the domestication of the Swedish nation. The adoptee body represents national myths of goodness, anti-racism and international solidarity; bringing national projects into the home while symbolising the homely nation. These roles mean that the adoptee body is used to conceal the violence, extraction and exploitations of the Swedish national project and international adoption.
The adoptee’s status as domesticatable and domesticated is contrasted with the ungovernable bodies of immigrants. While the adoptee’s use value and desirability are clear, their position as bodies of colour in white Swedish space (and, technically, as immigrants) means they have to constantly assert themselves as non-immigrants, as almost white Swedes, to distance themselves from the ungovernable. The ungovernable threaten the domesticator, showing the limits of their power and governance. But the domesticated adoptee poses an even greater threat, shown in fears and fantasies of domesticated–domesticator reversal, which are captured in popular Swedish yellow humour performances, and the reactions to criticisms of them.
The use of adoptees in Swedish domestication shows that domestication is not just a violence on the body, but that the body can in turn be used in this violence, to justify and conceal it. It helps this violence to be reimagined as a kindness of mutual benefit. Adoption is part of a bigger system of domestication desires of control, consumption of Other bodies, resources and species. It represents a move from colonialesque fantasies of domination to postcolonial fantasies of domination without aggression. Adoption is an environmental threat in the sense that Hage understands it, as it, too, is part of a domestication fantasy of extraction, control and destruction. It is a violence of exploitation and domination imagined as homely and loving.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful criticisms and suggestions.
Funding
The authors received funding from the University of Auckland FDRF Covid-19 PhD Publication Fund for the production of this article.