Posocco, Silvia (2011) Expedientes: fissured legality and affective states in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala. Law, Culture and the Humanities 7 (3), pp. 434-456. ISSN 1743-8721.
Abstract
The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have “fissured” the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the “prior” histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics inherent in these legal documents, and the legal frameworks regulating the production of adoption paperwork, the article offers a critical insight into the extra-judicial processes and forms of “exceptionalism” that made transnational adoptions possible in the thirty-year period between 1977 and 2007. At the same time, the analysis of declarations and disclaimers brings to light how the technologies of their production allow the emergence of “anti-social affects” that saturate, and internally disrupt, transnational adoption files. The article proposes a critical, “anti-social” analysis of international adoption, by illuminating the problems that come from taking for granted the values of futurity and reproduction in adoption studies.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Transnational adoption, documents, archives, Guatemala, affective states, violence and conflict, reproductive futurism |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, Centre for (CILAVS), Psychosocial Research, Centre for |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Jan 2012 11:34 |
| Last Modified: | 28 Mar 2025 16:46 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/4540 |
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