Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy Adoption
What do we see when comparing the “proxy” of proxy wars to that of proxy adoption: the practice of adopting children in foreign courts in absentia through a designated representative? This essay tracks the imbrication of proxy logics as they surfaced during the Korean War, exploring how the imbalances of these proxy relationships became occluded, overwritten, and ultimately naturalized by imperatives of rescue and care. The aim here is not to prove any causal link, but rather to ask what insights we might glean when reading these two forms of “standing in for” together and against each other, especially as representational strategies. At their heart is a concern over what it means to conduct the business of war at a distance: whether its war-making or its caretaking; its hand-to-hand combat or its humanitarian aid.
If proxy adoption is meant to redeem the violence of proxy wars, what is striking about this formulation is how familial substitution is meant to repair the child’s relinquishment, a wound itself created and conditioned by war. What distinguishes the migration of adoptees from that of other immigrants is precisely this enfolding into the American family: a narrative that requires the adoptee to accept their adoptive family not as proxies for their birth family, but as their very own. This is the founding fiction of adoption, a mode of intimate violence that refuses to admit the traumas of adoption well as its enabling structures of war, poverty, racism, and reproductive injustice. In doing so, adoption continues to rely on the proxy logic so crucial to the moment of its formation: the idea that work done by proxy can effect the work of the original, even as it displaces it or stands in for it. But it also simultaneously erases the proxy relationship, which gets overwritten by the rhetoric of rescue, sentimentalism, colorblindness, or multiculturalism. The secondary becomes naturalized as the primary: its substitution, forgotten. The substitutive violence of proxy wars thus continues through transnational adoption, with the self-erasing proxy as its final and perhaps most violent stage.
Representations 163 (Summer 2023), special issue on “Proxy Wars”
Access a copy here (until September 15, 2023)
[image: “War—And a Child’s Wound,” The Mirror and Daily News, April 27, 1955]