Classified children: A critical analysis of the digital interfaces and representations that mediate adoption in the United States

Introduction

As part of wider research into the digital mediatization of adoption, I discovered that details pertaining to children deemed eligible for adoption by families in the United States are shared in the public domain. This information – which often consists of photographs of individual children, as well as personal details such as their first names, age, racial identity and any health conditions or disabilities – are shared by federal and state funded agencies, as well as private adoption organizations and individuals. Details are shared about children with US citizenship and those from countries in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Organizations and individuals who share the sets of data state that they do so to increase the likelihood of such children being adopted.

In this article, I show that the design of these digital platforms, as well as the representations of children contained within them, are sites in which intersectionally racialized inequalities are created and reproduced. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2018), I argue that three characterizations of children visible in these spaces reflect a deep and complex set of intersectional inequalities related to histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery and the continued oppressions of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour in the United States today. The classificatory schemas reflected on these sites are not necessarily new; indeed, there is other literature that identifies similar characterization of children in the adoption process non-digitally. However, the reproduction of these classificatory systems is now directly connected to Internet use and digital design. It is the effects of these digital platforms on adoption processes that this article explores.

The significance of these processes can be understood if we engage with the nature of oppression itself. I therefore argue that it is productive to conceptualize the United States as a racialized social system (Bonilla-Silva, 1997) that exists in a transnational context with a long and complex history. The differential online construction of children in state foster care in the United States and institutional care in China, for example, emerges from and contributes to a wider context of oppression, in which racialization processes are shaped and affected by global histories of settler colonialism and imperialism.

The first part of this article considers these factors in more detail, exploring the racialized nature of representations of adoption by drawing on decolonial thought critical race theory (CRT) and thinking critically about digital interface design. I then identify three significant ways in which children deemed eligible for adoption are characterized online. Examining these characterizations in turn, I show how both discourses and interfaces work together to create complex mechanisms through which intersectional oppressions are reflected and reproduced. Ultimately, I argue that a fundamentally interconnected and intersectional approach is needed to understand how digital representations, together with the design and use of digital platforms, reinforce intersectional and historically contingent systems of oppression in the present.

Racialized representations of adoption in context

There is historic context of racialized meanings and values being encoded in photographs of children deemed eligible for adoption. Dorow (2006), for example, explores the reaction of transnational adopters to the photographs of children they received from adoption agencies, explaining that ‘the referral photo marks the possibility of the child becoming real to her parent(s)’ (Dorow, 2006: 110). Yet such photographs contain within them a ‘set of uncomfortable ghostly presences of inequitable racial, familial and national splitting’. (Dorow, 2006: 112). Similarly, Gay y Blasco (2012) explores the complex interaction between personal meanings and wider racial ideologies expressed by potential adoptive parents viewing photographs of children in China. She argues that the use of ‘Our China doll’, a photographic caption used by adoptive parents on personal blogs in the early 2000s, operates as a type of discourse that stems from the Orientalist fetishization of the ‘Other’, relying on racialized and gendered stereotypes (Gay y Blasco, 2012). The significance of these racialized constructions and their relationships to wider regimes of power can be understood by turning to Stuart Hall’s (1997) insights into ‘regimes of representation’. He states,

Images do not carry meaning or ‘signify’ on their own. They accumulate meanings, or play off their meanings against one another, across a variety of texts and media. Each image carries its own, specific meaning. But at the broader level of how ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ is being represented in a particular culture at any one moment, we can see similar representational practices and figures being repeated, with variations, from one text or site of representation to another. (Hall, 1997: 232)

Hall shows that when considering the cultural meaning of a visual representation we must acknowledge the importance of wider social and cultural context, moving beyond examining individual representations, or individual reactions to them. Instead, we must conceptualize representations as belonging within ‘regimes’, which are expressed in multiple locations to ultimately reproduce the same relations of power. As Dorow (2006) and Gay y Blasco’s (2012) empirical work shows, photographs of children deemed eligible for adoption operate as part of a complex set of racialized representational practices, in which notions of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ are engaged with by potential adoptive parents. Yet these are representations that are racialized intersectionally – they are shaped by understandings of national identity and connected to long histories of discursive practice. Very similar representational practices occur online today, and so it is necessary to use a theoretical lens that makes space for the complexity of these racialized regimes.

CRT and coloniality

Ali Meghji (2020) argues that value can be taken from using both CRT and decolonial thought together as a theoretical lens. This approach has proved productive for analysing racialized regimes of adoption representations. In the first instance, CRT helps explain some of the costs and behaviours related to adoption in the United States. Bonilla-Silva (1997) argues for a structural understanding of a racial hierarchy in the United States, in which White supremacy remains dominant through the reproduction of racial ideologies and grammars. Although these ideologies and grammars can transform, the relationship between racial categories on a macro-scale remains unchanged. Race, therefore, is much more than prejudice. It is both material and affective, it influences (and even dictates) personal subjectivities and relationships as well as global political economic systems.

Applying this theory to adoption practices can help us to understand the complex adoption marketplace in the United States. Domestic private adoption tends to cost around $40,000 per child (Goodwin, 2010). These costs can vary as they reflect free market principles – it costs more to adopt a White infant or a younger child, for example, because they are in higher demand (Ortiz and Briggs, 2003). State organized adoptions in the United States have fewer economic costs for adoptive parents. Most children in state foster care will have been forcibly removed from their birth families. This forcible removal is a deeply racialized process that reflects long-standing inequalities (Roberts, 2009). Children are likely to be past infancy and could be in sibling groups. They have most likely experienced trauma and may have been diagnosed with physical, emotional and/or behavioural conditions. CRT aids us in understanding that together, the forced removal of children of colour from their birth families by state agencies and the free-market principles that shape private adoption practices are both expressions of the same racialized social system. This is a system that reinforces Whiteness as a position of structural advantage, and continues to create oppression for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour in the United States.

Yet these adoption processes have a long history, and they occur both within the United States and between the United States and other countries where children may be adopted from. ‘Coloniality’ – a term that refers to a wide range of interconnected and global processes and relationships – helps make sense of this wider context. Unlike formal colonialism, which had a historically identifiable beginning and endpoint, coloniality denotes power relations that are not only concerned with the physical exploitation of people and resources over a specific period, but also the epistemic, ontological and affective relations and structures that have outlived formal colonial rule and continue to shape social life (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Meghji, 2020). It is a concept that ‘undrape[s] the underlying logic of all Western (From Spain to England to the US) modern/colonial imperialisms’ (Mignolo, 2017). In all these locations, the system of racialized capitalism that emerged during colonial expansion justified the mass exploitation of African Americans under slavery and people of colour living in countries colonized by European Empires. Despite the ending of these formal systems of rule, the underlying power structures remain.

Applying this theory to adoption practices in the United States can help us understand the complexity of the racialization processes they contain. For example, the amount adoptive parents pay in private domestic adoption directly correlates with the child’s racial identity, with White children costing more to adopt (Goodwin, 2010; Ortiz and Briggs, 2003). Across the literature, different explanations are given for this race-based baby valuing within the United States. Some White adoptive parents hope for a child who ‘looks like’ them so that they can ‘pass’ as a biologically related family. Others may not feel equipped to parent a child of colour (Seligmann, 2013). Whatever the reasons on an individual level, the aggregate result is that higher demand for White children pushes up their price (Goodwin, 2010). Using CRT, we might conclude that this differential pricing is a mechanism that reinforces the classification of bodies and attributes within the ‘racialized social system’ (Bonilla-Silva, 1997).

Yet, thinking historically, we can recognize that the devaluing of African American babies is also linked to the 1970s’ notions of ‘crack babies’ and ‘welfare queens’ which aimed to paint a deeply racialised picture of ‘deviant’ Black mothers and their equally ‘deviant’ offspring (Briggs, 2018; Roberts, 2017). The belief in a self-perpetuating and intergenerational ‘culture of poverty’ focused on individual behaviour and erased structural conditions that made it a challenge to care for a child on a low income in a racially discriminatory America. This justified the forced removal of thousands of African American children from their birth parents and their placement into foster care and adoption (Roberts, 2009). These discourses have a much longer history that stretches back to chattel slavery (Roberts, 2017) and are continuously reflected in online adoption practices in the present.

These same discourses exist within, and affect, transnational adoption practices. Black African children, not affected by the ‘culture of poverty’ and ‘crack babies’ discourse, are discursively characterized through a ‘tenacious, imperialist folk biology of the hardy, resilient and adaptive native who waits for modernist intervention to be fully realized’ (Ortiz & Briggs, 2003: 53–54). This construction is based on the ‘exotification of Africa and colonizing of black wombs’ (Goodwin, 2010: 9). The differential construction of Black children based on their nationality can be understood through an analytic lens that accounts for the complexity of the colonial matrix of power. Using CRT, along with coloniality then, allows for this nuanced understanding of these racialization processes.

Taken together, these theories allow us to recognize that adoption is a type of child transfer that gives extensive choice to adoptive parents, it relies upon free market economic principles (including adoptive parent choice and often transfers of large sums of money) and has at its foundation significant structural inequality between birth mothers and adoptive parents (this inequality is racialized, but also national and classed). These inequalities have a long history and are (re)articulated in representations studied by scholars such as Dorow (2006) and Gay y Blasco (2012). But in today’s context, this (re)articulation also occurs through digital platforms that are built for users and rely upon user engagement for their perpetuation. It is therefore necessary to engage with a methodology which examines these digital platforms directly.

Studying digital platforms: CTDA

Structural relations of power contained within and reproduced through digital platforms are drawn attention to by scholars working in an emerging field that Ruha Benjamin (2019) terms ‘race critical code studies’. Straddling science and technology studies, digital sociology and the sociology of ‘race’ and ethnicity, this scholarship looks to elucidate the relationships between the oppressive power of racism and the structuring (and often hidden) power of digital technology.

By exploring different digital worlds and aspects of digital technology, these scholars show that many aspects of everyday digital technologies act as forms of racialized control; exerting, deepening and reimagining the racialized hierarchies that have structured US society since the first days of settler colonialism (see Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2018; McIlwain, 2020; Noble, 2018). These approaches avoid falling into techno-determinism by drawing attention to the very human choices which shape technological design and use. They prompt us to remember that digital technologies are designed by real people who exist within a cultural system, whose biases and beliefs are often expressed in and through the interfaces and affordances they design (Benjamin, 2019).

These insights and observations have been made by a variety of scholars working over the past two decades. Reviewing Internet studies as a field, Jessie Daniels (2013: 696) reminds us that ‘race and racism persist online in ways that are both new and unique to the Internet, alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms that reverberate both offline and on’. These insights remind us that all elements of Internet design and use have emerged from a longer and wider cultural and social context, that our personal and collective histories and experiences translate into the design of digital platforms and the ways in which we use them.

André Brock’s (2018) CTDA translates these theoretical insights into methodological practice, overcoming the analytic bifurcations created by digital media scholars who differentially conceptualize digital representations, digital interfaces and digital practices. Instead, Brock demonstrates the inseparability of these fields: the actions users take are shaped by (and shape) interface capacity and design, and interface design itself is itself shaped by the cultural beliefs of interface creators. This approach reminds us to ask important questions, such as: who designed the interfaces we are studying? What cultural beliefs and ideologies influenced interfaces affordances? Ultimately, we are asking what is possible and permissible on these digital platforms, as well as why and how these possibilities emerged.

Bringing these insights to bear on adoption practices then, I consider how characterizations of children are constructed on Web 2.0 platforms – digital spaces that are ‘interactive, dynamic, and user-generated’ (McArthur et al., 2018). It is crucial to pay attention to interfaces – the systems on digital devices through which users engage with digitally mediated content, which Frosh (2018: 356) defines as ‘the system by which relations between a user and a device are made visible, executed and experienced’. Rendering interfaces visible is important because users may feel that they are able to view and interact freely with content in digital spaces, but their ability to engage relies upon the interface affordances: that is, what the interface allows or does not allow them to do.

Thinking about representations and interfaces together draws attention to the ways in which the online characterization of children deemed eligible for adoption reproduces racialized regimes of inequality. For example, the different ways in which children in state foster care in the United States and children in institutional care in China are represented in the public domain (how children are photographed, the kinds of personal information that is shared) as well as the different design of websites used to house these representations (how the sites differently archive and display information about the children), work together to shape user experience. Both representations and interface design construct these children as different types of subjects and shape the ways that users can engage with this content.

Methods in practice: digital observation and CTDA

Putting this method into practice involved two years of digital ethnographic observation, with the aim of understanding how digital platforms shape and mediate transnational and transracial adoption in the United States. I spent over 100 hours watching YouTube videos made by adoptive parents who are public figures with followers in the hundreds of thousands and clicking through the links they shared on their profiles. This led to a wide range of different websites, online spaces and communities. Drawing on Madianou and Miller (2013), who argue that digital ethnography should be focused on ‘polymedia’ – how users engage with multiple digital media devices, platforms and apps simultaneously, I tracked and mapped the different sites and platforms that my online research led me to over a two-year period, while keeping a fieldwork journal and writing over 100 pages of reflection.

This was a qualitative exploratory project in which I immersed myself in the online spaces and allowed themes to surface, capturing them by screenshotting and saving over 200 Instagram posts, 50 webpages and transcribing parts of at least 20 YouTube videos. I then conducted an inductive thematic analysis which led me to three characterizations of children that I present here. I use CTDA to analyse both discourses and interfaces visually and textually, with the ultimate aim of placing representational analysis and interface analysis in a structural and historic frame. The screenshots and quotations that I use are single examples of much more widespread phenomena, chosen for this article because they adequately and clearly reflect the key themes that emerged from my research material.

Ethics in practice: standpoint and structure

Brock (2018) states that the methodological value of CTDA is not diminished by perspectival data collection. This prompted me to reflect upon my own standpoint and how my research was a partial exploration shaped by my own perspective.

Although my life is very different to the lives of the adopted children I am studying (and of course, their lives are different from each other), I have experiences moving from a less to a more privileged household and being part of a transracial and transnational family (as a mixed-White British and Afro-Caribbean woman) who grew up between households and two cultures. These experiences have shaped my interests in family formation and how intersecting structural inequalities express themselves in the everyday to effect children’s opportunities and outcomes. I have had no direct access to the children I have studied, but my primary concern has always been how they feel and how they will feel when they become aware of the intersectional oppressions that are reproduced in the digital spaces where they are represented.

A larger ethical problem which my research aims to address is how children are represented online when they are not old enough to consent to such representation. These questions are complicated because I am benefitting from the study of the online representations of these children. These are children who are already marginalized and vulnerable, who do not necessarily know or understand that representations of themselves are being shared online, and do not know that I am conducting research. Yet the data I have collected is in the public domain and has been created with the explicit purpose of being viewed and shared by a large audience. Writing and thinking about these representations is therefore necessary to challenge prevailing policies and social norms that may be placing children at harm. In taking this approach I draw on the Association of Internet Researchers guidelines that state:

When one considers that ethical assessments are always operationalized via some sort of practice (method), and also contextualized institutionally and/or geographically, it becomes clearer that an adaptive, inductive approach can yield potentially more ethically legitimate outcomes than a simple adherence to a set of instantiated rules. (Markham and Buchanan, 2012: 5)

These questions form a significant part (roughly half) of my wider research project and have shaped the structure of the following pages. In the first instance, I look to the work of others. There is precedent set by Gay y Blasco (2012) in studying online adoption narratives, while successfully anonymizing and generalizing so that individual children are not implicated. I draw on and replicate this approach. Furthermore, in an attempt to ameliorate potential harm, I focus on the structure of different websites and how they represent different actors within the adoption process. By focusing on interfaces and discourses I avoid drawing attention to individual children who have not actively consented to their personal information being used in my research. When I do mention individual children, I anonymize as far as possible, using pseudonyms and changing or removing identifiable details. So, instead of me (the writer) and you (the reader) focusing on and thinking about the experiences of particular children, we instead return to this article’s focus: questioning the structural factors that shape these online spaces. I now explore three of the most significant characterizations found using this approach.

Domestic adoption and ‘the categorised child’

My research showed that federal or state-run websites with the purpose of placing children in US foster care with permanent adoptive families had some type of ‘meet the children’ webpage. These pages consist of a number of drop-down menus, enabling potential adoptive parents to indicate the age, gender, ‘race’ and number of children they would be interested in adopting (see Figure 1). Some state-run pages had even more options, allowing the user to indicate whether they would be willing to adopt children with mild, moderate or severe emotional, behavioural or physical difficulties. In some cases, states allow users to include or exclude children who have been sexually abused or have been diagnosed with specific neurodevelopmental disorders (see Figure 2). All of these webpages existed in the public domain, and although some have ‘privacy notices’ these rely completely on the intention and goodwill of the (unknown) user (see Figure 3). At the time of research (2019), I could not find a single government funded site that required password protection or need for the user to log in to the site and make their intentions or identity clear. This means that anyone with an Internet connection who has knowledge of the existence of these sites can ‘browse’ or ‘search’ for personal information about specific children.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A screenshot of the ‘meet the children page’ of a federally funded and administered project which aims to find adoption placements for ‘hard to place’ children. Note the options that allow the user to search on the basis of gender, age, number of children and ‘racial composition’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

A screenshot of the ‘meet the children page’ of a state-run website in the United States which aims to find adoption placements for ‘hard to place’ children. Note the detailed search options on the bottom half of the page.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

A Screenshot of a ‘privacy warning’ from a state administered website. Note the options to ‘browse’ or ‘search’ immediately following the warning.

After analysing these websites I concluded that the digital affordances and discourses reify colonial categorization schemas. This categorization is achieved textually through the consistent and repeated use of the categories of ‘race’ or ‘racial composition’ as well as age, gender and disability – hierarchies borne in colonial rule are thus rearticulated in the present.

Once the user makes their choices and clicks ‘search’, they are presented with images and text about individual children. The user can then scroll through the listings, read more information about specific children by clicking ‘read more’ buttons and also click on buttons labelled ‘contact us’ or ‘enquire now’ to make a direct enquiry about a specific child. When examining these sites, it seemed clear that the interfaces design creates digital experiences where it feels as if the user is ‘shopping’ for a child. ‘Shopping’ for a child on the basis of their characteristics has a much longer history, right back to the early days of settler colonialism and the forced movement of the first enslaved Africans to the United States (King, 2011). The sense of ‘shopping’ in adoption also has a longer non-digital history. In a 2002 documentary, an adoptive father in the United States describes his experience of looking through a folder of children eligible for adoption given to him by an adoption agency. He states,

By kid number 100, we resigned ourselves to the bizarre and depressing process of catalogue shopping for our child. (Symons, 2002)

But in this case, the sense of ‘catalogue shopping’ is activated and intensified as a result of technological capacities and interface design. When we include a consideration of the digital platform, these textual discourses become ‘options’ which a user uses to clarify their interests and desires. The digital structure of these sites works in combination with the textual discourse to actively sort and organize children on the basis of these colonial classificatory schemas. Giving the user the option to search based on these characteristics then, creates a reality in which prospective adoptive parents (or any other site users) are encouraged and are able to organize the digital representations of children on the basis of characteristics that gained significant power in the context of (settler) colonialism and continue to shape social life today.

The inequality inherent in this choosing and organizing is intensified once a user of the site clicks ‘search’ because the images and text about individual children tends to be quite detailed. During my research, I found that at the very least, they included the child’s first name, age, racial identity, details of any disability or health conditions and a photograph that clearly showed the child’s face. They often also included personal details, such as ‘[child’s name] likes playing outside with her brothers’ or ‘[child’s name] will flourish in a family that is able to focus on meeting his [personal/specific/particular] needs’.

At any time, the user can stop and redefine their choices, narrowing or broadening the number of children that they are presented with by using the dropdown menu options. This process creates a particular power dynamic between the user of the interface and the children that are listed. This power dynamic is intensified by the fact that site users are not only able to view information about the listed children but are able to define and refine what kind of children they would like to see. The children are thus categorized, on the basis of colonial hierarchies, through both discourse and interface design. If we place these discourses and the structural design of these digital spaces in a longer history, it becomes clear that they are an iteration of wider and deeper structural power relations.

Turning to consider the broader social conditions which these interfaces and textual discourses are reflecting and reproducing, the concept of ‘hypervisibility’ is productive, because the combination of interface design and discourse on these sites contributes to the unequal privacy and surveillance of Black bodies. Social theorists have explored how new digital technologies work to unequally classify and make visible Black bodies in the US context. Charlton McIlwain (2020), for example, explains that there have been multiple connections in policy and practice between computational technology and the surveillance of Black people in the United States since the 1960s. Benjamin (2019) characterizes this ‘coded bias and imagined objectivity’ as ‘The New Jim Code’ arguing that digital innovation enables racialized containment. She argues that ‘coded exposure’ – the hypervisibility of Black bodies in digital spaces – incorporates anti-Blackness into technological systems by putting such bodies at risk.

This argument can be applied to the children in foster care whose personal details are shared online. During my research, I found that intimate details about children most in demand in US adoption – healthy newborns and infants – are never shared publicly. Instead, it is only children in foster care who are characterized by state or federal government as ‘hard to place’ or ‘special needs’ that have intimate details shared about them in the public domain. Children are characterized as ‘hard to place’ for a number of reasons – age, membership in a sibling group, disabilities or health conditions and ‘racial identity’ all contribute. There is non-digital precedent for these decisions: the Adoption Promotion act, for example, a federal piece of legislation passed in 1996, afforded a $6000 tax breaks to parents adopting children with ‘special needs’. In this legislation, Black children were categorized as ‘special needs’ on the basis of their racial identity (Ortiz and Briggs, 2003).

Thinking about these websites in this context then, we can consider the discursive construction of the children whose details are shared on these websites by the US government as ‘special needs’ or ‘hard to place’. These children may not all be Black, but the use ‘special needs’ or ‘hard to place’ function as types of racial grammars (Bonilla-Silva, 2015) that place such children into the proximity of Blackness. The privacy of such ‘categorized children’ is then denied – using Benjamin’s (2019) language, they are made ‘hypervisible’ – their images and personal information are made visible for any Internet user who accesses these sites. Some of the most marginalized children in the United States are therefore further marginalized.

This marginalization is furthered by descriptions that disconnect the children from their birth families, their histories and the structural factors that may have contributed to their placement in foster care. The federally administered US website, for example, explains that

Like all children in foster care, the children registered on [this site] have been placed into foster care because they have been abused or neglected.

This statement does not account for any of the structural forces that can contribute to ‘abuse’, ‘neglect’ or the forced removal of children from their birth families. Briggs (2018: 105) explains,

nearly all children in the [foster care] system have been taken involuntarily from their impoverished, often nonwhite mothers (or fathers) who are being punished for something – most commonly poor housing or some other kind of neglect that may or may not be essentially just the bad luck of being poor. Foster care is the very definition of reproductive coercion, and, as many have argued, works together with adoption to transfer children from poor, usually racially minoritized mothers to whiter and wealthier ones.

But these structural inequalities are not acknowledged on these sites. Instead, the hypervisibility and classification of these children act as mechanisms through which racialized relations of power are reproduced, and conditions of coloniality are continued.

Transnational adoption: ‘the waiting child’

The divorcing of children from the structures that have led to them being placed for adoption are intensified further in the portrayal of children eligible for transnational adoption. Here, I examine how the discourse of the ‘waiting child’ is articulated on web 2.0 platforms. I argue that interface affordances intensify the cultural ideology and the symbolic value that this discourse of ‘waiting’ creates.

My research has found that ‘waiting child listings’ are created by transnational adoption agencies or religious organizations who collate images and information about children eligible for adoption into the United States. These listings are in the public domain, shared on individual agency or charity websites and also often shared by individual women connected to these communities on their social media channels. In the first instance, discursively characterizing children as ‘waiting’ renders them alone, isolated and without social relations. It makes invisible the structural factors that have led such children to be eligible for adoption and instead orients them towards potential adoptive patents. In these listings, children are further oriented towards potential adoptive parents through the use of Euro-American ‘advocacy’ names that aim to make them appeal to an audience in the United States. Like in domestic child listings, the ‘waiting child’ listings also contain photographs and intimate details about individual children.

However, there are differences in how children eligible for transnational adoption are characterized. ‘Waiting child’ listings are more closely related to the trope of ‘the waif’, traced by Briggs (2003). She examines how children eligible for transnational adoption were represented in US popular culture in the 1950s, arguing that ‘the waif’ became a trope with huge symbolic value, relying upon children photographed alone and outside the space of the home. This trope works ‘through a logic of incompleteness. An infant alone is a disturbing picture. We long to solve the narrative problem it presents us, to pick the child up and comfort it’ (Briggs, 2003: 185). Just as Briggs describes, the ‘waiting children’ I observed in my research are photographed alone, central to the image and often looking up at the camera in institutional care settings. Representational regimes that divorce children from material and structural conditions are therefore created not only through the use of the word ‘waiting’ but also in how such children are photographed.

This separation from structure is intensified by the descriptions that accompany the photographs. Part of one description, for example, reads:

We know [this child] will only grow stronger with the love and support of a forever family. We are so proud of how much she has already progressed since entering care!

This discourse relies upon what Oritz and Briggs (2003: 53–54) describe as the ‘tenacious, imperialist folk biology of the hardy, resilient and adaptive native who waits for modernist intervention to be fully realised’. This appeal for an American family to improve the child’s life supports the underpinning American exceptionalism and liberal internationalism, a cultural ideology contained and reproduced within transnational adoption practices (Briggs, 2003).

Like Briggs’ trope of the waif then, the digital characterization of the ‘waiting child’ works to further ‘an ideology of rescue by white people of non-white people’ (Briggs, 2003: 180–181). This rescue relies upon a normalization of structural inequality, which is reflected in how potential adoptive parents respond to representations of the ‘waiting child’ online. The quote below, transcribed from an adoptive mother’s YouTube video, demonstrates this:

I had felt that the Lord was telling me that I had a daughter and her name was going to be Anne [. . .] that had been in the summer of [year 1] . . . in [year 2] I was scrolling through Facebook one day and I saw a little girl being advocated for by a friend of mine and her name was Annie and I was like ‘Oh my Gosh, that’s so cute, I love Annie that’s so close to Anne obviously’, and so we ended up deciding to look at her file and everything with China [. . .] and I put two and two together that she shared a birthday with me and then all of a sudden I stopped in my tracks and was like ‘wait a minute, she was born in [year 1], that is the same month and year that I felt God was telling me I had daughter named Anne’ [. . .] So we knew right away that she was meant to be our daughter, and it’s just crazy to me how that happens you know [. . .] God orchestrated all of the details after that so we could come together at just the right moment.

This quote allows us to trace the impact of a ‘waiting child’ listing, shared on a social media platform, and noticed by an adoptive mother when she was ‘scrolling through Facebook one day’. She explains that she connected to the image because of the child’s advocacy name and as a result of this she made the decision to enquire about the adoption of this specific child. She also links her decision to her Christian belief. This quotation shows how the mother does not reference the structural factors that led to the adoption taking place. Instead, it is ‘God’ that ‘orchestrated all the details’. The discursive trope of the waiting child, the use of an advocacy names and the fact that webpages containing such discourses can be shared on social media platforms, actively divorce such children from the structural conditions which mean they are deemed eligible for adoption into the United States. Such structural factors have a long history, and are context and country specific, but ultimately, they rely upon fundamental inequalities between birth and adoptive parents.

Moments of transition: ‘Gotcha Day’ and ‘the captured child’

Children are also characterized in a key moment of transition – when they legally become the children of their adoptive parents. I use the word ‘captured’ here as a provocation. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition is 1: ‘to take into one’s possession or control by force’ and 2. ‘[to] record accurately in words or pictures’ (Lexico Dictionaries, 2020). Both definitions can be applied to ‘Gotcha Day’ videos which are created and shared by adoptive parents on YouTube. These videos, like the other characterizations of children, do not take into account relevant structural factors. Instead, the adoptive parents create a narrative from their perspective.

‘Gotcha Day’ videos occupy a key location within my research because they are made by a large number of US families with adopted children: a search on YouTube in 2019 for this term resulted in over 60,000 results, the first 200 of which were ‘Gotcha Day’ videos of adopted children. The videos all follow a particular narrative arc, documenting the day that adoptive parents first meet their child (in transnational adoption) or the day in which domestic adoptions are legalized. They start with footage of the potential adoptive parents, they express the parents’ desire to adopt, usually through text on screen, and then show the family travelling to meet the child, the moment the parents and child meet, then the child in distress, then child travelling back to the United States and the family looking happy back at ‘home’. The fathers mostly film the video, the mother stars. In domestic adoption, the videos show the family travelling to the courthouse, the climax is the moment where the judge declares the child officially adopted (the child is usually sitting on the mother’s knee), and then the family is travelling home.

The phrase ‘Gotcha Day’ was used before the videos began being made and uploaded to YouTube. Sociologists have noted the coloniality that this discourse contains. Dubinsky (2008: 340), for example, explains that the phrase ‘produces its own kind of common-sense rationalized kidnap narrative. Children move from south to north, east to west, poor to rich, brown to white’. For Bacchiddu (2015: 512) ‘public ceremonies and new rites of passage such as the “Gotcha day” [. . .] project an impression of children as commodities to be exchanged’. Like the tropes of the waiting and the classified child then, the discourse of ‘Gotcha Day’ obscures the structural conditions that lead to adoption. It also normalizes the global social inequalities, borne from colonial systems of oppression, that mean children are often transferred to White middle-class families in the United States from birth parents of colour likely living in poverty in the United States or in variety of global locations.

This normalization of inequality is intensified through the interface capacities of YouTube because ‘Gotcha Day’ content in digital adoption space is made indexical as a result of a common phrase in each video title. This makes the videos easily searchable and also affects the suggestions made to users by the YouTube algorithm which recommends more ‘Gotcha Day’ videos after a user watches one. I experienced this algorithmic tendency myself during my research and noted comments by viewers who state that they enjoy watching multiple ‘Gotcha Day’ videos, recommended to them by the YouTube algorithm, because of the affective responses they prompt – such viewers report crying at the adoption of children into American families. To unpack this response, I turn to Amaro (2019) who asserts that the social world is mirrored in technology. He states that inequalities are reproduced by the representational inclusion of Blackness in technological systems, which only ostensibly disrupts racialized power structures. This insight can be applied to ‘Gotcha Day’ videos, where White American viewers cry at the ‘rescue’ of children of colour by White American parents. Although such children of colour may be afforded value in these videos, the videos as a genre ultimately further discourses of racialized American exceptionalism.

Furthermore, the indexical nature of ‘Gotcha Day’ videos advances American exceptionalism by transforming ‘Gotcha Day’ videos collectively into a digital space for social memory. The YouTube search function allows users to search directly for ‘Gotcha Day’ content. When this search is carried out users can access a digital space (the search page of YouTube) in which transracial and transnational adoption is celebrated, repeated and normalized. There are parallels between these interface capacities and Mills’ (2017) argument for selective social memory, in which the collective memories of White culture justify the oppression of Black peoples in the United States. Mills explains that these memories are inscribed in textbooks, national holidays and monuments, which aim to define and reify what the dominant group believe to be important. These insights can be applied to ‘Gotcha Day’ videos. Each video is an individual piece of memory making which records the moments in which a child is legally adopted. But as well as celebrating individual adoptions, the ‘Gotcha Day’ search page is similar to any other collective monument – taken together, the individual videos form a collective space which celebrates adoption as an institution and reifies and normalizes all the inequalities it contains.

Conclusion: children classified

In this article, I have looked at how children eligible for adoption are characterized in domestic and transnational searching spaces and within ‘Gotcha Day’ videos that document and represent the process in which adoption is legalized. In doing this work, I have been most influenced by CTDA, an approach developed by André Brock (2018: 1014), who argues for ‘evaluating technologies as an assemblage of artifacts, practices and cultural beliefs’. CTDA aims not to divorce the cultural beliefs and practices of digital platform creators and users from the content that is being created and engaged with on these platforms. Instead, it draws attention to the fundamentally interconnected and co-constituting relationship between the designers of social media platforms, the users of the platforms, the content that is created and shared, the way the content is interacted with, and the wider cultural beliefs and values that shape platform design and use. CTDA, therefore, leads to a simultaneous interrogation of digital interfaces, the representations and discourses on the interface and the practices and cultural ideologies of users.

I argue that children in US foster care are classified most explicitly. The interfaces and discourses on federal and state-run searching sites quite literally allow potential adoptive parents to define the type of child they would like to adopt based on categories borne from colonialism. Children eligible for transnational adoption are characterized by discourses that orient them towards potential adoptive parents. Their classification as ‘waiting children’ erases the structural factors that led to their placement in institutional care. Children in ‘Gotcha Day’ videos are grouped together through their inclusion in a genre of content that occupies an indexical space on YouTube. The videos create a digital space in which ideologies of American exceptionalism are celebrated. These children, therefore, are differentially constructed depending on a variety of discourses and interface capacities. However, underpinning this differential construction is a subscription to colonial notions of classifying and organizing. In all of the cases I have examined, the children are characterized in ways that orient them towards potential adoptive parents. And in each case, the classificatory schemes used to define and organize these children stem from systems of belief borne from coloniality. Such systems rely on notions of ‘race’, ‘nationality’ and the role of the United States (and by extension, of adoptive parents within the United States) as classifier, organizer and rescuer.

By examining this empirical case then, I have aimed to show the complexity of the processes that reproduce structural power in digital spaces, as well as the importance of paying attention to interfaces and thinking intersectionally. Structural racism and coloniality endure and are reproduced through both the design of digital platforms as well as the representations and discourses shared on such platforms. Colonial power structures are reproduced through website design, photographic representations and written discourses which differentially and hierarchically characterize children eligible for adoption. These tropes are racialized but are also deeply intersectional – affected by and affecting understandings of gender, religion, class, age, sexuality, nationality and disability. In making these arguments I am ultimately arguing for a connected sociological approach that thinks across time, across social contexts – connecting racial systems of oppression with the United States to processes of racialization across the globe, and across different elements of digital media – the design of platforms, their use and the effects of such use.