CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | de Blank, Max Baoshi Christiaan |
|---|---|
| Title | Rethinking Adoptee Politics in the Netherlands: A Queer of Colour Critique |
| Summary | After the Council for the Administration of Criminal Justice and Protection of Juveniles published its policy advice to the Dutch government to stop intercountry adoptions in late 2016, a new movement of adoptees emerged. In this thesis, I turn to queer theory to critically reflect upon this new adoptee movement on a primarily theoretical and conceptual level. Taking a Foucauldian biopolitical framework, I first conceptualize how the Dutch self-perception as a white nation—an imagined genetic community—informs a biopolitical discourse of social belonging based on origin. Based on previous scholarship, I then show how a discourse of neoliberal colour-blindness comes to facilitate the dynamics of this biopolitical discourse of social belonging, deploying mechanisms of assimilation and roots-essentialism. I subsequently apply this conceptual analysis to contemporary Dutch adoptee politics to show how certain activist aims and strategies tie into these normalizing mechanisms of assimilation and roots-essentialism. Then, I turn to the work of David Eng, to demonstrate how his concept of queer diaspora provides an answer to queer liberalism, which is very similar to neoliberal colour-blindness. I take up the psychoanalytical underpinnings of queer diaspora, most notably the concept of racial melancholia, to re-interpret contemporary Dutch adoptee politics. Subsequently, I re-interpret the concept of racial melancholia itself by considering the common conflation of race and ethnicity. I show that such a re-interpretation suggests a strategy that entails building communities to bridge the gap between adoptees of colour and non-adopted people of colour. Finally, I turn to the work of José Esteban Muñoz to show how John McLeod’s concept of adoptive being can be read as a strategy of disidentification, not least because disidentification and adoptive being build on racial melancholia in a similar fashion. I conclude by formulating several brief thoughts on how disidentification constitutes a promising strategy for an adoptee politics that aims to question the racial norms of neoliberal multiculturalism and colour-blindness. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/de-blank_max.pdf |
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