Origins, Searches, and Identity
Narratives of Adoption from China
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920536 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Margaret Homans (Yale University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 59-79 |
| Publication date | 2007-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpm020 |
| OpenAlex | W2020582372 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 4 |
This essay discusses fictional and autobiographical narratives by contemporary women who, in representing searches for the origins of adopted children from China, explore urgent issues raised by contemporary feminist theory today. Adoption, like “queer,” names a social practice and a social condition that provides fresh insights into what it means to be human. Although, among scholars, adoption has been of greatest interest to those personally involved and to social scientists who study it under such particularizing rubrics as reproductive technology, kinship studies, or globalization, I want to argue for its broader significance for all those interested in thinking about identity in both its psychological and its social and political dimensions. Like Donna Haraway's cyborg, the figure of the adoptee reveals that no one, adopted or not, can sustain an organic connection to an origin. And yet the adoptee, unlike the cyborg, is uniquely expected to pursue a “quest for identity” by seeking access to his or her “origins,” which are usually represented as materialized in a place or embodied in a person. Adoptees are peculiarly burdened, in popular adoption culture, with this obligation to find, know, and grasp material origins. They are compelled to narrate their lives in terms of one particular quest plot. I would like to see this plot loosen its grip on adoptees, adoptive parents, and adoption professionals and scholars. Addressing here the case of adoptive origins in China, I argue that in Emily Prager's Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China and in Gish Jen's The Love Wife the quest for literal origins ultimately gives way to an understanding of the figurative—indeed, fantasmatic—nature of origins. In these works and other to which I compare them, the search for an unavailable origin compels imaginative work that itself constitutes identity
Aesthetics · Art · China · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Child Welfare and Adoption · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Law
Search and Reunification
Why Can’t Orphans Play Baseball? Writing Into the Primal Wound
Letting Her Go
Relationships without Borders
Assessing Community Connectedness and Self-Regard in a Mid-Life Follow-up of British Chinese Adoptions
Constructing Identities and Issues of Race in Transnational Adoption
Paradoxical Essentialism
Kinship Within the Context of New Genetics
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,57 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2023 (12) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |