Introduction: Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts

Hipchen, Emily; Deans, Jill R.

doi:10.1080/08989575.2003.10815302

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…According to Gustafsson (2023), ghosts abound in adoption narratives. Yet a search for ghost-related adoption scholarly works produced just fifteen that directly engaged with the subject (Lifton 1994(Lifton , 2002(Lifton , 2006(Lifton , 2010Beatty 2000;Hipchen and Deans 2003;Dorow 2006;Gunsberg 2009;Appell 2010;Swain 2011;Collins 2016;Donoghue 2017;Mariner 2019;Scholar 2019;Quist 2023). Lambert claims that: "Despite the legislative shift to "openness", references to ghosts and haunting still pervade the online adoption archive" (Lambert 2020, p. 370).…”

Section: Adoption's Ghostsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past” (Faulkner, 1919 Requiem for a Nun p. 85): Mapping and Taking Care of the Ghosts in Adoption

Clapton

2024

Genealogy

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The Code of Ethics of the Association of Professional Genealogists promotes the communication of coherent, clear, and well-organised information). It is not that simple when adoption features in a family’s history. This paper suggests that standard approaches to family tree-construction will struggle to capture the complexities, gaps, and challenges posed by adoption. Firstly, the paper makes the case for family historians having an alertness to adoption by noting the number of people affected by adoption. It then goes on to look at the literature that argues that adoption involves erasures of birth families and makes ghosts of them. Adoption also creates possible selves and lives; the adopted person’s “could-have-beens” had there been no adoption, the biological child that the adoptive parents might have had and could not, the birth mother’s life with the child lost to adoption. These presences and possibilities haunt all involved in adoption, and writers have posited the existence of a “ghost kingdom”. This paper maps out a greater ghost world of adoption, paradoxically full of life, and because of access to birth records, a world that offers a much greater potential for materialisation. The paper avoids the traditional notions of ghosts as things to be shunned or as representatives of pathologies. Instead, it asks for respect for the “not-dead”/“not-past” of adoption and for family history researchers, a capacity to embrace the jumbled, the murky, and the disorganised. People everywhere are increasingly constructing their own family trees, with all the potential for pleasant surprise but also the shock that this might bring. Should genealogists overlook adoption’s ghosts then they overlook the opportunity to professionally map a rich and varied world of family knowledge and connections. The paper concludes with this observation coupled with a discussion of other associated ethical implications of family history work where adoption features.

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Section: Adoption's Ghostsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past” (Faulkner, 1919 Requiem for a Nun p. 85): Mapping and Taking Care of the Ghosts in Adoption

Clapton

2024

Genealogy

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“…However, Verrier (1993) believes that he still would have missed his first mother. Hipchen and Deans (2003) point out that adoption life writing "blur[s] the boundaries between fact and fiction", p. 167), and Margaret Homans shows that many adoptees' memoirs involve creating fictions about their origins (Homans 2013). Jakiela creates such fictions in the vignettes in which she imagines her birthmother under the new name of Marie, not to pretend that she has found the identity of a birthmother, as is often all that can be achieved because of closed records, but to help understand and forgive her.…”

Section: Overall Experience Personalities and Beliefs About Adoptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class, Shame, and Identity in Memoirs about Difficult Same-Race Adoptions by Jeremy Harding and Lori Jakiela

Novy

2018

Genealogy

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This paper will discuss two search memoirs with widely divergent results by British Jeremy Harding and American Lori Jakiela, in which the memoirists recount discoveries about their adoptive parents, as well as their birth parents. While in both cases the adoptions are same-race, both provide material for analysis of class and class mobility. Both searchers discover that the adoption, in more blatant ways than usual, was aimed at improving the parents’ lives—impressing a rich relative or distracting from the trauma of past sexual abuse—rather than benefiting the adoptee. They also discover the importance of various kinds of shame: for example, Harding discovers that his adoptive mother hid the close connection that she had had with his birthmother, because she was trying to rise in class. Jakiela imagines the humiliation her birthmother experienced as she tries to understand her resistance to reunion. Both memoirists recall much childhood conflict with their adoptive parents but speculate about how much of their personalities come from their influence. Both narrate changes in their attitudes about their adoption; neither one settles for a simple choice of either adoptive or birth identity. Contrasts in their memoirs relate especially to gender, nation, class, and attitudes to fictions.

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The “Telling Part”: Reimagining Racial Recognition in Jackie Kay’s Adoptee Search Narratives

Fox

2015

CWWRIT

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Introduction: Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

“The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past” (Faulkner, 1919 Requiem for a Nun p. 85): Mapping and Taking Care of the Ghosts in Adoption

“The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past” (Faulkner, 1919 Requiem for a Nun p. 85): Mapping and Taking Care of the Ghosts in Adoption

Class, Shame, and Identity in Memoirs about Difficult Same-Race Adoptions by Jeremy Harding and Lori Jakiela

The “Telling Part”: Reimagining Racial Recognition in Jackie Kay’s Adoptee Search Narratives

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