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Genealogy
Special Issues
Transnational and/or Transracial Adoption and Life Narratives
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Transnational and/or Transracial Adoption and Life Narratives

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 October 2023) | Viewed by 8266

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Lena Ahlin

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Humanities, Högskolan Kristianstad, 29188 Kristianstad, Sweden
Interests: adoption; life narratives; racialization; belonging; nostalgia; collective memory; affect
Dr. Maria Freij

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Humanities, Högskolan Kristianstad, 29188 Kristianstad, Sweden
Interests: childhood landscape; nostalgia; imagery; memory; poetry and poetics; Lars Gustafsson; alienation; food

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, we have seen a memoir boom, with a demand for “authentic” stories, as well as a growing public debate around transnational adoption. Many adult adopted persons are engaged in debates about children’s rights and the possible end of international adoption. Common outlets for adoptee experiences are the memoirs written by adopted persons in which they tell their side of the story of international adoption; other examples include documentary films, essays, short stories, poems, and online fora. Search narratives are a fundamental component of adoption life narratives, and in the case of transnational adoption, this usually includes a return journey to the country of birth. Adoption life narratives may be read in the light of human rights discourses, and several transnational adoptees are activists themselves, who, in their work, address the practice of closed adoptions; adoptions carried out under the pretense of orphanhood; rigid norms of gender and sexuality, as well as global economic inequality.

This Special Issue invites essays on the topic of “Transnational/transracial adoption in life narratives.” We seek contributions from scholars from a range of fields that include, but are not limited to, literature, film studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, and anthropology. What previously silenced voices are articulated in contemporary life narratives of transnational and/or transracial adoption, and what alternative histories of the late 20th and early 21st century do they offer? What is the relationship between the private life narrative and public debate? What interventions have adoption life narratives made, or what might be their effect on adoption policies? What role does form play for adoption life narratives?

The representation of the search for kinship also provides fertile ground for explorations of how adoption narratives challenge dominant norms of heterosexual reproduction and biological family ties; relationships within the adoption triangle; the role of gender in the global patterns of domination of which transnational adoption is a part; and the extent to which adoption life narratives address the end of transnational adoption, topics that have emerged in recent scholarly and public debate. This Special Issue aims to include papers addressing these and other topical questions within the growing field of adoption studies.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative completion schedule:

  • Abstract submission deadline: 1 February 2023
  • Notification of abstract acceptance: 1 March 2023
  • Full manuscript deadline: 1 August 2023

Dr. Lena Ahlin
Dr. Maria Freij
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • transnational and/or transracial adoption and its related topics
  • life narratives
  • identity, alienation, otherness
  • kinship
  • search narratives
  • closed adoptions
  • gender roles
  • multiculturalism
  • challenges to the heteronormative family
  • activism
  • global systems of inequality
  • memoirs and multimodality

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 290 KiB  
Article
Can First Parents Speak? A Spivakean Reading of First Parents’ Agency and Resistance in Transnational Adoption
by Atamhi Cawayu and Hari Prasad Sacré
Genealogy 2024, 8(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8010008 - 15 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1624
Abstract
This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors [...] Read more.
This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals. Filling in this gap, we discuss the search strategies employed by first families in Bolivia who desire a reunion with their child. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s feminist postcolonial theory, we analyse ethnographic fieldwork with fourteen first families in Bolivia. We read how the agency of first parents, severely limited by the loss of legal rights through the adoption system, is caught in a double bind of dependency and possibility. While hegemonic adoption discourse portrays first parents as passive and consenting to the adoption system, the results of our study complicate this picture. Moreover, we argue that the search activity of the first parents can be read as a claim and request to revise and negotiate their consent to transnational adoption. Ultimately, we read first parents’ search efforts as resistance to the closed nature of the adoption system, which restricts them in their search for their children. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transnational and/or Transracial Adoption and Life Narratives)
15 pages, 432 KiB  
Article
Brothers Home and the Production of Vanished Lives
by Eli Park Sorensen
Genealogy 2023, 7(4), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040101 - 18 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1440
Abstract
This article delves into the history of one of the most infamous internment facilities in Korea’s recent past—Hyungje Bokjiwon (형제복지원), or Brothers Home. The article outlines the history of Brothers Home, its biopolitical production of ‘vanished lives’, and what enabled it to come [...] Read more.
This article delves into the history of one of the most infamous internment facilities in Korea’s recent past—Hyungje Bokjiwon (형제복지원), or Brothers Home. The article outlines the history of Brothers Home, its biopolitical production of ‘vanished lives’, and what enabled it to come into existence—arguing that this is an essential context for understanding the history of international adoption from Korea. Located in Busan, South Korea, Brothers Home began as an orphanage in the early 1960s but developed into a ‘social welfare institution’ in the early 1970s. The events that transpired from the early 1970s until the facility shut down in the late 1980s—a period which aligns with the height of international adoption from Korea—have led to some referring to this place as Korea’s ‘concentration camp’. Inmates died in the hundreds, predominantly due to malnutrition and illness, while many suffered brutal deaths through physical abuse and torture. Some of the children from Brothers Home were relocated to Western nations for adoption. The history of Brothers Home embodies the biopolitical process of bodies and lives simultaneously enveloped in and, at the same time, kept outside socio-legal frameworks to invalidate those lives or render them insignificant or invisible; to erase them from any meaningful, socio-legal context and thereby reducing those lives to bare life. The article will focus on three main areas: the history of Brothers Home, the biopolitical production of vanished lives, and how the latter resonates with specific instances depicted in testimonies written by people returning to Korea to uncover details about their adoption circumstances, that is, moments encapsulating this ‘production of vanished lives’. The central concern here is less to draw a direct line between international adoption and the events at Brothers Home, but rather to outline a crucial biopolitical context—epitomized in the history of Brothers Home—that precedes the adoption process and thus constitutes its condition of possibility. By juxtaposing this biopolitical context with autobiographical testimonies of people searching for information about the circumstances of their adoption, the article seeks to understand what it means to bear witness to the existence of a life whose desubjectivization—or disappearance—at the same time constitutes the witnessing subject’s condition of possibility. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transnational and/or Transracial Adoption and Life Narratives)
13 pages, 286 KiB  
Article
Transracial Adoption, Memory, and Mobile, Processual Identity in Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road
by Pirjo Ahokas
Genealogy 2023, 7(4), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040093 - 25 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1184
Abstract
Representations of adoptions tend to concentrate on normatively conceived forms of identity, which prioritize the genetic lineage of adoptees. In contrast, scholarship on autobiographical writing emphasizes that identities are not fixed but are always in process and intersectional because they are formed in [...] Read more.
Representations of adoptions tend to concentrate on normatively conceived forms of identity, which prioritize the genetic lineage of adoptees. In contrast, scholarship on autobiographical writing emphasizes that identities are not fixed but are always in process and intersectional because they are formed in within inequal power relations. Kay’s experimental, autobiographical narrative Red Dust Road (2010) tackles the themes of adoption, the search for close relatives, and reunion. Many scholars of her autobiographical writings describe the fluidity of the diasporic adoptee identities created by her. My aim is more specific: I examine what I call Kay’s continuously mobile, processual identity construction as a transracial adoptee in Red Dust Road. I argue that her identity formation, which is also intersectional, is interconnected with her multidirectional networks of attachments and the experimental form of her adoption narrative. In addition to an intersectional approach and autobiographical studies, I draw on insights from adoption studies. In my reading of Kay’s work, I pay special attention to the inequalities derived from the intersecting vectors of adoption and race, which also intersect with other dimensions of difference, such as nation, gender, class, and sexual orientation. I employ the notion of the multidirectional in the sense in which McLeod applies it to the study of adoption writing. As I demonstrate, multidirectionality and the complex form of Red Dust Road provide versatile means of conveying Kay’s fragmented acts of memory, which assist her ongoing mobile, processual identity construction. Her multidirectional lines of transformative attachments finally bond her to her adoptive and biogenetic families as well as other affective connections. While Kay’s socially significant narrative indicates, amongst other adoption issues, that transracial adoptions can be successful, it is significant that it has no closure. The last chapter gestures toward potential new beginnings, which indicates that the story of adoption has no end. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transnational and/or Transracial Adoption and Life Narratives)
20 pages, 1088 KiB  
Article
Korean Adoption to Australia as Quiet and Orderly Child Migration
by Jay Song and Ryan Gustafsson
Genealogy 2023, 7(2), 40; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7020040 - 06 Jun 2023
Viewed by 3029
Abstract
Approximately 3600 Korean children have been adopted to Australia, as of 2023. Existing studies have tended to approach transnational or intercountry adoption from child development, social welfare, or identity perspectives. Research on Korean adoption to Australia is relatively scarce. The current article approaches [...] Read more.
Approximately 3600 Korean children have been adopted to Australia, as of 2023. Existing studies have tended to approach transnational or intercountry adoption from child development, social welfare, or identity perspectives. Research on Korean adoption to Australia is relatively scarce. The current article approaches the population from a migration perspective, building on Richard Weil’s conceptualization of transnational adoption as “quiet migration.” Drawing on both Korean-language data from South Korean governments and Australian data, the authors analyse Korean adoption to Australia as a state-sanctioned transnational migratory mechanism that facilitated the orderly movement of children from so-called “deficient” families of predominantly single mothers in South Korea to adoptive families in Australia. Situating adoption practices within the socio-political contexts and larger migration trends of both countries, the authors identify multiple enabling factors for channelling the ‘quiet’ flow of Korean children for adoption and argue the very ‘quietness’ of the adoption system is a source of concern despite Australia’s relatively stringent regulations. A migration perspective and analysis of these enabling factors contributes to the conceptualization of adoption as a socio-political state-sanctioned phenomenon, rather than a solely private family affair. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transnational and/or Transracial Adoption and Life Narratives)
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