(M)othering Loss: Telling Adoption Stories, Telling Performativity

Abstract

Abstract This piece explores how telling adoption stories—to and of birth mothers, adoptive mothers, and their children—perform both the failures of language and the pleasures of repeating and rewriting tales of birth and placement, of the fictions of families. I consider how adoption stories spin not only tales of loss and fractured identities but also open-ended narratives of self and parent-child relationships. I use the languages of adoption, feminist and poststructural theories of subjectivity and performativity, and my own experience of adoption and family to tell and tell on the adoption story. And I wonder an adoption story's potential to (m)other loss and speak other narratives about adoption, its subject(s), and the force and possibility of storytelling. Keywords: Adoption StoriesSubjectivityPerformativity Notes Stacy Holman Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Portions of this manuscript were presented at the 2004 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago, Illinois. This essay is inspired by Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document and dedicated to Bernice B. Holman and Noah Jee Min Kim Holman Jones, two adoptees who've taught me not only what is missing but also what is found and felt in the story of adoption. Correspondence to: Stacy Holman Jones, Assistant Professor, University of South Florida, Department of Communication, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, CIS 1040, Tampa, FL 33604, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] [1] CitationYngvesson writes that one of the two predominant stories in the world of intercountry adoption is the story of abandonment (7). [2] My language is drawn from (and revises) CitationVerrier, who describes the separation of biological mothers and their children as a "primal wound." She notes, "Many doctors and psychologists now understand that bonding doesn't begin at birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological, and spiritual events which begin in utero and continue throughout the postnatal bonding period. When this natural evolution is interrupted by a postnatal separation from the biological mother, the resultant experience of abandonment and loss in indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious minds of these children, causing that which I call the 'primal wound'" (1). [3] My language is again inspired by and comments on Verrier's words. She writes, "Very few parents seek counseling previous to adopting, perhaps thinking that having a baby will obviate the need for such work. Yet there is certainly much work to be done. Not only do prospective adoptive parents need to examine the impact infertility has upon them. …" Verrier goes on to advise adoptive parents to "work through their own issues of abandonment and loss in order to be adequately able to help their adopted children work through theirs." She continues by writing, "And altruistic adoptive parents, who have children already and just want to provide a family for those 'poor abandoned children' need to examine their motives and expectations more closely" (2–3). [4] CitationBaudrillard 192. [5] Adapted from CitationFlax, whose text reads, "They search for mothers who never existed, whose names are nowhere in the record" (5). [6] Flax 5. [7] Kelly writes of a child's text as a "fetish object" that inscribes and thus replays the differences and separations of the Oedipal complex (Post-Partum 188). Elsewhere Kelly writes, "In having the child, in a sense [a mother] has the phallus. So the loss of the child is the loss of that symbolic plenitude—more exactly the ability to represent lack" (41). This post-partum loss is created in the child's move into identification and language. She writes that the letter b (along with p, d, and q)—inscribes "straight and a round" figures, "pairs of graphemic oppositions [that] designate the symbolic function of presence and absence in a double movement of memory and forgetting." She continues by saying that the text as gift (as fetish object) "unfolds the child's desire to-be-what-she-wants-him-to-be; but the letter constructs the cannot-be of his autonomy and instigates the unexpected pleasure of deferment" (188). [8] These lines are inspired by Derrida. He writes, "The first book, the mythic book, the eve prior to all repetition, has lived on the deception that the center was sheltered from play: irreplaceable, withdrawn from metaphor and metonymy, a kind of invariable first name that could be invoked, but not repeated" (296). [9] CitationBarad writes, "materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily production: matter emerges out of and includes as part of its being the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material reconfigurings of the world). … The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter" (822, 829). [10] This is taken from Kelly's description of weaning as parallel to an infant's move to identification (as in Jacques Lacan's mirror stage). She writes, "It is this identificatory movement of the child towards an ideal which mediates his/her anaclitic and primary relationship to the mother (or a part of her body) and subsequently inscribes a sense of lack in her because it threatens her own Imaginary identification with the child as someone who was once part of her" (Post-Partum 40). [11] Kelly, Post-Partum189. [12] My language in this line is drawn, again, from Kelly, who writes that the separation of mother and child "articulates a rupture, a rent, a gap and a confrontation … in which the dialectic of desire … transgresses the system of representation in which it is founded. The construction of femininity as essentially natural and maternal is never finally fixed but forever unsettled in the process of articulating her difference, her loss. And it is precisely at such moments that it is possible to desire to speak and to change" (Post-Partum 189). [13] Kelly, Imaging 22. [14] Butler writes, "I began with the speculative question of whether feminist politics could do without a 'subject' in the category of women" (Gender Trouble 142). [15] In addition to reflecting my own (and this essay's) interests in how personal narrative and performative writing might constitute an aesthetic and political practice, my language here references Kelly's reflections on Post-Partum Document in her more recent CitationImaging Desire. She writes that when the work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it was staged within the "rupture" of feminist thinking and the women's movement and avant-garde art making. She notes, "identity's unruly content—sexual difference—had divided the field, not only of feminist debate within the movement, but also of critical practice within the institutions of fine art" (Imaging xv). [16] Kelly, Post-Partum xxi. [17] Kelly writes, "Post-Partum Document … is an effort to articulate the mother's fantasies, her desire, her stake in that project called 'motherhood'. In this sense, too, it is not a traditional narrative; a problem is continually posed but no resolution is reached. There is only a replay of moments of separation and loss, perhaps because desire has no end" (Post-Partum xxi). [18] Kelly writes that Post-Partum Document aspired to "'picture' the woman"—as mother, as a representation of femininity and of sexual difference—"as subject of her own desire" (xii). [19] CitationOliver writes, "In the traditional psychoanalytic model of both Freud and Lacan, the child enters the social realm and language out of fear of castration. The child experiences its separation from the maternal body as a tragic loss and consoles itself with words instead" ("Introduction" xxi). [20] This phrase is inspired by CitationWilliams (135). Williams describes a structure of feeling as that which articulates presence. Like Kristeva, Williams is working to theorize the relationship between language and matter, feeling and thought, rhythm and logic, the personal and the social. [21] Gordon 200. Gordon is riffing on Williams's notion of structures of feeling as a haunting, the "tangled exchange of noisy silences and seething absences." [22] Oliver xxi. [23] My use of the opposition of "natural" and "right" is taken from CitationGuillaumin's writing on the evolution and workings of modern racial categories and, in turn, racism (77-80). She notes that, beginning in the nineteenth century, conceptions of race are based on "natural" or phenotypical characteristics and are used to create scientific, legal, and social relations that operate on an oppressor-oppressed model. The correctness or "rightness" of such relations hinges on the "natural" distinctions among races and as such enacts a dialectic of nature and right: "An ideology or interpretation of reality which balanced the right of the oppressors against the nature of the oppressed" (79). [24] Volkman, "Introduction" 2. [25] Yngvesson 9. [26] Volkman, "Introduction" 2–3. [27] CitationVolkman writes of, specifically, "early-era" Korean adoptees placed with families in America: "The past was erased or contained in an abandoned 'there'; the racialized trace of origins tended to be treated as manageable" ("Introduction" 2). [28] CitationBarthes writes, "Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object—whatever its cause and its duration—and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment" (13). [29] Kristeva describes the symbolic as linguistic sign and the semiotic as a forceful, pleasurable, insistent, and expressive desire that troubles the sign even as it informs its creation and representation ("Motherhood" 304; see also Kristeva, Revolution 40). [30] Kristeva characterizes this lack as the "symbolic paternal facet," contained in a mother's "desire to bear the father's child." She contrasts this lack—as described by Freud—with the "homosexual-maternal facet," which she characterizes birth as a reunification (identification) of women with their mothers, though here Kristeva is speaking generally about women, childbirth, and discourses of maternity rather than about individual women and their mothers ("Motherhood" 303). [31] Kristeva, Revolution 27. Kristeva's chora is a space—a womb—that contains trace and mark of the unconscious and its ineluctable drives and energies. These drives, which are organized around the infant's connection to and separation from the mother's body, mediate between the biological and the social in a space anterior to symbolic language. [32] Kristeva writes, "By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother they are the same continuity differentiating itself. She thus actualizes the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory, more open to her own psychosis, and consequently, more negatory of the social, symbolic bond" ("Motherhood" 303). [33] Kristeva, "Motherhood" 303. [34] Kristeva, "Motherhood" 303. [35] Kristeva, "Motherhood" 303. [36] Pollock writes, "I remain moved by Kristeva's sense that maternity is a utopic force, drawing together women, mothers, and their children—male and female—in the deep and sensual renewal of their lives together" (Telling Bodies 59). [37] Derrida explores and interrogates the notion of an originary identity or subjectivity through his theory of writing as differance, as difference deferred, always a "double origin plus its repetition" (299). If a sign is apprehendable as a sign only in its repetition (its beginning as repetition), Derrida asserts that a search for origins—for a "natural site" or "natural center"—is both part of the impulse to write and a failed, yet playful and powerful attempt to (re)produce experience. He writes, "Rendered hopeless by repetition, and yet joyous for having affirmed the abyss, for having inhabited the labyrinth as a poet, for having written the hole, 'the chance for a book,' into which one can only plunge, and that one must maintain while destroying it" (298). The repetition of adoption stories—to and for and from birth mothers, adoptive mothers, adopted children—is such a hopeless and joyous search to write (and tell) the (w)hole story of birth and placement, the chance for a family. This project posits such stories as an abyss one must plunge into and strive to maintain, while at the same time repeating and rewriting these stories with the "power of perversion and subversion" and the serenity that comes by "remaining open, by pronouncing nonclosure, simultaneously infinitely open and infinitely reflecting on itself" (296, 298). [38] Pollock writes, "As I understand Kristeva, the maternal body is a rupture in the social fabric always already about to happen" (Telling Bodies 58). [39] Kristeva writes, "in order to separate from their mother's bodies females must separate from themselves as women; and in order to maintain some identification with their mothers as the bodies of women females carry around the 'corpse' of their mothers' bodies locked in the crypts of their psyches" (CitationBlack Sun 28-29). Kristeva writes that the rejection of the same-sex (homosexual) desire of women for and with their mothers creates a melancholy and repressed desire for an abject maternal body. Where Kristeva focuses on the relationship of women and their mothers, I am suggesting that adoption creates, among other things, a dynamic of abjection and melancholic desire for mothers, children and surrogates. [40] Adapted from Derrida, who writes, "the time of writing no longer follows the line of modified present tenses. What is to come is not a future present, yesterday is not a past present. The beyond of closure of the book is neither to be awaited nor to be refound. It is there, but out there, beyond, within repetition, but eluding us there" (300). [41] This relationship is meant to evoke Kristeva's conceptualization of the signifying process as an exchange among semiotic, symbolic, and significance (see Revolution 41), and Derrida's use of triplicity, a "double origin plus its repetition. Three is the first figure of repetition" (299). [42] Kristeva writes that the function of poetic language is to "introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it" (Revolution 81). [43] Oliver writes, "Even if the mother is not the subject or agent of her pregnancy and birth, she never ceases to be primarily a speaking subject. In fact, Kristeva uses the maternal body with its two-in-one, or other within, as a model for all subjective relations" ("Kristeva and Feminism" par. 12). [44] Adapted from Kristeva, who, writing of the symbolic paternal (which she contrasts with the homosexual-material), notes, "It is an appeasement [of the desire to bear the father's child] that turns into melancholy as soon as the child becomes an object, a gift to others, neither self nor part of the self, an object destined to be a subject, an other" ("Motherhood" 303). [45] Kristeva, "Motherhood" 306. [46] This perception is due in large part to the creation of the "one child" policy in China in 1979, which mandated that couples limit themselves to one child in order to limit population growth. This was, according to Volkman, often a "'one son/two children' policy: parents were allowed to try for a second child—a son—if the firstborn was a daughter" ("Embodying" 33). Enforcement measures for the policy (which included fines for "over-quota" children, sterilization, and the threat of forced abortions) and social pressures led to a marked increase in abandonment of baby girls, crowding China's state-run orphanages and, in turn, an explosion of transnational adoptions of the (mostly) infant girls. This perception, along with the preference for girls among most adoptive parents (see Citation"Gender Preference"), has meant that, according to my social worker, other countries have trouble placing boys. Thus, some agencies, including those facilitating Korean adoptions, have mandated that no gender preference may be stated by adoptive parents (at least for the first child placement with a given family). [47] CitationLifton 11. [48] My phrasing is drawn from Derrida, who writes, "Such is the anxious desire of the book" (298). [49] Oliver, "Introduction" xxi. [50] Adapted from Verrier, who writes, "for the child abandonment is a kind of death, not only of the mother, but of part of the Self, that core-being or essence of oneself which makes one feel whole. In acknowledging this loss and its impact on all involved in adoption, there is no way one can get around the pain: the pain of separation and loss for both the child and the birthmother, and the pain of not understanding or being able to make up for that pain and loss on the part of adoptive parents" (6). [51] Kristeva questions Lacan's ideas about desire and signification, noting, "This desire, the principle of negativity, is essentially the death wish. … [The] subject's desire is founded on drives … that remain unsatisfied, no matter what phantasmatic identifications desire may lead to because, unlike desire, drives divide the subject from desire. … Desire will be seen as an always already accomplished subjugation of the subject to lack" (Revolution 131). Rather than view a subject's desire as fulfilled only in sublimation of the drives to language (and thus to lack, castration, death), Kristeva proposes that we view language as (always already) "mixed with the drives" and subjectivity as fluid, in-process, and exceeding the death wish or any other static and nonresistant construct. Rather than view subject and sign as impossibly and forever separate, Kristeva wants to reunite language and body, life and death, desire and signification—though, again, not into a unified, stable whole but in temporary and shifting moments of I am an who are by … are by Adapted from who writes, is about how to transform a of a life into an life whose in the of Butler writes, "It is whether the primary relationship to the maternal body which both Kristeva and to is a and whether it is even a experience. … The drives that the semiotic constitute a which makes itself in but which an prior to language She continues by Kristeva describes the maternal body as a of that are prior to itself. of the maternal body and an of its construction and (Gender Trouble Bodies and Oliver, and Feminism" par. Bodies Trouble Trouble see also that Trouble Kelly, Post-Partum xxi. Adapted from Volkman, who writes, "In the absence of the mother's body, the for origins may be the body of the and its ("Embodying" I am the opposition of parents, biological as more and than the by adoption and my own in this and move of such much in the same way Butler questions a biological and subjectivity in Butler writes that if gender is there is no identity by which an or might be there be no or or of and the of gender identity be as a Yngvesson the that distinctions of for theories of adoptive subjectivity in her of how the adoption story in which is with a or of that is the child (as 'primal and and works with and against an identity the child in the sense that it is to her to she is (as by and from this of and a need for the adopted child to to she Yngvesson writes, "The search for … is part of a story of and of in which an self must be to a a a that its (13). Adapted from who writes, the body is not a but a a whose is …" (Gender Trouble Butler writes that Kristeva's of the as the abject the of the body which are also the first of the (Gender Trouble of Kristeva's see 2. writes that comes to matter through the of the world in its The is not that there are material in addition to discursive the is the nature of and This is for me to and write of the and of adoption CitationVolkman writes, other of transnational is in a of ("Embodying" The on is birth stories Pollock what when a story in … What when 'the becomes the from which its (Telling Bodies This is in of how which adoptees to their the of the as a of or in which one can oneself in by at a or of … at the or rather it the Pollock writes, self is in a past she only because we tell make and her sense of identity and being in the world in the of stories of her in stories whose is in (Telling Bodies I am to the that makes in between and performative to and performative are (6). a as an of a performative "I is the of by or to an Pollock writes that birth because they are are open, to and These stories "the self and its with the of do not an originary as much as mirror and of the mother and child, mother and mother, self and in the of into the for the of their (Telling Bodies writes, narrative is in the and body of the and as in with present and in with or Kelly, Post-Partum xxi. Adapted from Kelly, who writes, "desire has no the xxi). writes, soon as comes to on a questions of of social of of and political all (5). writes, as in that and between a of and a that … we have to and see also Bodies and see also asserts that performative writing the of the between between an beginning and between and … the force of those see also Pollock writes that telling birth women themselves … and and to often of memory, desire" (Telling Bodies Kelly, Post-Partum xxi. I am from and to of how and creates identities and she writes, the double movement writes, are part of the world in its on Holman Jones Stacy Holman Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Portions of this manuscript were presented at the 2004 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago, Illinois. This essay is inspired by Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document and dedicated to Bernice B. Holman and Noah Jee Min Kim Holman Jones, two adoptees who've taught me not only what is missing but also what is found and felt in the story of adoption. Correspondence to: Stacy Holman Jones, Assistant Professor, University of South Florida, Department of Communication, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, CIS 1040, Tampa, FL 33604, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]