Update: Clarification: this call is for a proposed special session at MLA
2001, New Orleans
----"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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