Dar uma criança a uma família ou uma família a uma criança? O mercado contestado da adoção

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the issue of Adoption, establishing a dialogue between the adoption of children and adolescents with economic sociology. A reflection is proposed the existence of a contested market within these social practices. Adoption as an alternative to obtain the "gift", is treated as an "unpaid market", rooted in relationships of compassion, altruism and friendship. We seek to understand the processes and relationships that enabled the emergence and its current formatting in Brazil, guided by the following question: how did the Adoption practices arise and were configured in Brazil? For this, we take as a theoretical reference sociological approaches that make it possible to understand the dynamics, stability, and change in organizations. In line with contemporary aspects of economic sociology and sociology of organizations, knowing how the moral and cultural references markedly “non-economic” have influenced the dynamics of adoption. We focus on the dynamics of the shock between the bases of judgment and the attribution of legitimacy and the dominant forms of rationality in the field of adoption. Adoption as a social practice has been consolidated over the centuries as an instrument that allowed couples who did not have children the opportunity to establish their families. The Church and the State were at the forefront of intermediation between those who “gave children” and those “looking for children”, starting from the assumptions of charity to that of social well-being. Currently, the State has consolidated itself as the intermediary institution capable of linking these two realities and deciding the situation of several children and adolescents who await in their shelters the crowning of their destinies. The method used in this work was qualitative research, with documentary analysis of posters and folders from the campaigns of different organizations that work in the adoption of children and adolescents in Brazil from 2015 to 2019; and analysis of speeches in posts / comments by two secret groups about adoption, linked to a social network. From the results, the study made it possible to compress the formatting and meaning of the adoption practices of children and adolescents in Brazil, mainly from the perspective of the grantees involved in this process, in which the situation experienced is waiting, bureaucratic and biased by subjective meanings. We conclude that a perspective of adopting children and adolescents has a specific social construction, with its own culture and, therefore, it deserves to be considered in its specific features.