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This article attempts to initiate a critical dialogue on the politics of love and attachment by investigating the way in which the concept of attachment governs the field of transnational adoption. We take our starting point in an analysis of a collection of background articles, teaching materials, and interviews produced by child psychologists as well as instructions to and testimonies from adopters. Reading the material through Sara Ahmed's notion of affective orientation and Lauren Berlant's critical deconstruction of love, we argue that the texts popularize and instrumentalize John Bowlby's framework of attachment theory in ways that connect attachment to specific notions of love. Even though the aim seems to be the strengthening of intimate familial ties in adoptive families and ensuring feelings of kinship and security for the adoptee, the notion of attachment-as-love simultaneously organizes a narrative logic that positions the adoptee in a deadlock between pathologization and the demand for affective assimilation into the adoptive family. Our reading seeks to invite a more critical approach to notions of the attachment paradigm as an idealized route to affective belonging and psychological well-being for adoptees. ; publishedVersion

From 2002 to 2018, Denmark was the only country in the world to enforce a migration law demanding that couples seeking family reunification in Denmark documented their combined "attachment" to the Danish nation. This article investigates the practice of documenting such national attachment through the so-called "application packets". Investigating the attachment requirement as a migration political tool with affective investments and implications, we suggest that the documentation process can be understood as a performative process in which the application packets lay out a trajectory of "happy objects" (Ahmed 2010): the application, family reunification, a residence permit and ultimately the nation itself. Although the applicants are urged to orient themselves towards the Danish nation as a happy object with the promise of a possible future in Denmark, this promise may have cruel implications for the applicants. Suggesting that an interdisciplinary meeting point between the fields of migration studies and cultural/discursive studies may form as fruitful, this article invites readers to think about the biopolitics of border control in affective terms ; From 2002 to 2018, Denmark was the only country in the world to enforce a migration law demanding that couples seeking family reunification in Denmark documented their combined "attachment" to the Danish nation. This article investigates the practice of documenting such national attachment through the socalled "application packets". Investigating the attachment requirement as a migration political tool with affective investments and implications, we suggest that the documentation process can be understood as a performative process in which the application packets lay out a trajectory of "happy objects" (Ahmed 2010): the application, family reunifi cation, a residence permit and ultimately the nation itself. Although the applicants are urged to orient themselves towards the Danish nation as a happy object with the promise of a possible future in Denmark, this promise may have cruel implications for the applicants. Suggesting that an interdisciplinary meeting point between the fields of migration studies and cultural/discursive studies may form as fruitful, this article invites readers to think about the biopolitics of border control in affective terms

From 2002 to 2018, Denmark was the only country in the world to enforce a migration law demanding that couples seeking family reunification in Denmark documented their combined "attachment" to the Danish nation. This article investigates the practice of documenting such national attachment through the so-called "application packets". Investigating the attachment requirement as a migration political tool with affective investments and implications, we suggest that the documentation process can be understood as a performative process in which the application packets lay out a trajectory of "happy objects" (Ahmed 2010): the application, family reunifi cation, a residence permit and ultimately the nation itself. Although the applicants are urged to orient themselves towards the Danish nation as a happy object with the promise of a possible future in Denmark, this promise may have cruel implications for the applicants. Suggesting that an interdisciplinary meeting point between the fields of migration studies and cultural/discursive studies may form as fruitful, this article invites readers to think about the biopolitics of border control in affective terms

This special issue of NJMR contributes to the field of Nordic migration research by investigating the intersections between migration, affect and biopolitics. Affective biopolitics is a term that grapples with how the construction, policing and maintenance of borders increasingly occur through the structuring and production of emotion or 'affects'. The point is not that affect replaces racism as the caesura between life and death (Foucault 2003). Rather, affective biopolitics examines the connections between affect and racism (Ahmed 2000, 2004b, 2010) which allow for bio- and necropower (Mbembe 2003) to expose some populations to death while other populations are afforded mobility and access to rights and resources.