White Australian adoptive mothers’ understandings of birth cultures and families

Abstract

This paper reports an analysis of interviews conducted with ten white Australian women who had undertaken intercountry adoption. The paper begins with an overview of how issues of culture play out within discourses of intercountry adoption in general, and how this occurs specifically in Australian policy in regards to intercountry adoption. The analysis highlights how the interviewees were in many ways inculcated in broader Australian discourses of intercountry adoption, as much as in some instances attempting to resist this. The paper concludes by discussing how it might be possible for white adoptive mothers in Australia to do other than remain complicit with marginalizing accounts of adoptive children's birth cultures and parents.