| At writing, approximately 70,000 Chinese children have been adopted by American citizens. Given that the vast majority of these children are girls adopted by White parents, of interest is the gendered and racialized ethno-cultural incongruence in China adoptive families. Drawing on original data gleaned from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 91 American China adopters, this dissertation examines how parents bridge this incongruence by identifying with the ethno-cultural heritage of their ethnic-Chinese children. By describing and retrodicting four of the broad practices that constitute China adoptive parents' Chinese cultural identifications, this dissertation also reveals why China adoptive parents can and do make ethnic claims across racialized and primordialized ethno-cultural boundaries. In doing so, this dissertation extends, qualifies, and critiques new sociological theories on the increasing flexibility and fluidity of ethno-cultural/ethno-racial identities; revealing how actors' ethno-cultural boundary crossings are mediated by and/or expressed through a number of structural, categorical, and processual variables. |
