‘A wondrous adventure’: mutuality and individuality in Internet adoption narratives

In this article, I analyse the narratives that American adopters of Chinese children put up on Internet family websites in the early 2000s. I focus on what these narratives reveal about the complex articulation of notions of kinship and of individuality in twenty-first-century America. These website accounts illustrate both the relational nature of middle-class American individualism and its embeddedness in a deeply racialized world-view and a political economy of desire that turns Chinese children into vehicles for the assertion of American personal and communal selves.