Laura Briggs

Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis

This essay argues that transnationalism is an indispensible term, bringing into sharp relief all the ways that scholarly disciplines have relied upon, and reified, the nation. Although some have charged that the concept is intellectually “soft,” this article contends that it does crucial work in undoing academic complicity with the ideological work of constructing the nation. Transnationalism is, we argue, a radical intervention with roots in anti-imperialist writers back to Fanon and Wallerstein, forward to the sharpest critics of neoliberalism. Drawing on work principally from Latin American and the United States, this article suggests that transnationalism need not be a concept that obviates our ability to think borders, walls, and militaries, but is precisely the conceptual apparatus that allows us to locate objects like the border wall in relation to transnational currents of globalization and its discontents. In 1986, Joan Scott summarized a decade of feminist scholarship by arguing that gender refers to far more than sexed bodies (or even worse, female ones), but to entire symbolic systems and forms of social organization. In this piece, we suggest that the same is true of the nation—that it has organized knowledge, disciplines (Mexican History, American Literature), and forms of social organization (the entire bureaucratic apparatus associated with the Guatemalan economy). While the nation is anything but a transhistorical, natural, or autonomous entity, it has been politically usefully and academically expedient to proceed as if it were. “Gender” was the name Scott gave to the conceptual acid that could reveal the constructedness and utility of sex; “transnationalism” is the sign under which a critique of the nation has been underway.

International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Circulation of ChildrenPart I Defining Reproduction: Law, Strangers, Family, Kin Part II Perspectives from Sending Countries Part III Experiences in Receiving Countries About the ContributorsIndex

Making Race, Making Sex

Abstract This article is interested in how biomedicine, psychology, and anthropology have produced the rape-able, violable Arab body that need not be the subject of law, national or international. In the 1970s, feminists argued that violence produced gender, that rape and the threat of rape made “women” as a social category, abuse-able and inferior. In the 1980s and beyond, feminist science studies has shown how science makes sex, gender and race, at the level of constructing the basic categories. This article argues that we can extend these feminist theoretical insights to explore the ways that torture is itself a science that racializes, that produces and relies on a notion of Arab-Muslim masculinity as distinct from that enacted in “the West,” a region that is produced alongside a Muslim “Orient.”

La economía política de la adopción: la neoliberalización del bienestar infantil

Guatemala, a diferencia de la mayoria de las naciones latinoamericanas, en las decadas de 1990 a 2010, vio aumentar su tasa de adopciones transnacionales. Este articulo sugiere que la explicacion habitual de este fenomeno –que miles de ninos y ninas estaban desplazados por la guerra, y que el pais no tiene una “cultura interna de la adopcion”– es incorrecta. Por el contrario, argumenta que la adopcion transnacional en Guatemala comenzo su ignominiosa historia con el secuestro de ninos y ninas por parte de militares y paramilitares durante el conflicto armado interno. La mayoria de los ninos y ninas fueron adoptados en el pais (mostrando que los guatemaltecos si adoptan cuando tienen la oportunidad), pero algunos fueron adoptados en EE.UU. y Europa. La victoria de las fuerzas neoliberales en la guerra se refleja en lo que sucedio con la adopcion: a pesar de decadas de esfuerzos de reforma, la adopcion se convirtio en un negocio muy lucrativo para los jueces/zas, trabajadores/as sociales, abogados/as y otros. El exito de los esfuerzos recientes para disminuir o detener la adopcion transnacional en Guatemala dependera de si los que se beneficiaron de ella encuentran satisfactorios los beneficios indirectos de la mejora del “historial de derechos humanos”.