Judith Lind analyses the accounts of 22 young adult transnational adoptees in nine focus group discussions in relation to the recommendations made by the MIA. Further, it is a strategy that requires certain cultural and language competencies that are difficult to acquire. For example, despite official discourse on the value of multiculturalism, non-Swedishness in Sweden continues to have predominantly negative connotations. While this might seem to be a plausible strategy, it raises various problems. The implicit message is that the Swedishness they are excluded from is not worth aspiring to and having additional national origins is more desirable. The guidance and education material published by the Swedish Intercountry Adoption Authority (MIA) suggests a strategy of dealing with this by developing pride in the adoptees’ non-Swedish origin. The consequences of looking visibly ‘non-white’ are a recurrent theme in the accounts of many trans national adoptees in Sweden, who frequently find their Swedishness challenged in everyday life. Since family formation involves an active choice, the knowledge and discussion on how race and whiteness norms structure our thoughts and behavior are essential in today’s multicultural Sweden. Transracial children and their parents are perceived differently depending on their origin and degree of visible differences and non-whiteness, but also based on the historical and social context. The color-blind ideology that characterizes the Swedes’ self-understanding, together with the privileged position of whiteness in relation to Swedishness, makes the attitude towards different forms of transracial families ambivalent and contradictory. The analysis revealed a somewhat contradictory and complex picture on the norms of family formation. By bringing these two topics together in a critical race theory framework we got a deeper understanding of how transracial families are perceived and affected by societal beliefs and norms. Transnational adoption and interracial marriage in Sweden have previously never been compared in research, even though they both are about transracial family formation. In this article, we use the results from two studies, one on interracial relationship and the other on transnational adoption, to explore how notions of race and ethnicity shape family policies, family building and everyday life in Sweden. The adoptee body therefore risks exposing the inauthenticity of Swedish virtue and the good white Swedish subject, and the histories of eugenics, racism and colonialism that good Sweden and the international adoption project are built on. However, while the adoptee body is central to upholding myths of Swedish goodness and exceptionalism it also troubles them: for it simultaneously carries hidden histories of Sweden’s colonial past and racist present, which its presence forever threatens to re- veal. It can also carry the possibility of white fantasies of being progressive, cosmopolitan digressive desiring subjects who are able to step out of whiteness to experience a world of Otherness. The adoptee body symbolises a safe version of multiculturalism, where a non-white body can be observed, controlled and consumed legitimately. The thesis argues that the body of the transracial adoptee is used to signify a uniquely Swedish national goodness, and serves to unite a divided nation by symbolically con- necting white Swedish subjects to a mythical glorious past, when white Swedes could have complete control over the positioning of bodies of colour in white national space. Analysing a range of sources, from commercials to popular adopter and adoptee autobiographies, it seeks to deconstruct narratives of adoption and goodness, and build a new understanding of white adopters’ racial desires and their roles in maintaining a status quo of patriarchal white supremacy. Drawing on the theoretical work of Ghassan Hage, bell hooks and Homi K Bhabha, the thesis uses deconstructive narrative analysis techniques to explore meanings and desires concealed beneath the surface of published texts and images. This thesis critically explores the unique nature of Swedish international transracial adoption desire, examining how the adoptee body is deployed in national myth building and in fantasies of colour-blindness and white cosmopolitanism. Yet, in Sweden, arguably the world’s leading adopting nation, in- ternational adoption remains celebrated, wrapped up in national myths of anti-racism and goodness. Globally the international adoption industry is in a time of crisis, beset by a steady stream of corruption and abuse scandals, and criticised by some as a racist and exploitative trade in children of colour.
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