"Contemporary Adoption Narratives" (03/15/01; New Orleans, MLA '01)
In her recent Wellek Library lecture series Antigone's Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death (2000), Judith Butler positions Antigone at "the
limits of intelligibility exposed at the limits of kinship," suggesting her
relevance for those individuals formed by contemporary situations where
"kinship has become fragile, porous, and expansive"--including, among
others, children adopted into new families as a result of "global
displacements" and "migration, exile and refugee status," or who live,
"psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered
family situations." The variety found in contemporary adoption narratives
affords a context for rethinking kinship at certain radical removes from
the normative nuclear family. At the same time, the more metaphorical
adoption situation of outside organizations assuming responsibilities in
loco parentis for unaffiliated children and young adults invests
"impersonal" settings for training, recruitment and employment with
recognizable tropes of familial relation. How do contemporary fictional
and/or theoretical accounts of adoption transform familial models of social
connectedness along international, ethnic, gendered and/or class-conflicted
lines, testing the limits of kinship and the "intelligible"
representational models we devise for it? How do adoptions by the school,
the state, the corporation, or other organizations recast social
responsibility for the unaffiliated child, and recast the responsibilities
of the nuclear family in the process? Papers could address such issues as:
§ International adoption
§ Adoptions across ethnicities
§ Adoption fantasies
§ Organizational adoption-state, school, corporation, profession
§ Adoption and same-sex marriages; the "defense of marriage act"
§ Foster care and "at-risk youth"
§ Recruiting the orphan; new "scholarship boys" (and girls)
§ Internet adoption
§ Birth parent searches
§ Adoption in autobiography/memoir
One-page abstracts, hard-copy or email attachment, by March 15, 2001 to:
Lisa Fluet
22 McCosh Hall, English Dept.
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
ljfluet@princeton.edu
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