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Revisiting the Right to Know: The Transnational Adoptee and the Moral Economy of ‘Return’

ABSTRACT In this article I examine regulatory regimes of mobility through the case of transnational adoption. In particular, I focus on ‘return’ journeys by adoptees and their entanglement the ‘right to know’. Backed up by international law, the right to know in the adoption context includes the right to know one’s biological parents, one’s birth culture, and the right to information (for instance, medical information). At large, the ‘right to know’ signals a valuation of openness. But what are the problems that come with knowledge and information? What does the imperative of openness do to kinship relations? Looking at a number of instances where institutions discuss the necessities and implications of return journeys, I demonstrate in this article that ‘the right to know’ is inextricably linked to moral economies of kinship. Returns make visible the transaction of adoption and the exchangeability of the adoptee body. I discuss how adoptees are implicated in this moral economy but also how they, as subjects, negotiate, destabilise, or refuse openness as imperative. I argue that in the end, while the ‘right to know’ allows the discovery of relations, it also fails to acknowledge the invention of relations.