ABSTRACT
Approaching social life as a vast stage on which actors perform certain roles in order to achieve specific effects on each other and on the intended audience, this chapter studies how prospective adoptive parents stake out a socially acceptable identity for themselves on the online platform of the adoption agency Full Circle Adoptions. It shows how humanities perspectives and concepts can be brought to bear upon pressing social issues by analyzing how prospective adopters negotiate the ethical quandaries involved in adoption from a dramaturgic perspective. This case study of adoptive strategies reveals that aesthetic strategies for creating a specific imago for yourself are not confined to some self-contained fictional universe but have a way of spilling over into real-life situations.
