Pop star Madonna's adoption of little David Banda from Malawi has raised troubling questions about international adoptions, cross-cultural care, and the power of celebrity -- just to name a few.
But even the simplest cross-cultural adoption can be fraught with a host of questions about identity, heritage and respect. As Marina Jiménez reported in Saturday's paper, here in Canada there's a dearth of Muslim foster families to take in Muslim children.
Dr. Karen Dubinsky, a history professor at Queen's University, is familiar with the complexities of international and cross-cultural adoptions. She was on-line Monday to take your questions on the topic.
You can still join the conversation by submitting a comment on the discussion. Your questions and Dr. Dubinsky's responses appear at the bottom of the page.
Dr. Dubinsky teaches in the History Department at Queen's University. She is the author of Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 (1993) and The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooners, Heterosexuality and the Tourist Industry at Niagara Falls (1999). She is currently writing a book about international and interracial adoption titled Babies Without Borders: Adoption and the Symbolic Child in Canada, Cuba and Guatemala.
Dr. Dubinsky has spent several years in various archives in Canada, researching the history of the placement of black and Aboriginal children with white parents. She has also done field research in Guatemala exploring international adoption from the perspective of "sending" countries.
This year she has launched a new course, "Symbolic Children: The Global Politics of Childhood," which explores a variety of current and historical controversies over children such as adoption, child labour, child soldiers, and children and sexuality.
Please join Dr. Dubinsky and other readers on-line at 1 p.m. Monday for a discussion about cross-cultural adoption.
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Rebecca Dube, globeandmail.com: Thank you very much for joining us today, Dr. Dubinsky. Madonna's adoption of an African boy certainly seems to have touched off a lot of controversy. Why do you think that is? Are there any lessons to be learned here for Canadian parents who have adopted children internationally (going through the proper, and sometimes lengthy, channels), or is this just a one-off story about the power of celebrity?
Karen Dubinsky: Historians like to read stories like this at least in part to observe or tease out cultural meaning. That wealthy people live differently and play by different set of rules isn't exactly newsworthy in and of itself. "This just in: Madonna is a rich white woman:" Not exactly front page material.
Incidentally, this story played out, in a remarkably similar way, in 1951, when Hollywood star Jane Russell (also someone with a sex goddess persona) adopted, in a very public way, a Irish infant, and the press exploded with indignant stories of rich Americans stealing/buying Irish children. Adoption was un- and under-regulated in many places in the world in the 1950s — Ireland and Korea for example — and this often leads to really bad practices.
But this is more than "just" about unregulated adoption; the power of this story comes in large part from the huge symbolic power children hold for us. And it also reveals, I think, that there are two conflicting — and I'd say equally unhelpful — ways of thinking about adoption in our era: rescue and kidnap. Both are simplistic and don't really get at the complexities.
