Building on precarious knowledge: The governing of family formation through matching practice in transnational adoption

Abstract This article explores matching as a psycho-pedagogical technology of child placement in transnational adoption. Drawing on empirical data and theoretical linkages to governmentality and biopolitics, I argue how the production of transnationally powerful knowledge becomes a crucial strategy in attempts to bridge contingencies, to manage risk and to legitimize action and decision-making. Professional judgment builds on knowledge produced through classification, categorization, flexibilization and redefinition of categories applied to govern bodies and family formation. This entails ethical interventions such as regulating the possibility to choose a desired (ethnicized, gendered, non-/psychologized, non-/medicalized) child available for adoption. Thereby, technologies of guidance are geared towards the assessment of parenting and coping capacities, moral conduct and “intercultural qualification” for adoption. As will be shown, matching becomes a matter of knowing for both professionals and prospective parents.