Adoptees Traveling Worlds: Love and Multiplicitous Being in Adoptees’ Autofictional Writing

In the adoptive family, discourses of love have been mobilized to attach the adoptee to the intimate space of the nuclear family, thereby detaching them from other spaces and meaningful others. In this article, I engage with the question of what kinds of love have been erased in the adoptive family, how understandings of love impact upon adoptees’ subjectivity and which ways of imagining the self, in its connection to present and absent others, thereby become disabled. In order to assess whether alternative understandings of love, self and kinship can be imaginable within the adoptive family, I turn towards two works of autofiction written by adoptees: Shâb ou la nuit by the French author Cécile Ladjali and The girl I am, was and never will be by US author Shannon Gibney. In examining their articulations of love and the difficulties of finding words for that which might exist outside of dominant, quasi-hegemonic discourses, I draw on Maria Lugones’ articulation of love as connected to her theory of world-traveling. This enables us to understand adoption narratives and searches as attempts to reconnect with pre-existing worlds and meaningful others, made inaccessible by the Euromodern institution of adoption.