Global Parents

Eleana J. Kim’s ethnography of transnational Korean adoptees instantly reminded me of an article I read earlier this year by Raka Shome entitled “Global Motherhood: TheTransnational Intimacies of White Femininity.” Shome looks at several high-profile white women known for their humanitarian work in the Global South – including Princes Diana, Mia Farrow, and Angelina Jolie – and shows how these women are positioned (especially in media representations) as global mothers. “In representations of white women as transnational mothers,” Shome writes, “we often find them moralized through visual logics that represent them as angelic figures emanating compassion, love, and healing” (p. 392). Invariably, these visual logics function on the castigation or erasure of non-white non-Western mothers.

I could see similarities between Shome’s analysis and Kim’s narrative of the Caseys from Missouri who wanted to adopt a Korean ‘orphan’ named Sul Ja. Even when the couple discovered that Sul Ja had a living parent and a sister, they tried to go forward with Sul Ja’s adoption, believing that the child would have a better life in the United States where she would have two loving parents. Although the Caseys were not a wealthy couple, their whiteness and Westerness still positioned them as ‘global parents’ – including those children who already had parents.

Another similarity that I found between Shome’s and Kim’s analysis of transnational adoptions is the connections they drew between gender, humanitarianism, and nationalism. Shome argues that global motherhood is particularly significant in the context of 'family values' discourse in the United States, where “parenting has become...a measure of 'value, self-worth, and citizenship' for white middle class subjects in order to feel like a completed citizen” (p.389). Likewise, Kim finds that the Christian Americanism and anticommunism of the 1950s “linked American cultural citizenship and national security with parenthood and the nuclear family” (p.44). For me, this is where the contradictions of global parenthood are most apparent. Global parents are framed as a challenging the borders of the nation-state – by “enrich[ing] or expand[ing] the scope of family and nation” – when, in reality, Western logics of kinship reassert those borders (p.101).

Ultimately, this week’s reading troubled many notions I had about identity, but also affirmed some of the misgivings I have about moving beyond ‘identity politics’, which many social movements aim to do. Mohanty’s personal reflection on her shifting sense of identity in relation to her experiences with Americans, Indians, Indian Americans, leftists, and feminists is a great example of why identity remains a crucial part of feminist politics. 

Yet as I recall Violet Barriteau’s article on the lack of engagement between black feminists in the U.S. and black feminists in the Caribbean, I realize that doing 'feminism without borders' means that our politics cannot end with articulating difference. As Mohanty states, difference should also be an impetus to "envision and enact common political and intellectual projects" (p.125.).