”IDAG ÄR JAG LIKA MYCKET SVENSK SOM CHILENARE” En antropologisk studie om stulna adopterades upplevelser av identitet och utanförskap i Sverige

Abstract

In recent years, revelations about illegal international adoptions have made headlines around the world, and one notable country where many illegal adoptions have been facilitated is Chile. To find out that one's adoption wasn’t facilitated legally is a shock for the individual that raises many new questions about themselves and their origins. This study intends to examine how the identity of stolen adoptees has changed in their adulthood after they have found out that they were stolen, as well as to investigate how they experience alienation in Sweden from their position as both stolen and non-white adoptees. Qualitative methods have been employed in this study: participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and informal interviews. The fieldwork was conducted at the beginning of 2024 for 10 weeks with four stolen adoptees, where I participated in their everyday lives. The study’s central concepts of Bourdieu’s habitus, white fragility, bureaucratic violence, and racialization have been used to analyze the empirical data. The main finding is that the adoptees construct their identity as an essentialist bifurcation of being “Swedish” and “Chilean”. These notions also translate into the informants’ sense of kin and the making of kinship. It is indicative of how they reconcile their stolen identities in which biological kinship was broken off by illegal adoption. Identifying themselves as “Swedish” and “Chilean” is part of the process of “making kin” in this particular case. The stolen adoptees are also facing discrimination in everyday life, such as racialization and not being believed about their illegal adoption history. Higher institutions, such as Adoptionscentrum and the Swedish government, maintain bureaucratic violence against the stolen adoptees, which has negative consequences for this minority group. These aspects of discrimination effectively cause alienation. This study is written in Swedish.