ABSTRACT

Adopted Women and Biological Fathers offers a critical and deconstructive challenge to the dominant notions of adoptive identity. The author explores adoptive women’s experiences of meeting their biological fathers and reflects on personal narratives to give an authoritative overview of both the field of adoption and the specific history of adoption reunion. This book takes as its focus the narratives of 14 adopted women, as well as the partly fictionalised story of the author and examines their experiences of birth father reunion in an attempt to dissect the ways in which we understand adoptive female subjectivity through a psychosocial lens.

Opening a space for thinking about the role of the discursively neglected biological father, this book exposes the enigmatic dimensions of this figure and how telling the relational story of 'reconciliation' might be used to complicate wider categories of subjective completeness, belonging, and truth. This book attempts to subvert the culturally normative unifying system of the mother-child bond, and prompts the reader to think about what the biological father might represent and how his role in relation to adoptive female subjects may be understood.

This book will be essential reading for those in critical psychology, gender studies, narrative work, sociology and psychosocial studies, as well as appealing to anyone interested in adoption issues and female subjectivity.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|20 pages

Wounded Women

The discursive construction of adoption and maternal separation trauma

chapter 2|16 pages

Trauma Culture

part |26 pages

Interlude 1

chapter 3|25 pages

Adopted Women and the Missing Father

Paternal absence and the production of truth

part |58 pages

Interlude 2

chapter 4|14 pages

In Their Own Words

Adopted women, otherness and the quest for truth

chapter 5|14 pages

The Search for Origins

Self-discovery, fragmentation and the fantasy of return

chapter 6|9 pages

Naming and Giving Voice

Rethinking the ways in which adopted women and biological fathers have been constituted

chapter 7|10 pages

Who Am I?

Adopted women’s stories and subject positions

chapter 8|12 pages

Becoming an Adoptive Subject

part |25 pages

Interlude 3

chapter 9|20 pages

Multiple Voices/Multiple Selves

chapter |2 pages

Conclusion