ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the adoptee's search for a father as a search for truth and personal meaning. It addresses the question of adopted women's search for their biological fathers, competing and intersecting discourses on truth-seeking, belonging and otherness can be identified in the extracts, along with their counterparts formulated by secrecy, uncertainty and alienation. The chapter presents a significant feature of the overall organisation of adoptive subjectivity and concerns the quest for self-knowledge through connecting with one's biological lineage. It discusses the personal narratives illuminated the multiple perspectives and possibilities of the subject positions and revealed tensions between personal constructions of meaning and identities, and the fixed subject positions of the dominant discourse of the primal wound. The chapter also discusses the theme of secrecy in relation to a few of the participants' narratives, before moving on to notions of the adoptees' 'otherness' and their quests for truth.
