Skip Navigation

Contemporary Women's Writing 2007 1(1-2):59-79; doi:10.1093/cww/vpm020
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Homans, M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Origins, Searches, and Identity: Narratives of Adoption from China

Margaret Homans

Yale University, USA margaret.homans@yale.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This essay discusses fictional and autobiographical narratives by contemporary women who, in representing searches for the origins of adopted children from China, explore urgent issues raised by contemporary feminist theory today. Adoption, like "queer," names a social practice and a social condition that provides fresh insights into what it means to be human. Although, among scholars, adoption has been of greatest interest to those personally involved and to social scientists who study it under such particularizing rubrics as reproductive technology, kinship studies, or globalization, I want to argue for its broader significance for all those interested in thinking about identity in both its psychological and its social and political dimensions. Like Donna Haraway's cyborg, the figure of the adoptee reveals that no one, adopted or not, can sustain an organic connection to an origin. And yet the adoptee, unlike the cyborg, is uniquely expected to pursue a "quest for identity" . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Adoption and Feminist Theory
 

   Creating Chinese Origins
 

   Conclusion
 

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?