Anxious Kinship Of The Vanishing Adoptee

Volume 7, Issue 2
General Editor: Emily Hipchen
Karen Balcom
History and Women’s Studies
McMaster University, Canada
Susan Bordo
English and Gender & Women’s Studies
University of Kentucky
Cynthia Callahan
English
The Ohio State University, Mansfield
E. Wayne Carp
History, emeritus
Pacific Lutheran University
Sara Dorow
Sociology
University of Alberta, Canada
Sally Haslanger
Philosophy and Women’s Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ellen Herman
History
University of Oregon
Margaret Homans
English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality
Studies
Yale University
Tobias Hübinette
Department of Language, Literature and
International Studies
Karlstad University
John McLeod
English
University of Leeds
Claudia Nelson
English and Women’s Studies
Texas A&M University
Marianne Novy
English and Women’s Studies, emerita
University of Pittsburgh
Joyce Maguire Pavao
Psychiatry
Harvard University
Pamela Anne Quiroz
Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago
Mary L. Shanley
Political Science and Women’s Studies
Vassar College
Carol J. Singley
English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies
Rutgers University, Camden
Barbara Yngvesson
Anthropology, emerita
Hampshire College
EDITORIAL BOARD
Adoption & Culture
THE INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF THE ALLIANCE
FOR THE STUDY OF ADOPTION & CULTURE
Volume 7, Issue 2 (2019)
Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University Press

The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture officially formed, through a
constitution established in 1998, under the name The Alliance for the Study of
Adoption, Identity, and Kinship. ASAC promotes understanding of the experience,
institution, and cultural representation of domestic and transnational adoption and
related practices such as fostering, assisted reproduction, LGBTQ+ families, and
innovative kinship formations. ASAC considers adoptive kinship to include adoptees,
first families, and adoptive kin. In its conferences, other gatherings, and publications
ASAC provides a forum for discussion and knowledge creation about adoption and
related topics through interdisciplinary culture-based scholarly study and creative
practice that consider many ways of perceiving, interpreting, and understanding
adoption. For more information, contact the executive committee at asac@gmail.com.
Subscription to the journal confers membership in the Alliance.
The Ohio State University Press

Adoption & Culture Vol. 7, Issue 2 (2019)
Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University
The Anxious Kinship of the Vanishing
Adoptee
SAYRES RUDY
ABSTRACT: The core question of this essay is whether adoption and adoptees
still exist. I approach this puzzle by exploring what adoptee kinship might
entail since “post-kinship” affiliation replaced traditional “blood-tie” filiation
with the liberal discourse of universal love. Adoptee alienation persists despite
the removal of biological kinship as the formulation that long held adoptees
as partial and suspect members of family and society. Imagining nonbiocentric
intra-adoptee kinship is a horizonal way to examining this seemingly anach-
ronistic adoptee anxiety by interrogating the specific experience of subjective
liminality imposed by the liberal adoption regime. My study makes four cu-
mulative, braided observations in support of an overarching argument that the
“postbiogenetic” normativity of progressive families and enlightened societies
re-inscribes and reinforces adoptee subjectivities of anxious belonging. First,
the adoption regime combines explicit inclusion and implicit exclusion of ge-
netic others, in a discourse I call flesh-and-blood liberalism. Second, only
adoptees perceive that the liberal love that disavows old biological kinship
entails new biocentric fidelities to DNA-tracking, family physicality, and bio-
political fitness that still code adoptees as genetic suspects. Third, the love
metaphor that represses its biological supplements compels adoptees to in-
ternalize individually the disavowed and silenced contradictions of biopo-
litical liberalism, whereas other subaltern groups collectively externalize the
acknowledged social contradiction of racism, sexism, and so on. Fourth, seen
as a regime of evolving repressive biocentric liberalism, adoption produces
neurotic liminal subjects through a generalized suspicion at once privately felt
and publicly denied. My overall argument is that flesh-and-blood liberalism
only intensifies adoptee anxiety over equal status within modern biopower by
deepening while disavowing the biocentric-physical criteria of legitimacy that
immure adoptees in a neurotic subjectivity that dissuades kinship solidarity.
KEYWORDS: adoption, discourse, biopolitics, subjectivity, liminality, intersec-
tionality

THE ANXIOUS KINSHIP OF THE VANISHING ADOPTEE 207
The trouble with adoption is you never know what you are going to get.
—Jeannette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
[Y]ou actually do know who you are when you are adopted, it’s just that you are
different.
—Jackie Kay, qtd. in Gish, “Adoption, Identity, and Voice: Jackie Kay’s Inventions
of Self”
All dwarves are bastards to their fathers.
—Tyrion Lannister, George R. R. Martin, Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones1
This is a good time to ask on what grounds “adoption” remains a pressing area
of critical inquiry: not merely does adoption matter, but does adoption even exist any-
more? The hegemonic norms of modern liberalism seem to transcend adoption
as anything special or concerning. We now know that kinship has always been a
fictive cultural notion integrating biological and adoptive relationships in commu-
nities under an abstract metaphor of “blood.” We disdain consanguineous family
structures as tribal, reactionary, or fascistic. We invigilate against any derivation
of human values from genetics, accepting all persons as worthy of equal personal
love and public standing. Regnant commitments behind phenomena such as “non-
traditional families,” “open adoption,” and the “social family” (or “familization”
—collapse of family and society), bolstered by diffuse attacks on “essentialist”
concepts like the “blood-tie,” would appear to render adoption an odd archaism.
Like kinship, the nuclear-biological family has exploded into bits and vaporized,
logically taking “adoption” with it. In a world without adoption, do adoptees exist?
As participants in an allegedly unique social institution called adoption, adop-
tees seem caught in a dilemma: either we exist as second-class others of traditional
biological family structures, or we cease to exist as fully-included family members
and cultural citizens. Adoption as a specific institution and adoptees as peculiar subjects
come into being through exclusion, and by extension achieve inclusion only through
nonbeing. Fully inclusive adoption lacks special social meaning. In an equal, that
is, adoption-friendly and -indifferent society, being adopted becomes as banal any
other neutral fact about us. In a liberal political climate that explicitly rejects the ge-
netic membership criteria that used to be so traumatizing, continued identification
qua adoptees suggests a perverse nostalgia for the painful but familiar exclusions
of a bygone era. This quandary—where social exclusion produces by intensify-
ing adoption and then inclusion erases by normalizing it—obviates progressive
proposals for a post-biological affirmation of individual adoptee-becoming. Once
biological or ancestral continuities are discursively demoted as the political desid-
erata of healthy personhood, equal citizenship, and complete belonging, adoption
ceases to exists as a significant subjectivity to be positively re-valued. Now that family is
everything and everything is family, the adoptee is just another liberal individual
who cannot be liberated as an adoptee but only liberated from adoption altogether.
Only willfully melancholic, nostalgic adoptees care about adoption now.

208 ADOPTION & CULTURE 7.2
But adoptee attachment to physical kinship is “perverse,” “traumatic,” and
“anachronistic” only if the social order has actually elided its anxious norms of
genetic inheritance and biopolitical legitimacy. Are adoptees really the only ones
who missed the memo that biocentrism has ended or are we the only ones who see
through the obvious disavowal of ongoing but reinscribed fetishistic physicality? Have
adoptees confected the obsession with DNA searches; the heightened desire for
heritable likeness and physical bonding (pregnancy, giving birth, breast-feeding) of
the “priceless” child; or biopolitical demands for somatic fitness and responsibility
to a genetically accountable population? Are adoptees inventing these revitalized
forms of biocentric validation to compensate for the instability of capitalist democ-
racy? Or do we alone discern the repressed material-psychic biocentric stipulations
of the generous-minded liberal discourse always ready to pathologize the disgrun-
tled biological minority? Is there maybe an adoptee-whistle that exposes to genetic
outcasts alone the unspeakable truth behind the love-tie that so proudly supplants
the blood-tie: that a more comprehensive, diverse, and invasive bio-codification
than previously imaginable is the condition of possibility for liberal security and
a far more literal and unambiguous threat to adoptees?
These rhetorical questions introduce my account of the contemporary, chang-
ing regime of adoption that revises its overt ideological liberalism and covert
psychological biocentrism. I wish to urge that the biological origin-fetish of the
ambivalent blood metaphor is just a primitive version of the biocentric fitness-
fetish undergirding liberal political ethics, a duality encompassed by the repres-
sive love metaphor. Liberal universalism or humanist cosmopolitanism provides
the explicit discourse of enlightened ideology, inclusive and welcoming of all hu-
mans as inherently equal. No unchosen traits—skin, blood, genes, smarts—may
impede equal participation in society’s value-spheres: markets, families, parties,
or offices. Success in liberal-democratic society, however, requires appropriate ca-
pacities, significantly narrowing the actually-existing “freedom” to choose one’s
life to embodied exertions of strategic identities under dominant regulations and
practices. The liberal banter about unalloyed inclusiveness is always co-signed
by biocentric guarantees of genetic legibility, family sameness, and biopolitical
aptitude—the rigorously enforced, disciplined, and surveilled physicality that
enables the shallow liberal universalism that adoptee particularism perceives, re-
sents, and fears.
Adoptee anxiety about full social presence derives first, then, from the dichot-
omy between explicit liberal inclusion and implicit biocentric exclusion. Adop-
tees grow suspicious when they see biocentric qualifications complicate the liberal
self-understanding. But liberalism’s biocentric preoccupations also explicitly reject
biological-ancestral accreditation. Every strand of biocentric modernity overtly em-
phasizes a natality that looks forward, not backward. DNA-traces, they insist, feed
rich personal histories, not coercive genealogical apparatuses; parental celebration
of physical nurturance values love, not blood; and apposite fitness in conducting

oneself according to society’s healthy, hygienic, and competitive standards is pre-
cisely defined as a demand of general conduct indifferent to personal background.
The hidden biocentric logic underpinning liberal discourse, it turns out, stresses
the physical present and not the biological past—a nondiscretionary attitude to-
ward adoptee and birth kinship. Modern biocentric liberalism says everyone can
do everything: track your DNA, get cuddled, climb the ladder. When adoptees
glance behind the veil of liberal-humanist love that parades its universal embrace,
we find a biocentric physicality that parades exactly the same invitation. This means
that the allegedly implicit biocentric exclusion masked by explicit liberal inclusion
is nothing of the kind, but is itself explicitly inclusive, i.e., indifferent to biological
versus adoptive origins. Adoptees in liberal democratic societies remain neurotical-
ly anxious about their full and equal inclusion in a surrounding normative order
that explicitly offers all inhabitants full political rights and equal physical oppor-
tunities. As a result, adoptees who still complain of second-class status based on
biology, blood, or genes again seem deluded, stuck in the past, narcissistic, or to
confirm the no-win condition of “genealogical bewilderment.” If adoptees cannot
explain why they remain fixated on biological origins, despite the explicit norms
of biopolitical liberalism, then they appear to desire their own suffering—a kind
of madness.
But I argue that adoptees accurately discern a suspicion of biological outliers
immanent in the re-coding of physical security as biocentric liberalism. Behind
liberal inclusion lies biocentric inclusion as explicit discourses, but behind both lies
an unconscious and implicit biological fetish. This deep structure—where liberal-
ism ideologically dissociates from its physical support system, which silences its
biogenetic core—is the mystified but tangible source of adoptee anxiety about be-
longing. The gaslighting denial of any such source of this anxiety, inherent in the
unconscious or immanent logic of the three physicalist discourses, then becomes
the source of adoptee neurosis. Adoptees exhibit here a special sensitivity to the
unspoken normative ligatures that suture familial and social discourses together
by subtly extruding biodivergent minorities. In this case, the moral-psychology of
neoliberal democracy promotes a risk-averse securitization mentality that seeks
to minimize uncertainties, and adoptive alterity is ultimately, if unconsciously,
viewed as potentially unreliable (a sense that spans “closed” and “open” adop-
tive situations). Thus, adoptees correctly perceive that just as liberal inclusion and
its love metaphor must repress its bionormative internal other, so its underlying
biocentric inclusion and its fitness metaphor must repress its biological internal
other. But precisely because these liberal and biocentric self-understandings explic-
itly repress this minatory logic, the adoptee who exposes it is easily dismissed as
imagining things or not listening, and advised to grow up. The adoption regime
isolates adoptees in this way as liminal hysterics incapable of authentic and uncon-
tested relationships. Before proceeding I wish to clear some necessary conceptual
and analytical ground.

My opening hypothesis is that we may benefit from identifying what is ir-
reducibly adoptive about adoption. Awareness of adoption—as a personal decision,
private experience, public discourse, or social hierarchy—has advanced largely
through more established and accredited fields of inquiry. Generally with great
benefit, adoption has been framed as an instance of other social phenomena au-
tonomous from adoption, which becomes fungible evidence of issues outside of it;
hence, we “understand how race, gender, class, politics, oppression, and inequity
operate within the industries of adoption and in the social fabrics of both our birth
societies and our adopted ones” (Park Nelson 273). Instead of being a distinctive
social discourse or practice, adoption gets depicted as exemplifying the structural
logics or “intimate economies”2
of racism,3
sexism,4
imperialism,5
postcolonialism,6
legalism,7
fundamentalism,8
humanitarianism,9
neoliberalism,10
etc. To clarify my
methodological concern, I propose a sports-analogy-test: a study that can replace
adoption with sports without affecting its argument is not about adoption itself
and, more troubling, obscures adoption’s unique features. While I admire these
incisive studies, my purpose is to isolate the elements of adoption irreducible to
other social phenomena.
Similarly, theoretical works that draw particular attention to adoption are not
immediately about adoption. In Œdipus Rex, adoption facilitates a tragic tale of
mistaken identity but adoption is hardly the necessary condition of Œdipus’s fate.11
Likewise, more recent works cited frequently in the field are not about adoption.
Freud’s essay “Family Romance” detects a tendency in all individuating children
to fantasize that they are adoptees because they miss the oceanic sense of their
“real,” i.e., earlier, parents: a kid’s “sense that his own affection is not being fully
reciprocated . . . finds a vent in the idea, often consciously recollected later from
early childhood, of being a step-child or an adopted child” (Freud, “Family” 237).
By contrast, Brinich presents a plausible psychoanalytic profile specific to adoptive
families, such as distinct adoptive-parental fantasies, mourning, disowning, and
adopted-child modes of splitting that redounds to “two facts: that the child was
not wanted by his biological parents; and . . . that the adoptive parents were un-
able to conceive” (Brinich). Even the most notorious quotation in the literature,
H. J. Sant’s definition of “genealogical bewilderment,” is not about adoption as a
unique subjectivity: “A genealogically bewildered child is one who either has no
knowledge of his natural parents or only uncertain knowledge of them. The resulting
state of confusion and uncertainty, it will be argued, fundamentally undermines
his security and thus affects his mental health. Not only adopted children may lack
knowledge of natural parents. Genealogically bewildered children may be found in any
family where one or both of the natural parents is missing” (133, emphasis added). Ob-
viously, Sant’s anxiety about genealogical bewilderment applies to all adoptees and
thus warrants attention in our field. But “no . . . or only uncertain knowledge of
[one’s] natural parents” extends to anyone who does not “know” their parents—not
only adoptees—and to many reasons beyond their parents’ going “missing.” All

this said, I do not think that just because a concept of adoption is needed to sustain
“critical adoption studies” that one must be found or findable. We have to be open
to the possibility that analysis will prove adoption, as a distinct formation, does
not exist and thus requires no specialized inquiry.
I do believe adoption exists and that it powerfully defines a unique subjective
experience, but in ways accessible only by scrutinizing hegemonic and resistant
discourses about adoption as a specific practice and ideation. In informal terms: to
identify any plausible concept, meaning, or experience of adoption per se we have
to boil away everything that is not adoption, through a process of analytical tri-
al and error, of positing and refining the features that inhere in adopted life. My
idiosyncratic concepts or inferences within this project matter less here than that
such a method is recognized as indispensable to a solid field of adoption studies.
But here we confront the key dilemma, as I have implied, of all research fields: we
need both the concept and its genealogy. This desideratum appears to require the
incompatible pursuit of adoption as an essential identity and as an anti-essential
history. In short, under genealogical scrutiny adoption—like “morality,” “freedom,”
“democracy,” “health,” and so on—becomes contextually particular to the point of
breaking down as a coherent “object of inquiry.” Nonetheless, even to affirm its
relational12
specificities by exploring its variations, we must posit some heuristic
concept “adoption”; only on the basis of some “working definition,” ironically, can
we establish the absence of a universal concept.13
To generate a frame, I will posit that the concept adoption is intrinsically tied to
a host concept, family; so family-adoption is a constitutive pairing. Adoption does not
occur in the absence of family, and thus appears as a derivative concept. I will urge
that the family constitutes the adoptee, but will bracket the obverse idea that adoptees
may be “constitutive outsiders-within” families.14
So I will suppose families exist
absent adoptees but not vice-versa. Because families outnumber adoptions, then,
adoptees have a minority and derivative social status: adoption depends on family
for its very existence, a stipulation that may conjugate the “existential” anxiety in
much adoption discourse. From this initial chimney-sweeping, it seems that to
take adoption seriously as an object of inquiry must begin with some concept of
“family” (if not the “family”). Here we face again the genealogical conundrum:
for adoption studies, a critical issue is that its founding referent, the family, has
no fixed, essential, ontic, or transhistorical substance across time and space. As
Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh insist, we “must refer to a particular, histor-
ically and socially specific, form of family since no general or essential category
can be derived analytically from the many and varied arrangements commonly
lumped together as the family” (81). If the family is indefinitely polysemic and
polymorphous, so is adoption; by extension, the fate of the family and the adoptee
are bound together—the much-heralded “death of the nuclear-biological family”
must kill the adoptee.

By extension, this mimetic family-adoption pairing appears to dissolve if
adoptees retain their minority identity after the majority renounce biocentric kin-
ship. Excluded as biological castaways, adoptees seem to refuse the revised main-
land discourse of universal loving affiliation. Families in liberal societies loud-
ly, often shamefully, denounce biological essentialism as a crude and reactionary
atavism. Adoptees become the only remaining bio-(ec)-centrics, as if clinging to
our sole and vanishing identity; as Signe Howell puts it, “[a]s a social practice,
adoption is meaningless without a biological model of kinship as a reference”
(qtd. in Sales 150). The social significance of adoption requires the biogenetics that
progressive families reject. Having forever opposed the family’s avowed nuclear
biologism, adoptees seem to insist on its power precisely as the family disavows it.
Perversely, adoptee subjectivity thus appears wedded to the very suffering it has
always abhorred; and to embrace the marginal, conditional, inferior existence the
liberal family evidently wishes to deny it. So if adoptees finally have what they
have dreamed of and asked for, why are we still unhappy? In this postbiocentric
climate, as it sees itself, are we merely traumatized by past exclusions or are we
retraumatized by ideological deceit about reformed biocentrism (akin to “postra-
cism” or “postsexism”)?
Symptoms abound. We still often hear psychological diagnoses, e.g., “[s]tudies
have . . . generally shown that adoptees more often manifest externalizing symp-
toms such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or oppositional and conduct
problems rather than internalizing disorders, such as depression or anxiety” (Fes-
tinger and Jaccard 280). Specialists sensitive to adoptee anxieties deny the liber-
al passage from biocentrism. Lucy Curzon insists, from “decidedly professional
and deeply personal” experience, that the “category of family . . . remains . . .
uniquely defined by biology,” “singularly genetic in scope,” and socially enforced
by the “bionormative gaze” (35–36). In a similar vein Carol Singley writes, be-
cause “adherence to biogenetic identity is ingrained,” adoption generates “as much
sympathy or suspicion as appreciation” (“Adoption” 51), hence its “predominant
. . . ambivalence” (Adopting 6). Liberalism and the love metaphor leave intact the
“privileged position in American culture [of] biological kinship” (Carp xiii). We
adoptees arise in perverse revolt: we insist adoption still exists and liberal kinship
abandons us once more.
A generation ago, Katharina Wegar, framing the desire to search for birth
parents in “society’s view that real kinship is biologically based,” urged: “What
we can and must do . . . is to analyze critically the connections between particu-
lar styles of self-representation, on the one hand, and beliefs, values, and power
relations in society, on the other” (73, 79). This recommendation may be read as
insisting that we cannot sunder personal from social desires, perceptions, norms,
convictions, experiences. A simple version of this insight is that no matter how
we each may wish to assert our individual identity, or group dignity, we will be
constrained by hegemonic codes, proscriptions, and attitudes, especially regarding

full membership in society. A fuller version of Wegar’s suggestion emphasizes
that the relationship of majority (family) to minority (adoptee) beliefs forms the regnant
discourse of adoption whether convergent or divergent. This means that the discordant
inversion in which liberal-families disavow biocentric kinship and adoptees insist
it remains should not be construed as dissolving the family-adoption pairing. In
short, adoptees are not breaking away from the family that defines us when we
reject the family’s post-biocentric account of itself; rather, in denying that this
post-biocentrism exists, we are remaining true to the family-adoption pairing as
it defines the discursive regime of adoption. If progressive societies and families,
with their DNA-kits, “priceless” physical nurturing, and biopolitical hygiene, have
not superseded but merely sublimated their biological anxiety, then adoptees ex-
perience the actual continuity rather than traumatic discontinuity of the family’s
genetic fetish. The inference here is that in discerning its false disavowal of biocen-
trism, the adoptee alone retains fidelity to the truth of the family. The alienation
of the adoptee derives from the repressed biocentrism of liberal love, and the un-
sayable biologism of liberal biocentric attachments.
This proposition that adoption emerges as a derivative and conflicted reflec-
tion of diverse kinship formations may seem only to hinder my objective: to con-
ceptualize adoption as a credible object of inquiry in post-biocentric liberal society.
If, after all, “the family” has exploded into countless articulations, or has dissolved,
under the radical individualism of neoliberal capitalist society, then presumably
adoption as its cracked mirror must fragment and lose its substance, too. Is this
“ambivalence about the nature of family bonds,” prodded by adoptive love, not
more “deep-rooted” (Wegar 99) than tired biological preoccupations? I would pro-
pose that declensions of adoptee subjectivity inhabit precisely this ambivalence,
evidenced by our liminality between pro- and anti-biocentrism. I want to claim
that the family-adoption dyad remains, comprising a shared, schizoid genealogical
bewilderment. The family-adoption couplet conjoins two discomforts with biolog-
ical or “blood” ties, distinct but imbricated in forming the concept, discourse, and
regime of adoption. In sum, hegemonic family normativity and subaltern adoptee
subjectivity both evince ambivalence over biological kinship but in ways reflecting
their discrete positions. Majority families and minority adoptees both suffer “the
difference between what one desires and what the reality insists on” (Baldwin
107). The majority family/society15
desires to express liberal love but their reality
insists on repressing biocentric anxiety; the adoptee desires to believe this liberal
love but our reality insists on de-repressing, or outing, residual genetic obsessions.
James Baldwin’s pointed contrast between desire and reality, positing desires as in
effect unreal, helps pinpoint the painful contact points of these ego-dystonic family
and adoptee desires. The family and adoptee share a desire for the full inclusion,
nonbiological, liberal love, yet this fantasy remains haunted by the reification of
shared physicality as the condition of familial-societal security.

I have advocated that the unique analytic object required for critical adoption
studies focuses on hegemonic concepts of family across time and space. These con-
cepts structure the discourses that constitute the adoption regime, especially the
repression of biocentric fetishes in the dialectical designs of liberal societies and
families. In the liberal fantasy, nothing prevents us from assimilating adoptees to
families or families to societies, or forming a series <adoptee-family-society> that
just represents unfettered choices to develop attachments, share loyalties, or ex-
press love. That is, there is no necessary biocentric impediment or deception in the
liberal fantasy of the love metaphor, nor in the ideology of neoliberal-democratic
embodied self-assertion. Likewise in “traditional” kinship, no fixed system gov-
erned relationships between biogenetic persons and others (Franklin 286–87). The
key point is that while we must always contextualize society-family-adoptee con-
figurations, risking radical conceptual plurality or even collapse, we may attempt
to provide genealogies of adoption by disinterring the repressive structures of fam-
ily-society discourses, as they specify their explicit needs and silence their enabling
conditions. Note that this research program should pass the sports-analogy test,
because the implicit and explicit norms, modes of disavowal and repression, social
practices and linguistic signifiers, and so on, will be specific to adoption discourse
rather than just generalized and diffuse features of the society-familial priorities.
Toward this end, I would pursue a more or less formal approach or method
of analysis. We may view adoption either (1) as a transhistorical phenomenon in
which a subset of children is raised by people who did not give birth to them; or
(2) as a contextually designated and dialectically reinscribed regime of discourses
and experiences that posit families and adoptees as normative subjects. Adhering
to (2), I conceive adoption as a regime: an enduring social order in which historically
specific technologies of power form subjects by embedding persons in patterns em-
bodying consistent discourses (premises, images, symbols, incentives, institutions,
practices, and norms). Genealogical reconstruction of any given adoption regime
will then access its complex anastomosis of enunciations and silences, permissions
and coercions, repressions and sublimations that arrange the conscious and uncon-
scious expression of its expected and prohibited values.16
All this could be called
genealogical discourse analysis or immanent critique of the adoption regime, and
is more honored than indulged because contextualism tends to dissolve comfort-
ing ontological categories like “the family” into unruly protean objects of study.
In the remainder of my essay I will broach the practice or concept of a ge-
nealogy of the adoption regime by discussing a crucial transition in structur-
ing adoptee subjectivity under flesh-and-blood liberalism. I will sketch the con-
tinuous ambivalence of biogeneticism and liminality of adoptee subjectivity across the
discontinuous metaphors of blood and love kinship. The summary finding is that
preliterate, early modern, and present-day societies all combined biological and
adoptive ties in their kinship patterns, but arrived at different, contextually relevant
metaphors to compensate for this potentially destabilizing complexity by

discursively-symbolically repressing it. Premodern kinship discourses commonly
used blood metaphors to symbolize their communal attachment while contempo-
rary kinship discourses invoke love to symbolize their contrasting priority of freely
formed personal and social bonds. The blood metaphor connotes genetic fixity and
thus social determinism; while the love metaphor connotes genetic malleability
and social contingency: preservation versus innovation, permanence versus infini-
ty, the standard caricatures. But a textual genealogy of the adoption regime reveals
that “primitive” and “modern” kinship structures routinely comprised biological
and adoptive relationships and their respective “blood” and “love” metaphors are
best seen as compensating for this flexibility or porosity in the dominant social
arrangements by generating shared symbolic abstractions of social unity. Both
metaphors of blood and, later, love similarly generalize their dominant or primary
social tie into a uniform self-caricature: premodern communities essentialize their
“consanguineous” kinship relationships while modern societies exaggerate their
aleatory post-biological attachments.
All this upends the canard that liberalism either eradicates or replicates the
biocentrism represented by previous blood metaphors; that modernity must tran-
scend or copy biological criteria for social membership across time; and, notably,
that “tradition” and “modernity” had to decide on genetics one way or another.
Indeed, this last error is the pivotal insight. The blood and love metaphors sym-
bolize the essential undecidability of genetic and adoptive relationships, to which
inhabitant-subjects must constantly orient themselves. The biocentric is always pres-
ent with the adoptive, with the latter generally in the subordinate position. Despite
apparently antinomian connotations, love does not replace blood as some post-
biological freedom replacing biological despotism. Rather, blood and love metaphors
serve the identical purpose: repressing the plurality of actually-existing kinship
relations in order to stabilize distinct articulations of biocentric social order. Be-
cause the ambivalences of genetic-and-adoptive kinship patterns were revised rather
than elided in these distinct societies, under these situated metaphorical ambigu-
ities, the transition from earlier to later kinship structures—bridging “family” and
“society,” “public” and “private”—we find continuity in adoptee neurotic lim-
inality and insecurity that persists into the liberal-love adoption regime. Just as
a multiplicity of “adoptive” connections enriched the premodern “blood-tie,” so
the biocentric physicality of genetic tracking, birth-giving, and biopolitical fitness
suture the precariousness of bourgeois life.
Adoption regimes—those systems that intensify adoption as socially signif-
icant—derive their ideas, symbols, images, and anxieties from the discourses of
the dominant family form in given social settings.17
Whatever defines the family
defines the adoptee as not-that, as an exception to others in the family or to the
family itself.18
If adoption matters, adoptees register only as outliers, oddities, as
the internal other of the family, whether valued negatively (as deficit) or positively
(as supplement).19
Many adoptees fret that we will always be valued negatively as

long as “the family” is attached to biology as the primary criterion of full presence.
But by revising the bonds of belonging, adoption may be valued positively as an
impetus to reinscribing “the family” as post-biological: as liberal, “open,” “fictive,”
viz., as norm rather than as exception.20
Indeed, the key observation driving my
reflections is that adoption discourse responds now to an era in which “the fam-
ily” disavows biological legitimacy, to the point where nothing and everything is
“family”—in just the way (and time) that anthropology has dismissed biocentric
familial lineages, ultimately declaring “there is no such thing as kinship.”21
But
traditional kinship was never literally, only metaphorically, genetic and consan-
guineous. The “blood” metaphor, specifically, was a symbolic abstraction that gave
affective significance to nonbiological social attachments, obligations, and devo-
tions. The biocentrism adoptees reject was always-already fictive and metaphori-
cal, reflecting a supra-genetic communal desire that survives literalist critiques of
genetic or ancestral origins.
The narrative that generally frames adoptee discourses is that traditional soci-
eties and families are consolidated and secured through biological preoccupations
that must exclude us. We can attain social equality, on this view, only by transcend-
ing biocentric filiation, specifically by removing it from national and familial vo-
cabularies. By extension, “modernity” comes to identify post-biological belonging
and a post-genetic familial or national ethos with enlightened ideas and progres-
sive values. More brutally put, prioritizing genetic ties is finally associated with
precisely what “politics should exclude: the archaism of blood feuds, the threat of
cruel and unusual punishment—or of menstruation—and the pertinacity of kin-
ship, of tribalism, and finally of race” (Anidjar). Liberal society is haunted by, and
fundamentally self-identifies as rejecting, “genealogical notions of race descent,
filiation, and biological traceability” that define “displacement from a lost home-
land” and aggressive “ideologies of nationalism” (Eng, qtd. in McLeod, “Against”
30). In this narrative, ancient or traditional social systems based on reactionary,
exclusive biological kinship ties must yield to progressive, inclusive nongenetic
kinship ideals under modern liberal commitments to individual qualities and the
“contents of our character.”
I will dislodge this misleading story with its radical inversion: previous soci-
eties pretended their kinship systems were biologically ordered when they were
not; and our society pretends its kinship system is not biologically ordered when
it is. Again, both kinship patterns self-essentialize to make the primary bond stand
for the entire bond, thus repressing the mixture of social affective bonds. For this
reason, the felt imperatives of physical belonging have not replaced earlier meta-
phorical blood-tie kinship discourses with any presumptive liberal post-biocentric
inheritor. Instead, the adoption regime that succeeds older kinship orders compris-
es three extensive biocentric revisions: a literalized DNA fetish; biopolitical apparatuses
of fitness and hygiene responsible to the body politic; physical bonds formed in pregnancy,

childbirth, breastfeeding, and heritable likeness of the love-object. These biocentric inno-
vations and their systemic features are roughly:
BIOCENTRIC PHYSICALITY IDENTIFICATION VALUE SPHERE IMAGE/GOAL
Genetic Tracking Juridical State, Law, Family Legitimation
Biopolitical Fitness Subjective Labor, Family Population
Embodied Attachment Reproductive Market, Family Circulation
These reinvigorations of bionormativity constitute a new adoption regime focused
on affirming legitimate bodies as properly coded, rigorously self-disciplined, and
ideally conceived. Enlightened humanist attacks on traditional “blood” ties hardly
eradicate but instead perfect biocentric reification into a more scientific method,
effective normativity, and comprehensive subjectivity. Reconstituting the adop-
tion regime in this new physicality, notably, is not impervious to liberal dissent
from old-fashioned biologism but absorbs and assimilates its individualist, origin-
transcending beliefs. It is precisely genetic and ancestral origins that no longer
constitute the adoption regime, but instead values adoptees themselves embrace,
however reluctantly and neurotically: personal origins (adoptee searches), physi-
cal attachments (family bonds), and coherent psyches (redressing liminality, loss).
It seems common to presume communities view themselves as they are; if
they tell us they are biologically related, bound by genetic codes symbolized by
blood, we tend to believe them. We should make two distinctions here to get a
firm grip on the discourses adoptees must respond to. First, we might distinguish,
at least provisionally, between discursive and empirical kinship patterns. A com-
munity’s sense of its kinship structure will often diverge from its actual structure,
especially in reports to visitors of its genetic continuities. Most communities de-
scribe themselves as biologically tied in certain ways that prove false under even
casual scrutiny. That is, kinship is ideological across the ages, in the minimal sense
that how people see themselves varies from the whole story. Second, we must
scrupulously evaluate various reports before dismissing them as “false,” especially
by differentiating metaphorical from literal accounts they may give of their lives.
The relevant example here is a community that describes its kinship system as a
network of blood-relations. An ethnographer who empirically disproves the ge-
netic connections may find that the blood-tie was a metaphor all along, one that
offers a different local sense of the biological without diminishing its genetic sub-
stance or its compelling social force. I read the “blood-ties” of “traditional kinship”
this way, as a metaphor for the diverse ways “nature” and “culture” combine in
forming diverse people who have never survived through literal genetic linkages.
“Kinship” has long been a sociological extrapolation of the concept “family,”
used to refer to social ties rooted in biology. In ordinary language “kin” connotes
genetic family relationships, often deployed to separate in/out groups on biolog-
ical grounds. Historically, kinship blends two desires in constructing biocentric
social connections: “native” and “ethnographic.” The regnant assumptions were

that “primitive” social groups were tiny, remote, natural, and primarily concerned
with and defined by communal reproduction. Enough evidence confirmed some
agnatic lineage patterns among most pre-literate, pre-scientific peoples to support
the impression that they operated “akin” to nuclear-biological families. These kin-
ship groups had intimately integrated neighbors; complementary social practic-
es beyond tribe and household; bilateral marital traditions that fused bloodlines;
and incest taboos. Biological reiteration or cohesion remained only one dominant
principle of kinship social organization; for instance, under duress the nonbiolog-
ical were the first sacrificed.22
Generalized as the ontology of communal security
and continuity, kinship modeled on biocentric nuclearity came to misrepresent
pre-modern life; by extension, modern life claimed to transcend kinship and fam-
ily at least as immutable biocentric classifications of illiberal exclusion from full
public presence as citizens. For adoptees, challenges to this interpretive tradition
bolstered anti-biocentric resistance to fetishistic biological kinship, including all
nostalgic sacralization of genetic bonding as a core human desire sacrificed to
modern decadence.
Coeval anthropological and adoptee challenges to biological kinship emerging
from the 1960s enlisted new empirical work on “primitive societies.” It turns out
that in “creating kinship”23
often-expected “anxieties over natural and unnatural
parent” status were generally absent,24
that through history kinship has always
produced “recombinant”,25
“functional”,26
“polygynous”,27
or businesslike28
sys-
tems based on filiative, nuptial, communal, or “religious-political relations . . .
that govern descent and alliance” (Goody 128). In non-“primitive” ancient Rome,
likewise, “consanguinity” hardly enforced or even sought pure genetic ties but
rather enmeshed adoption inextricably into its social institutions.29
In his summary
statement on the matter, Marshall Sahlins declares that kinship is cultural—never
biological. He calls “kinship [the] ‘mutuality of being’: people who are intrin-
sic to one another’s existence—thus ‘mutual persons,’ ‘life itself,’ ‘intersubjective
belonging,’ transbodily being,’ and the like. . . . [It applies] equally to interper-
sonal kinship relations, whether ‘consanguineal’ or ‘affinal,’ as well as to group
arrangements of descent” (2). Kinship characterizes, then, any relatively stable,
consistent social group of people whose “kinsfolk” act as “one person” bound by
mutual substitutability, solidarity, and responsibility, as equals who are alike and
belonging to one another.30
As tight as such kinship bonds are, they are consti-
tuted by normativity rather than physicality, much as family now refers equally
to investment banks, professional sports teams, chain restaurants, or folks living
in private homes. As Sahlins summarizes pithily, “kinship categories are not rep-
resentations or metaphorical extensions of birth relations; if anything, birth is a
metaphor of kinship relations” (ix). Or, in Kath Weston’s comparable overview:
“Even the most naturalized of kinship ties—the ones described as blood relations
in Europe and North America—must be synthesized in some sense, insofar as they
are meaningfully constituted through culturally and historically located practic-
es. . . . The process of synthesis is not so much one of social construction as it is

a compounding of various elements and practices that can yield new and quite
specific forms of relatedness” (245).
I have been cobbling together what seems the consensus view in recent eth-
nographic literatures that empirically kinship has never been biological in any
remotely “pure” sense. Across migratory tribes, settled highland villagers, and an-
cient city-states, kinship has invariably combined biological and cultural features
of diverse peoples in securing their communal survival. The adoption regimes
required of such kinship systems may have been biocentric in some highly anfrac-
tuous sense, viz. kinship stressed genetic ties among countless nonbiological relation-
ships and networks that included adoptees. Kinship old and new has constituted its
adoption regimes in innumerable combinations of genetic and nongenetic attach-
ments. Even from a cursory overview we see post-biocentric adoptee discourses
inherit or couple with the social-scientific rejection of old myths about humanity
evolving essentially from natural being to cultural belonging.31
Adoptee liberation
cannot, in short, rely on some immanently evolving or historically progressive
pathway from biological to rational-affective-personal criteria of kinship-belonging
because biology and its others form a binary forever reinvented to establish newly
required variants of the adoption regime.
The most celebrated final nail in the coffin of primordial-essentialist scheme
of humanity-arising-from-animality opposes these sequences: naturewoman
sexbodyessence versus culturemangendermindagency. Using a startling
culinary analogy, Judith Butler scoffs at images of “a natural or biological female
. . . subsequently transformed into a socially subordinate ‘woman,’ with the conse-
quence that ‘sex’ is to nature or ‘the raw’ as gender is to culture or ‘the cooked.’”
She bins the idea that “sex is before the law in the sense that it is culturally and
politically underdetermined, providing the ‘raw material’ of culture . . . that be-
gins to signify only through and after its subjection to the rules of kinship” (But-
ler 37). Conventional academic structuralism, Butler insists, posited kinship as
a mechanism “whereby sex is transformed into gender.” Kinship thus could be
nostalgically construed as “constructing . . . the cultural universality of oppression
in nonbiologistic terms,” i.e., as the “unnatural and nonnecessary” destruction of
a desirably organic woman (or family) before society (38). Indeed, “classic” eth-
nographies imagined “natural” biological kinship, she notes, as cooking natural
sex into cultural gender. Whether “natural” or “biological” elements stick around
to spice the cultural meal and haunt the cooks—i.e., whether “culture” represses
or erases “nature” in ethnographic tales (presumably remote from how kinship
communities discuss themselves)—remains ambiguous.32
This is the basic post-
modern view that there is no such thing as “nature,” and there never has been,
that the entire notion of biological, natural, or organic life is invented for specific
contextual reasons. But note that such dismissals of an essential biology or nature
lurking beneath society raise the same problems as “naturalist” views of kinship.33
Consider the “ethology” project, an area of Darwinian social research big in
1930s Europe that presaged current sociobiology. Ethologists held that human so-

cial patterns had a biological grounding in species’ “instincts” that evolved and
variegated through cultural selection processes: “The basic premise . . . was that
instincts, like organs, were inherited and had been formed by natural selection.
Instincts or drives—in later formulations programs of the central nervous system
and, later still, genetic programs—were often shared by different species, which
inherited them from common ancestors. The innate programs expressed them-
selves in particular sequences of behavior. These were adaptive, which was why
the programs persisted . . . [C]ulture was a superstructure built upon the instincts”
(Kuper 131, emphasis added). Ethology sought to avoid “a too-easy equation of
instinct theory with the politics of the blood that the Nazis espoused” but also with
“a set of genetic programs that require environmental triggers” (132–33). The core
inference is that humans have instinctive incentive-structures that adapt to discrete
circumstances by developing distinct cultural codes, symbols, vocabularies, and so
on. Hence there was no unitary biological content to kinship patterns in two sens-
es: (1) the motor of social history, in even pre-literate kinship, was never genetic-
biological in its fundamental or governing logic; (2) the variation in human groups,
likewise, was ambivalent as to the universality of the instincts themselves, though
I wish only to mark rather than pursue this point here.34
Throughout the twentieth
century, the now-obscure ethological position was that a balance between “cultur-
al” and “natural” or “instinctive” human needs was necessary for fruitful social
life. With refreshing mischief, Kuper mocks the caricatural enlightenment binaries
I have been discussing: “Kinship and territory, blood and soil, were antithetical
principles of association. However, as reliable studies began to be made of sim-
ple, small-scale human societies, it became evident that these principles could be
combined” (210). Ethology merely illustrates the necessity of structural analysis as
a kind of remainder of the postmodern truism: whether or not “nature” inhabits
“the social,” their interaction remains to be shown in forming kinship, family, and
their strangers within. To be as clear as possible, these granular distinctions matter
because family and adoptee discourses are shaped, if not determined, by subtle
placements of “nature” and “culture” in how the social imagination conditions
adoptive love on diverse and changing biological-genetic substrates.
My extended discussion of kinship is intended to clarify the static idea that
across previous and current adoption regimes we uniformly find empirical mixtures
of biological and adoptive ties expressed ideologically in exaggerated, essentialist
metaphors of blood or love (or liberalism or dignity or humanity). By implication,
these irreducibly layered, dense, and polysemous kinship formations permanently
dislodge any standard idea of family and, derivatively, of adoption. I am also ad-
vancing a dialectical narrative where in the “modernization” of ambivalent biocen-
trism into the liberal regime of physical attachment, adoption still matters because
we have not entered into a post-biocentric anti-essentialist world but into a rearticulat-
ed bio-adoptive normativity that talks love while regulating genetic bodies. I have
suggested that this subtle ideological disavowal of the underlying, highly regi-

mented apparatus of biocentric physicality supplementing liberal freedom pathol-
ogizes adoptees who diagnose it as ignoring explicit liberal inclusion. Here the dis-
course of biocentric-liberal denial unfolds in a kind of dialectical question/answer
format via two sequential arguments: (1) anti-essentialist liberalism rejects biological
kinship based on genetic or ancestral origins, leaving unscathed biocentric-
physical norms (DNA-traces, familial similarity, biopolitical fitness) that immanently
threaten adoptees; then (2) intersectional liberalism35
absorbs biopolitical physicality,
abandoning the liminal adoptee to critique the suspicious biocentric liberal adop-
tion regime and its hystericizing love metaphor. I will conclude by connecting this
adoptee liminality, neurosis, or even madness back to the idea of adoptee kinship.
I have argued that adoptees who discern biological exclusion lurking behind
liberalism and physicalism—that is, in a culture claiming universal commitments
to fictive kinship, nontraditional family attachments, and population-oriented bio-
genetic rectitude—will be traumatically told they are imagining, willing, or desir-
ing their own suffering. I have suggested that this produces a kind of neurosis
or, colloquially speaking, an experience of being gaslighted, of being driven mad.
The liminal subjectivity we experience as reflecting the hypocritical or contradic-
tory discourse of biocentric liberalism—its securitized suspicion of genetic alterity
rooted in family continuity—is consistently denied, and I believe this infringes on
our capacity for systemic “sanity” and kinship. I can only outline here my sense of
how “adoptee madness” relates to kinship, but I feel it would helpfully illustrate
the dilemmas of adoptee liminality even among other adoptees. As throughout my
piece, my deeper aspiration is to isolate and amplify a unique aspect of adoptive
subjectivity.
The most common reference point for subaltern activists seems to be the inter-
sectionality of various groups who suffer social injustice or mistreatment in a given
milieu. “Intersectionality” is not a theory but an observation, namely that every
person embodies singular vectors of socially relevant identities; and, conversely,
that every collection of such persons contains potentially infinite combinations
of highlighted identities. The founding intersectional insight is that a firm might
have the socially mandated number of African American and women workers yet
have no African American women workers. To rectify this injustice, the identities
of all the firm’s workers must be listed and analyzed to ensure that all possible
combinations meet required minimal hiring numbers. Note several features of in-
tersectional politics from these bare bones. First, it is a juridical model based on
consensually legible and reportable “identities,” as if the ability and willingness
to name one’s self-coincidental identity is unproblematic.36
Second, those recog-
nized “identities” are physically marked (gender, “race,” ethnicity, disability) and
exclude political or ideological or psychological characteristics. Third, given the
infinite variations of human identity—each person forms, after all, a unique inter-
section—intersectional activism has always been monopolized by a small number
of “major” minority or “central” oppressed groups. Fourth, the fundamental logic

of intersectional-juridical identity politics says excluded collective bodies can, if
organized and clear-sighted, achieve just inclusion by being counted and combined
in a new, fairer way.
In considering possible kinship among gaslighted, neurotic, or liminal ad-
opted subjects, the implications of the intersectional approach to social justice are
provocative by contrast. I will take up, as succinctly as I can, divergences in col-
lectivization, repression, and internalization among the “classic” intersectional cohort
and alienated adoptees under biocentric liberalism. I will refer to the oppression of
African American women as my heuristic contrast, which I will qualify after. In the
standard intersectional model, the exclusion of a group is named and denounced
and their grievances redressed. From the start, then, we see an affinity between
collective identity and social exclusion: in this case, African American women are
excluded as a physically identifiable juridical collective. In addition, their collective
marginalization and oppression speaks to a repressed social injustice prevalent
elsewhere in society, akin to the mechanisms of the blood and love metaphors.
Intersectionality is not terribly detailed in theorizing its observations, but we can
extrapolate that racial, misogynist, ethnic, and other kinds of discrimination rep-
resent social conflicts of specific groups who are silenced for some time to achieve
social harmony. Intersectionality is therefore in the business of identifying abused
and censured vectors of injustice and giving them a voice where once suffocating
quiet had prevailed.
Karl Marx gives us a fine example of this repressive apparatus, where the
universality of individualist democratic political identification is achieved by re-
pressing the particularity of collective socialist labor identification. Universal unities
are thus realized by repressing particular conflicts. By implication, activist move-
ments that confront the oppression of physically marked groups often threaten
to break the repressive ideological rule, to speak the repressed conflict. Note the
massive social movements in the 1960s that inspired intersectional analysis arose
alongside accounts like Marcuse’s of “de-sublimation” and Foucault’s of “produc-
tive power”—theories that hegemonic discourses are most advanced when “lib-
eration movements” inadvertently deepen or affirm dominant systems. In this
light, intersectionality returns to quintessential nineteenth-century binary thinking
about obvious coercive oppression and successful uprising and liberation. It must
be specified here that intersectionality seems to have a narrow, “conservative”
agenda: to gain greater access to existing institutions. Again, the juridical objective
is derepressed improvement of access to firms or offices or voting processes for
specific kinds of bodies.
Finally, excluding physically marked groups under patently repressive and
manipulative “universal” norms collectivizes people as willful agents around nat-
urally externalized offenses. African American women, Latinos, disabled people,
and queer-identified groups bearing grievances have been marginalized and beat-
en and insulted throughout long histories of explicitly, publicly, and gleefully hate-
ful discourses that attack and moralize their physical features. While this is brutal-

ly painful, this process forms, as if by design, intersectional kinships of resistance.
These groups are collected under an obviously repressive ideology that insults
them with imbecilic and undeniable essentialist insults that they externalize as the
violence of white patriarchy. These groups then turn this entire apparatus into a
weapon to demand the exact inversion of the injustice: excluded as a minority group,
activists who never internalized but mocked the repressive ideology, demand inclu-
sion precisely as that group, as a highly mobilized political physical-ethical kinship.
These interconnected images of collective injustice, transparent normative re-
pression, and facile externalization of insults renowned in intersectional advocacy
exclude adoptee subjectivity, as I have been implying all along, with harmful ef-
fects on conjoined self-defense. Adoptees are not identifiable as a physically dis-
tinct group; not gathered into a visible collective; not taunted to rebel as a social
movement that inverts the identity of its oppression; not capable of resoundingly
exposing the violence, dishonesty, or stupidity of the hegemonic repression; and
radically not in a subjective position to externalize the embedded vulnerability
not only of biocentric suspicion but also of the outright denial that it exists. Un-
like other subaltern groups, adoptees are fragmented as individuals in separate
homes, where formative adoptive anxieties are privatized. We receive all kinds of
mixed messages about love and origins that have no parallel to the crude hostility
of racist apartheid or the risible coercion of misogyny. Adoptees are assimilated
to biocentric liberalism in secretive, matched “closed” adoptions or sunny, multi-
cultural “open” adoptions, publicly told we are full citizens, privately that we are
loved “just as much,” by the society and family that rescued us from curiously
loveless relinquishment. The adoption regime of post-biological attachment sub-
jectivizes us through ambivalent belonging and liminal placement, as intuitively
other to the families and societies that appear to embrace us wholly and equally.
Finally, absent collective and repressive subordination, and forever caught between
explicit affectionate inclusions and implicit genetic exclusions of the ambiguous
liberal body, we can’t locate the origins of our suspicious and neurotic liminali-
ty—did the system invent us this way or did we? I believe these contradictions in
the liberal-physical regime constitute adoptees as indelibly undecidable subjects
in ways that remain uniquely devastating precisely because they are unconscious,
immanent, and disavowed. Many adoptees internalize the repressive ideology,
identifying with its incoherent silences, its indefinite attachments, its manic dis-
sociations. Adoptees still exist as a secret carnival, or perhaps a quiet kinship, of
mad suspects.
Notes
This is a revised version of a paper delivered at The Alliance for the Study of Adop-
tion and Culture Formations Seventh Biennial Conference, “Thinking Kinship through
Adoption,” Oakland, CA (18–20 October 2018). I wish to thank the conveners for in-
cluding my paper, and especially Margaret Homans, John McLeod, and Emily Hipchen

for responding to my work with enthusiastic encouragement and the adoptee solidar-
ity I advocate here.
1. Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage in the television series Game of Thrones, sees
his physical “monstrosity” as orphaning him metaphorically within his ideal-typically
beautiful family. But just as important, Tyrion feels guilty for “killing” his mother, who
died during his birth. Later rejected and condemned to death by his own father, Tyri-
on kills him, thus literally orphaning himself. However sympathetically, this murder
imports the image of the “unstable orphan” into the biological family complex via the
analogized internal expulsion of the dwarf figure.
2. See Briggs, “Adoption” 23.
3. See Gordon 307–13; Samuels 71; Spence 1; Trenka, et al., “Introduction”; Eng and Han;
Eng; and Callahan.
4. See Fessler; and Heikkila 229–41.
5. See Briggs, Somebody’s; and Fieldston.
6. See McLeod, “Adoption,” and “Postcolonial”; and Ahluwalia.
7. See Yngvesson.
8. See Joyce.
9. See Winslow.
10. See Perry.
11. Recall that Freud included Œdipus in the “average myth” of the orphaned or aban-
doned, not adopted, hero “born against his father’s will and saved in spite of his fa-
ther’s evil intentions . . . by animals or poor people such as shepherds, and suckled by
a female animal or a woman of humble birth” (Moses 8–9).
12. For my purposes “context” and “relationality” are co-extensive [see also Hipchen; and
Jacobs].
13. The genealogical bias holds that applying a concept like “adoption” across time and
place necessarily produces ahistorical confusions since no one identity “adoption” ap-
pears in ancient tragedies, Victorian novels, and recent films. Discourses of community,
family, person, etc., vary too radically to treat adoption as the same thing in all these
contexts, even if they appear to bear a comparable structure. However, I side with my
colleagues who seek out the differential concept adoption by its nonuniversal emer-
gence in discrete social and historical settings.
14. Names or objects are conceived through affirmation and negation, of course; what
things are “includes” what things are not, even if only by “excluding” them. Tennis
“includes” basketball by “excluding” it, that is, by saying “my identity as tennis neces-
sarily includes not-basketball.” This means any X is beholden to Not-X in some trivial
sense. But the idea of X and Not-X as co-constituted—each defined by an internal other
or excluded term—varies in sociopolitical poignancy: “white people” defining them-
selves as “not-black” differs substantially from “Emily Hipchen” defining herself as
“not-Pluto.” In this respect, a robust deconstructive method may posit all identities X
as inherently including all identities not-X, but must recognize asymmetries in X/not-X
symbiotic identifications. First, there may be power or presence differentials between
X and not-X such that they do not “constitute each other” equally. There is an identity
F(amily) that is less dependent, if at all, on an identity A(doptee), however much family
and adoptee identify each other once they interact. We can imagine a society with 100%
families and no adoptees but we cannot imagine a society with 100% adoptees and no

families. Second, it seems important to distinguish whether the call of the “other” iden-
tity is, as it were, coming from inside the house. The repressive metaphor of blood or
love, for instance, silences adoptive or biological features of society that are potentially
disruptive to the social organism—an internal-other identity that must be banished
even as it defines us. In this case, the banishing of the other-within identity informs
us about the content of the identity banishing it. The identity liberalism represses the
stabilizing often illiberal identity biocentrism, or the identity physicality represses the
identity biology, and thus we learn about modern liberalism and physicality precisely
through what repressions they require. It seems obvious that, in contrast, some identi-
ties constitute each other without this same revealingly repressive internal apparatus.
The most controversial example I know of this proposal concerns Hegel’s idea that the
master cannot realize self-consciousness in the presence of only the bondsman, hence
his identity cannot self-actualize absent the recognition of a social equal. Fanon and
many other anti-colonial writers have countered that the master’s identity is precise-
ly forged in the erasure of the other’s humanity—the master’s identity exists with or
without the bondsman. These obscurities may help clarify adoptee anxieties over the
symmetrical, reciprocal, and internal character of family-adoptee identification.
15. I will use “family” and “society” as coeval imposers of the biocentric fetish on adop-
tees. Historically, of course, “family” mediates or even resists social norms; but, again,
adoption comes into being through familial discourses of biocentrism that generally
reiterate the broader social regime of biogenetic physicality.
16. “Genealogy” is a crucial but under-analyzed concept in social and literary studies, a
problem adoption research illustrates. It is a tension in our field whether we think adop-
tion is one or many phenomena, defined by discrete power relations or meanings over
time and place. A “genealogy of adoption” (nothing to do with genetic tracing) would
thus complicate the standard collation of distinct experiences and practices under the
general rubric “adoption.” Thus, regarding intra- and inter-“racial,” or closed and open,
adoptions as instances of a single, unified practice is as peculiar as conflating medieval
Christian oblation with modern foster care. Genealogy is concerned with contextually
articulated power arrangements that give rise to social practices and their supporting
ideations (thus in stark contrast with quasi-philosophical denials of all structures on
grounds of irreducible particularity). I propose, then, that adoption’s genealogy may
dismantle it as a coherent or continual concept. But I will sidestep the debate over
genealogy as descriptive history versus prescriptive “critique”; it seems safe to say that
objective investigations into the wills, interests, or desires supporting hegemonic dis-
courses will tend to destabilize them, with or without “criticizing” them. See Visker;
Geuss; and Stevens “Morals.”
17. I would re-emphasize that the adoption regime concept recognizes the welcome possi-
bility of a post-adoption society. This essay distinguishes adoption from adoption regime,
focusing on the latter as the hegemonic order.
18. Two further contextual observations arise in critiquing adoption regimes. First, wheth-
er adoptees are set apart from “the family” or “its members” is historically conditioned
and salient. Second, adoption regimes impose a little-noted double burden: the adoptee’s
minority status in a family transposes a minority status to that family in the society.
Adoptees are minorities in their families, and their families are minorities in their soci-
eties. Tensions often develop even in internally loving adoptive families from external-
ly imposed social judgment.
19. Philosophically there is a nonreciprocity in the family-adoption dyad. Adoption comes
into being via the family but not vice-versa. “The family” is not necessarily constitut-
ed or supplemented by adoption; rather, only specific families are. Adoption regimes
ideologically separate “the family” from “families,” often pathologizing the latter as

repositories of society’s surplus people. Here the family-adoption reciprocity forms
between the “deficits” of barren parents and unwanted children.
20. Peter Conn notes that from France to Japan, in many traditions adoption has defined
and advanced “fictive” kinship as the norm (8).
21. See Schneider vii. In his preface, Schneider dates his claim regarding the literal nonexis-
tence of kinship to 1971, when Rodney Needham drew similar conclusions. This period
coincides with widespread criticism of closed adoption.
22. See Pierotti.
23. See Cardoso.
24. See Weismantel 686; also Mead 22.
25. See Strathern 22; Segalen 259; Herskovits 13; and Mauss 37.
26. See Levy 43; and George 45–47.
27. See Thomas 10–11.
28. See Weber 167; and Tucker 245.
29. See Stevens, Reproducing 119–20; and Harders 20–21.
30. Sahlins proposes a criterion to single it out again: contrary to other relations (as be-
tween teachers and students, or between fans of the same football club), kinship entails
an idea of “mutual,” “conjoint,” or “transpersonal” being, an “intrinsic participation in
each other’s existence” (Hamberger 305).
31. I hope it is clear I doubt anyone—especially primitive anthropologists and their com-
munities—actually believed that social life was ever arranged in pure biological kin-
ship relations.
32. Whether the “social construction of gender” suffices to obviate all naturalistic views of
sexuality is debated.
33. For instance, if a transhistorical kinship discourse naturalizes women’s sexuality with-
in the cultural imperatives of social reproduction, itself a form of essential human trait,
the family-adoption pair will center around mother-child relationships and their inher-
ently problematic nonnatural, artificial, or suspect status.
34. The familiar debate concerns normative tensions between universal and particular so-
cial values; thus, what are our shared human features and how do they relate to our
diverse desires, meanings, and so on. “Ethology,” with its focus on “instinct,” opens
up two possibilities: (1) a complex human instinct such as social reproduction that generates
essentially diverse cultural forms; (2) a simple human instinct like the incest ban that creates
essentially uniform cultural outcomes. The possible objection that the incest ban (2) is a
just a subset of social reproduction, hence its relative simplicity, reinforces the under-
lying reason for the distinction I’m highlighting. The basic issue: how can universal
traits produce particular traits unless particularities are already present in the alleged
universal. Ethology’s Darwinian logic resolves this analytical problem by triangulating
instinct, culture, and specific situations.
35. For instance, see Collins 62–82.
36. “Intersectionality theory” appeared at the same time as the radical criticism of the
self-transparency and -coincidence of personal and social identity, and may be seen as
a conservative juridical retrenchment.

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