In search of humanity – Adoption and the question who we are

The question 'why adoptees search' has been much discussed in adoption research. This question has been answered in varying ways, reflecting shifts in understandings of identity development and socialization among adoptees. By differentiating between searchers and non-searchers, attempts are made to explain this desire to search. But conclusions are often that a specific profile of ‘ searchers’ is impossible to delineate, since they vary considerably in demographic characteristics and motivations to search, which makes the question quasi impossible to answer (Tieman, van der Ende, & Verhulst, 2005). In this contribution, I want to examine why this question is raised in the first place: Why should the search process of adoptees elicit such interest? As Said (1985) argued in relation to Orientalism, the questions pursued in scholarship often reveal more about researchers’ preoccupations and anxieties than about the actual research subjects. Firstly, I discuss how scholarship on adoption has become complicit in the construction of a particular ‘adoptee subjectivity’ that is essentially deprived of knowledge from first families, and hence ‘naturally’ invested in a desire to search. But adoption itself is an increasingly contested social practice, invested in complex processes of kinning and dekinning to justify both the removal of adoptees from their first families, and their insertion into adoptive families where they acquire new identities and belongings (Högbacka, 2016). The practice of adoption then is itself at the root of a differentiation between ‘normal’ human beings – whose possession of knowledge about their origins is taken as self-evident and hence remains unquestioned – and ‘adoptees’ – whose lacks of knowledge and biogenetic connection place them outside the confines of normative humanity. When scholarship presents this differentiation as essential to the adoptee experience, rather than as the result of a deliberate social practice, the work performed by adoption in producing ‘adoptees’ as a particular category of (non)human beings, becomes eclipsed. A second way in which adoption scholarship partakes in the (de)humanization of adoptees, is in its efforts to insert adoptees’ identity development in dominant eurocentric understandings of humanity, vacillating between what I call a ‘biogenetic’ and a ‘narrative choice’ perspective. While these perspectives seem mutually exclusive, they actually form the sides of the same Eurocentric coin, whose limits cannot do justice to the complexity of adoptees’ experiences (Wynter, 2004). In an effort to more fundamentally rethink adoption, I refer to the notion of ‘border thinking’ since it is only knowledge produced at the ‘other side of the colonial difference’ that can help us to dislodge dominant epistemologies and engage in process of unlearning (Mignolo, 2011). I draw on adoptees’ experiences as forms of border thinking that can help us to go beyond dominant understandings of kinship, family and identity, and offer the potential for a transformative rethinking of the practice of adoption.