ABSTRACT
Being adopted is a life woven out of threads of outsiderness, shame, guilt, embodiment, memory and most of all, a yearning for home. Though our home is not the same home that others talk about, and love is not the same love that majoritarian people enjoy; home and love are contingent, illusive and often (if not always) disappointing. For adoptees, home and love (like family) are also simultaneously virtual and actual: actual because people do make vital connections and virtual because home and love often feel elsewhere, just outside of reach. The queer adoptee who returns knows herself to be an artifact of fear, grief, shame: of the birth parents' (usually mother's) own failure and shame. Though whatever reparative or restorative (re-storyative) power such fragments might hold, hinges on a break from the ever-forward, ever-linear movement of memory and history, of "ordering origins" in an attempt at "creating order from the point of beginning".
