(Un)liveabilities: Homonationalism and transnational adoption

A biopolitical and necropolitical perspective

This article draws on the biopolitical tradition of Michel Foucault. Thus, we understand kinship as biopolitical; in the sense that specific formations of kinship are recognized and regulated by the state – for example, through laws governing marriage. At the same time, kinship produces subjectivity and identity positions, including those of mother, father and child (Butler, 2004). By viewing kinship through a biopolitical lens, it is possible to understand kinship as a fundamental component in the discourses of knowledge and power that govern life and identity, rather than as ‘pure’ and universal biologically defined relationships (Cherot, 2006). In extension to this, we look at kinship (including adoption) as a financial, social, and affective economy (Eng, 2010) constructed through a number of practices, relationships and categories – including gender, class, sexuality, and race. Thinking through the concept of economy, we wish to indicate how (monetary) economic interests not only inform kinship, but also show how kinship may be understood as a social and affective circuit in which constructions of love, alienation, and identity are demanded and provided, negotiated and demanded (Dorow, 2006; Kim, 2010; Myong Petersen, 2009: 4).

In Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault unfurls his genealogy of racism and its function in biopower, as is inferred in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality 1 (1990). As pointed out by Kim Su Rasmussen, who has written extensively on racism, Foucault understands racism as ‘a form of biopolitical government’ (Su Rasmussen, 2011: 35), which subdivides a population into hierarchical groups, races. This division legitimizes a death-function within the biopower mandate of self-survival: if the superior race is to become stronger and healthier, the subordinate race must be eliminated or killed off. Here, ‘killing off’ must be understood in its broadest sense – ‘exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256). In this way, Foucault argues that ‘massacres have become vital’ (Chow, 2002: 9; Foucault, 1990: 137; Puar, 2007: 33). The Holocaust can function as a brutal, yet almost naïve example: the Nazi movement singled out a particular social group within the population that had to be killed off, specifically with the intent of ensuring the survival and optimization of the ‘superior’ race. Achille Mbembe extends Foucault’s concept of biopolitics by centring on those lives that are characterized by death-like conditions. With the concept of necropolitics and by focusing on Africa, Palestine and the slave plantations, he shows how biopower creates ‘death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003: 40).

Jasbir K Puar also shares this interest in the interplay between necropolitics and biopolitics and between a focus on the optimization of life and a singling out for death. Analyzing homonationalism, and later debility, she works within a necro- and biopolitical framework, in which attention is drawn towards how the permanence of the lives of certain bodies and populations is subject to the subjugation of other bodies and populations – even to the point of death (2007: 32–36, 2009: 163). In a similar way, Judith Butler works with grievability (2009) as a caesura between those bodies and populations that from a political perspective can be seen as grievable and those bodies and populations that are not recognized as grievable. ⁴

Sharing this school of thought, we forward two theoretical areas that allow an intersectional analysis to be made. Through an affect-theoretical analysis (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b; Eng, 2010), we will show how certain subjects and kinships are established as culturally intelligible and grievable in the film. Additionally, by means of a necro- and biopolitical framework, we will show how this production – as well as the valorization of kinship – creates populations that are always already dead ⁵ the moment they fold new populations into being.

A journey into the slum

Given that queer becomes read as a form of ‘non-life’ – with the death implied by being seen as non-reproductive – then queers are perhaps even already dead and cannot die.

(Ahmed, 2004b: 156).

Thomas’s journey from Denmark (home) to Brazil (abroad) and back again reflects the film’s composition as a classic bildungsroman or coming-of-age story. Thomas starts out as a homosexual man who embarks on both a geographical and spiritual journey. Through this journey, he learns to become a complete human being in order to return home as a father. At the beginning of the film, Thomas is at a disco in São Paulo with his Danish friend, Jakob, where he turns down a one-night stand. Here, the film’s heteronormative premise can already be perceived: becoming a complete human being requires creating a family. Queer relations and ambitions/careers are construed as superficial in relation to the sanctified reproduction of life itself. The film constructs Thomas as a suitable father with whom we can identify and sympathize. In the film’s first scene, Thomas drives into São Paulo. This scene is one of a recognizable tourist trip, where the cityscape is established as a backdrop with its sprawling motorways, urban skyline and bars blaring out thumping house music. But when it becomes apparent to the audience that Thomas is in Brazil to adopt a baby, São Paulo begins to show a different side. Thomas becomes a voluntary worker in a project working to alleviate poverty and his job is delivering food around the city’s slums. On moving into these slum neighborhoods, there is a change in camera angle. No longer is the focus on Thomas’s face and his anxieties; the camera now follows him from behind – we see what he is seeing. He moves into foreign territory and the audience is thereby established as the tourist/foreigner in a new country.

The slum is construed as a geography formed by race, class and linguistics – a setting that establishes solidarity between Thomas and the audience. In contrast to the sprawling motorways and panoramic camera angles of the beginning of the film, the slums are portrayed as being cramped, maze-like alleyways where danger lurks around every corner – a claustrophobic and frightening atmosphere where the streets are ruled by drug pushers. Thus, the audience is invited to feel affectively threatened, just like Thomas. Here, nobody speaks English, forcing Thomas to switch to his unhelpful Portuguese. In this way, identification between the audience and Thomas is established, not through Thomas’s queerness, but through his Danishness. The filming takes on a realistic and documentary-like style, allowing a Danish/Anglo-Western audience to become tourists in this unknown and poverty-stricken environment. As a result, the audience is invited into a well-known colonialist structure where the white man explores an ‘unknown’ territory, while simultaneously colonizing it. Through his friends Jakob and Tereza, Thomas is introduced to Maria and her family; Maria is interested in giving her unborn child up for adoption. Thomas and Maria form a contract about her relinquishing the baby to Thomas, who can then adopt the child. Thomas thereafter becomes the provider – both economically and in terms of moral support – to Maria, Rosa, and Maria’s other children, while at the same time striking up a relationship with her. In this way, Maria becomes colonized through a hetero-patriarchal story. It is also noteworthy that the longing for a child establishes a shared, almost classical, heteronormative framework of identification. The film dwells upon how Thomas longingly gazes at every child on the street and on his Skype conversations with his Danish sister about her children; later it dwells upon his relationship to Rosa, constructing the longing to become a parent as a fundamental condition shared by every single human being. The film focuses on how Thomas’s desire to become a parent comes to overshadow everything else in his life, thereby naturalizing the desire and longing for having children.

Liza Duggan has argued that certain homosexual politics and social practices around the turn of the century have begun to challenge heteronormative assumptions and institutions less and less; instead, they contribute to them by redefining ‘gay equality against the “civil rights agenda” and “liberationism” as access to the institutions of domestic privacy, the “free” market, and patriotism’ (2003: 50–51). This heteronormative, neoliberal, and nationalistic U-turn in gay and lesbian policies she classifies as a homonormativity that should not be understood as the opposite of heteronormativity, but rather its ‘partner in crime’. Thomas is established as a figure in whom our identification patterns are achieved through white Danishness. His positioning as a successful and cosmopolitan architect and his rejection of queer representations points to the fact that it is precisely such a homonormative representation that enables a positioning of Thomas as worthy of kinship, rather as an always already dead figure. Adoption becomes the practice that folds the homosexual man into life by rendering him worthy of kinship.

(Il)legitimate adoptions

In this section, we will look more closely at how transnational adoption plays a role in Thomas’s normalization and existence as a responsible father, and how this requires a certain framing of transnational adoption. In Rosa Morena, adoption is constructed as a partly problematic phenomenon. The question, however, is not merely what becomes recognizable as problematic within the film’s logic, but also which constitutive effects this recognition produces – both in relation to homosexual identity and the practice of transnational adoption.

David Eng contends that transnational adoption must be viewed in connection with the increasing outsourcing of care and reproductive work to the Global South. He argues that in Western late-capitalist societies, having a child serves as a guarantee for full and robust citizenship and for being recognized as a subject who has realized him- or herself economically, politically and socially (Eng, 2010). This applies to heterosexuals, but to a growing degree it also applies to homosexuals in an age where queer liberalism ⁷ can no longer be said to stand outside conventional family structures in a Western context. Eng asks if the transnationally adopted subject can be conceptualized as capital and/or labour. Eng’s question gestures towards an understanding of transnational adoption as a kinship economy in which the adopted child can be conceptualized as an affective source of labour, rather than a remunerated source of labour in a classical Marxist context. The child’s sought-after value comes from the fact that she can be consumed by (potential) parents in the Global North, and that this consumption procures a sense of belonging and recognition as seen from a heteronormative family ideal (2010: 109). We will return to the question of which specific forms of labour are consumed in/with the film, and how the production and distribution of certain affects influences the balance of power in transnational kinship formation. But first, we will examine the representation of transnational adoption and how adoption becomes a part of Thomas’s normalization.

Thomas is not a figure who longs for a family whereby he can reproduce himself biologically. ⁸ Thomas prefers to adopt. This, however, is not portrayed as a simple process, but rather as a range of complicated and (de)stabilizing subjective choices, through which Thomas risks his life, mobility, and economic security. In no way does Rosa Morena portray adoption as an easy and ready-made form of kinship. Yet the way these difficulties are anchored in an exotic Brazilian context of poverty and inequality nevertheless enables a story of individual development to be told – a story that partly accentuates Thomas as a critical and contemplative man, and partly justifies certain forms of adoption as legitimate consumption.

In Rosa Morena, a continuum between legal and illegal adoption is outlined. Before Thomas meets Maria, he pays a visit to an attorney’s office in São Paulo. Here, Thomas learns that the easiest way to adopt is to find a woman who, in return for money, is willing to register him as the birth father on the child’s birth certificate. By doing so, he would then be able to return to Denmark with the baby. He could also stray into the more dubious market in which children are discreetly collected from an orphanage. For $100,000, he would even be able to choose the race, gender, and age of the child. This, as the attorney notes, is merely an issue of supply and demand. And in this economy white children are in high demand because they are considered more desirable than brown children. With the attorney’s laconic citation of these options, a connection is established between adoption and the purchasing of children. The one is not directly linked with the other, but a gradual transition or sliding between the two is alluded to. Confronted with the different scenarios, Thomas leaves the office convinced that he will not resort to such methods. The scene installs Thomas as a person with whom the audience can safely identify. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that he does indeed attempt to purchase a child. In this way, the scene serves to show Thomas’s reflective competencies and to establish empathy towards him. His willingness to indulge in reflective criticism projects him as a responsible human being with an ethical potential that is tested, but also matures throughout the film.

The scene serves a further purpose as it installs a differentiation between on the one hand the forms of adoption listed by the attorney and on the other hand the purchasing of children. The model of finding a woman who, in return for payment, will ‘voluntarily’ give up her child is portrayed as better than the model with the dubious bureaux. In other words, a demarcation between worse and better forms of adoption is established. And this is a complex demarcation. In both cases, adoption is portrayed as an economic transaction and consumption. But whereas one transaction comes across as a cynical ‘help-yourself’ affair (in which gender and race can be selected at will), an alternative model (in which the birth mother ‘voluntarily’ gives up her child for adoption and is compensated by a middleman) comes across as less cynical and consumer-oriented.

With this turn of events – where the question about racialized consumption is reserved to the dubious adoptions – these are construed as not only illegal and ethically reproachable, but also as decidedly racist. It is a movement that simultaneously relieves the pressure on other forms of adoption from suspicions of racism and unscrupulous capitalism. The differentiation creates a logic, where Thomas, as well as the film’s audience, can relate with critical reflection towards transnational adoption as a phenomenon anchored in inequality (and where the act of reflecting critically and empathically constructs a form of ethical substance in the person being reflective). At the same time, the audience can identify with choices that profit from the maintaining of the very same inequality structures.

The differentiation between different forms of adoption is expanded upon throughout the rest of the film. In connection with his voluntary work, which consists of bringing food out to families in São Paolo’s slum neighborhoods, Thomas meets a black woman who lacks the economic means to keep her baby. Following a couple of meetings, Thomas suggests that he can buy/adopt the baby from the woman. The transaction, however, is never carried out. Thomas is almost half killed by the woman’s husband and his friends who are outraged by the fact that Thomas has tried to buy a child. This form of illegal adoption – where the child is treated as a commodity in obvious ways, and where Thomas, as the privileged white man, convinces himself he can obtain a child in the same way that he would obtain other consumer goods – is symbolically attacked and rejected, just as Thomas is literally beaten up and left disrobed on a garbage dump. The film configures Thomas as a complex person, capable of failing, who, with his potent desire to have a child, tests his existential potential to its limits – and when this fails, he is corporally punished.

In Rosa Morena, transnational adoption is not configured as an ethical choice. Nevertheless, certain forms of adoption are portrayed as being more ethical than others. The film renders possible a critical perspective on adoption, for example, through its highlighting of the porous boundaries between adoption and human trafficking. The differentiation of adoption enables Thomas to buy/adopt Maria’s child while retaining his position as an ethically responsible person. In this way, it can be said that in Rosa Morena the consumption of transnational adoptive kinship takes place not despite, but because of, a critical perspective. Thomas’s positioning as a father requires a legitimization of transnational adoption practices, but it is also articulated through a range of social categories, set in motion through sexuality.

‘Who’s queer now?’ ⁹

Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as a subject) against sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). [… Q]ueer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent towards whiteness.

(Puar, 2007: 24)

This shift re-establishes queer as an analytical method (rather than an identity category) that examines which populations are made into perverse and pathological ‘Others’ by heteronormative strategies. ¹⁰ Puar points to the fact that the homosexual subject through resignifications of queerness is folded into life, yet this movement simultaneously designates other ‘Others’ as queer, what Puar terms homonationalism. ¹¹ As a result, she does not view homosexual populations as queer, but indicates that other (racialized) populations are rendered ‘queer’ and thereby expelled from the domains of life (Puar, 2007: 35). Earlier, we have shown how Rosa Morena folds Thomas, the homosexual subject, into a collective Danishness and how he is constructed as a suitable father through a process of de-queering. This is supported by the casting of Danish actor Anders W Berthelsen in the role of Thomas, who embodies a white, slightly heavy and plump, masculinity. Let us follow the question of de-queering by looking more closely at how Thomas’s sexuality is represented.

When Thomas is at the disco with his friend Jakob, an attractive young Brazilian man tries to seduce him. Despite the fact that the attraction is reciprocated by Thomas, he turns down the sexual invitation. In the following scene, Thomas and Jakob are on their way home from the disco, and while Jakob asks Thomas why he did not want to have sex with ‘the cute little boy’, Thomas spots a group of street children. The sight of these children prompts Thomas to tell Jakob that he wants to adopt a child, as he is tired of his superficial life as an architect. In these two scenes, a superficial life characterized by sex, career, and freedom is juxtaposed against a life characterized by parenthood. Thomas’s rejection of the younger man should not be seen as a rejection of homosexuality per se, but rather as a rejection of a superficial homosexual life style.

The next scene where Thomas’s sexuality is represented is a scene where Maria seduces Thomas. Thomas has moved in with Maria and is financially supporting her and her three children. In the scene leading up to his seduction, the two discuss the options of being able to start a family, but these options are rejected. In front of a mirror, Maria seduces Thomas with the words, ‘Just close your eyes. I don’t even want to know what you’re thinking’. The sexual relationship with Maria initiates a ritualized heterosexualization of Thomas. This is symbolized by the reflection in the mirror – a reflection that frames the classic image of heterosexuality. As a subject, Thomas remains homosexual, but he is written into a heterosexual population through his desire for a heteronormative family configuration, made up of a mother, a father and children.

This configuration is not shattered by Thomas’s homosexuality, but rather by Maria, who destroys the heteronormative order. In scene after scene, Maria is portrayed as a ‘bad mother’: she drinks during her pregnancy, her style of child raising is violent and authoritarian, she is not worried when there is shooting in the street, and she does not react when Rosa cries. Thomas, on the other hand, puts a stop to Maria’s drinking, he provides for the family, he prepares the evening meals, he lets the children play freely, and he gets concerned when there is shooting in the street. Thomas’s white masculinity is not only juxtaposed against Maria’s black femininity, but also against the black masculinity represented by Denilson, who is married to Maria’s sister. It is Denilson that manages the economic transaction regarding the adoption.

In one of the key scenes towards the end of the film, Denilson, Maria, and Thomas are at a local bar. Prior to this scene, Denilson has learned about Maria and Thomas’s relationship. Later on in the evening, Thomas and Denilson are standing beside each other while urinating, and Denilson begins to cruise Thomas by checking out his ass and his penis. Here too in the third representation of Thomas’s sexuality, it is the black Other who is the seducer. A specific economy of desire emerges, in which black sexuality is portrayed as being more aggressive than white sexuality.

The construction of white sexual desire as restrained and controlled comes at the expense of the black male/female Other who is represented as unrestrained, aggressive, and amoral. ¹² This portrayal of racialized desire works to justify transnational adoption through a sexualized perverting of a racialized population.

Following this, Maria and Thomas have sex in the dimly lit room. The economy of desire is repeated through the sexual position: Maria is on top of Thomas, who is lying on his back. Denilson opens the door and approaches the bed. Then he proceeds to kiss Maria, who is sitting on top of Thomas. Disconcertedly, Thomas watches, eventually capitulating and joining in with the kiss. The scene is disrupted by Rosa’s crying. At this point, Thomas leaves the bed and goes in to see to Rosa while Maria and Denilson succumb to each other. Once Thomas is finished comforting Rosa, he returns to watch the scene through the door opening; through the eyes of Thomas, the audience gazes upon the black bodies. This scene is followed by a quarrel between Thomas and Maria in which Thomas demands that he take possession of Rosa. The next morning, he kidnaps Rosa and leaves Maria.

What is interesting about this distribution of desire is how ‘good’ kinship is established at the expense of sexualized othering targeting racialized femininity and masculinity. Thomas’s controlled sexuality, in which desire can be subdued for the benefit of the needs of the child, is set in stark contrast to Maria’s desire, which results in her lack of care for her child and Denilson’s amoral bigamy. ¹³

This portrayal invokes racist narratives about black bodies as hypersexual and animalistic, and it points to how a white homosexual struggle for equality centring on achieving recognition and acknowledgement as an individual worthy of kinship depends on a sexualization of the racial Other. The price for white homosexual equality is hereby paid by a racialized population who gets expelled from the realm of proper kinship through the very same strategies of sexual othering that previously barred (white) homosexual populations from the domains of kinship. In this way, both race and desire become decisive factors for the film’s kinship economy, drawing a line between liveable and unliveable forms of kinship.

Affective labour

Let us further examine how the distinction between liveable and unliveable kinships is not only installed through sexual othering of the racialized body, but also how this is mediated through affect. Here, we return to Eng’s points regarding adoption and affective labour; however, where Eng predominantly conceptualizes the adoptee as a source of affective labour, we will focus more on the affective labour required of Maria, the birth mother.

The effect of Maria’s affective labour can clearly be read in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s points on affective economy and about how affects ‘do’ something, such as sticking subjects together (or the reverse), both in relation to one another as well as in relation to communities (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b). According to Ahmed, affect is hereby understood as a productive force, rather than a quality or attribute, the subject has or is in possession of. Ahmed writes that affect functions as form of capital that is generated when affect is circulated: ‘affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation’ (Ahmed, 2004a: 120). Thinking in terms of affect is clearly relevant when discussing kinship – not as a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ consequence of kinship, but as formative for which types of kinship we can imagine ourselves to be part of. With this, we are given the opportunity to regard affect as something that renders kinship both possible and impossible, for example, by ‘sticking’ certain bodies together in kinship relationships. Similarly, we can view affect as something that through its circulation and division produces capital, for example, in the shape of recognition as a parent. Following Eng’s conceptualization of affective labour, we understand circulation and division of affect not as arbitrary, but rather as being entrenched within various structures that have a tendency to fixate certain (racialized) bodies as labour. ¹⁴

When Thomas begins to speculate how much Maria will end up cheating him, he kidnaps Rosa. And after having paid an attorney to prepare the requisite documentation, he succeeds in passing through the emigration controls at the airport. But Thomas then has a sudden change of heart. While the other passengers pass through the gate and board the airplane bound for Denmark, Thomas drives back to Maria’s house to return Rosa. On arriving at Maria’s house, he receives an angry reception – Maria throws him out of her house, and once left in the street he is verbally harassed by the locals like a common criminal. Thomas’s treatment as a criminal suggests a potential criticism of how he capitalizes from global inequality, but the label of criminal does not ‘stick’ to Thomas, who is able to transport himself out of the slum and away from the wrath. The interpellation as a criminal mostly points to what Thomas could have become, though it is unlikely in his case because the kidnapping is never actually carried out in full. On the contrary, Thomas’s inability to go through with the kidnapping serves other purposes. For example, to substantiate him as a ‘good’ father as the kidnapping episode gives occasion for compunction and repentance. With his failing to fully carry out the kidnapping and the return of the child, the ethical potential – which throughout the film is tested within Thomas – becomes stabilized. Here, Thomas’s ethics are pushed to their absolute limit. Within the logic of the film he proves himself as an honourable human being – a proper father.

Before Thomas returns home to Denmark, he is visited by Maria. On a dark terrace in the pouring rain, she tells him that Denilson is not in fact Rosa’s father. The true father could be one of five other men. Maria’s confession that Rosa’s true father is not only unknown to her but also could be one of five men installs and strengthens Thomas’s position as the rightful (well-known and identifiable) father and thus his kinship with Rosa. ‘Take her’, says Maria. She herself never asks Thomas directly whether or not he will adopt Rosa. Instead, she asks various questions about the future. ‘Will Rosa attend a private school in Denmark? Will she be well fed and have pretty dresses? Will she have an iPod?’ asks Maria. By handing Rosa over to a better future, Maria becomes a good and unselfish mother. Maria’s self-sacrifice and acknowledgement that happiness and a good life (for Rosa, but not for herself) exist somewhere else, appease and reconcile the negative sides of her motherhood – sides clearly portrayed in the film.

In Rosa Morena, Maria is reunited with her child so that she may then ‘voluntarily’ give her up for adoption and a better future with Thomas. In this way, she becomes a source of productive labour as well as affective labour. The ‘voluntary’ relinquishment of Rosa disarms any potential criticism of Thomas (as a criminal) and transnational adoption (as exploitation), and it rests upon and reproduces the distinction between liveable and unliveable forms of kinship. This distinction is solidified through a deliberate distribution of affect: on the terrace, the furious Maria – who has thrown Thomas out of her house because he stole Rosa – becomes an appeased Maria, a Maria who has come to terms with the situation and who relinquishes her child without demands or bearing a grudge. Maria’s anger and rage – directed towards Thomas and/or economic inequality – dissolve and give way to tears as she hands Rosa over to Thomas. If we presume that crying (an image that is strengthened by the pouring rain) points to one or more losses, the question then arises as to which loss(es)? If we recall the list of questions posed by Maria about education and iPods, we can perhaps interpret the tears as being caused by Maria’s loss of not being able to offer Rosa a future. At the same time, the crying serves as an affective identification channel for the audience, who are given the opportunity to share her pain at the prospect of living a life in poverty. Identification with this loss (of a future) paves the way for the ‘voluntary’ relinquishment of Rosa. Maria’s loss can, in other words, only be recognized as a loss as it simultaneously creates an unliveable kinship between her and her child. Thus, the recognition of Maria’s loss of not being able to secure a future for Rosa supports the idea of poverty as being equal to having no future. Within this logic the relinquishment of children to adoption becomes the only responsible option (for the impoverished parent).

What is unusual in Rosa Morena is the fact that it gives a leading role to the birth mother. Nevertheless, it is Maria’s affective labour that serves as a premise for her representation. From her tears, two future scenarios for Rosa are distilled: one Danish, one Brazilian. The Danish future, which depends on kinship with Thomas, is portrayed in the film as always already better than the future that according to the film is non-existent in Brazil. The liveability of the Danish future and Danish kinship hereby rests upon a severing from the Brazilian future and Brazilian kinship. When Thomas promises to bring Rosa back to Brazil for a visit once a year, Maria replies that the only promise he should make is to love Rosa. Maria’s surrendering of Rosa (to a future in Denmark) and Rosa’s adoption (into Danish kinship) converge with the conventional story of transnational adoption as an irreversible and necessary phenomenon (Myong Petersen, 2009). ¹⁵

At the same time, Maria is tied to an emotional structure of self-sacrifice and gratitude. In the context of the film’s affective and capitalist economy, it not only becomes clear that parents such as Maria must give up their children, but also that they must do so without political claims, without regret, and without anger. This retraction of anger – within Maria and from the film’s ending – is interesting. When Maria has said goodbye to Thomas and Rosa, she returns dejectedly to the claustrophobic slum. The retreat of her anger can be read as a taming of its productive and subversive potential in relation to change and resistance. ¹⁶ This specific instance of anger, that ebbs away, confines Maria to a position as living dead – a state that makes it possible for Thomas to leave with Rosa.

Transnational adoption as a vital event

In Rosa Morena, white homosexuality is folded into life by enrolling Thomas into a heteronormative kinship. This requires the sexualized othering of a racialized underclass in the slum, which relegates this population to a position of living dead. When film critic Kim Skotte is able to read Rosa Morena as a feel-good film, it is because neither global inequality nor Maria’s crushed dreams are recognized as grievable. For Rosa, headed towards a ‘future’, the losses involved in transnational adoption are left unspoken. In this way Maria as well as Rosa can be said to pay the affective price for the film’s projection of transnational adoption as a vital event – an event that forecloses liveable kinship between Rosa and Maria, while simultaneously producing liveable kinship for the white homosexual man. The adoptee child remains a silent object in this biopolitical economy of life and death.

The film’s division of life, death, affect, labour, and kinship follow the same pattern as classic colonial and racist exploitation structures. What is new is how the white homosexual man assumes a symbolic and moral right to kinship in the racialized and classed economy of life.

Declaration

An earlier version of this article has been published in Danish in Kultur & Klasse, 2012, 113(1): 119–132.