Geographies of Identity: Adoption Relationality and Bastard Nation

In her recent keynote address at the Conference for the Study of Adoption and Culture, Margaret Jacobs, a scholar of Indigeneity at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, critiqued the geometry and materiality of the adoption triad in the context of our understanding of Native American adoption practice. In adoption studies, we speak of the triad as a triangle, on each point of which is an identity category—a person with a stake in the adoption: the birthmother, the child, and the adoptive parent or parents. Jacobs investigated transracial placements to tease out the ways in which this model fails, or rather the ways in which we can adjust the geography and construction of adoption identity to reflect actual practice. She proposed a many-pointed star whose points include not only the positions on the triad, but also tribal councils, the child’s and the adoptive parents’ extended families, social workers and bureaucrats, even the child’s and his/her parents’ ancestors. She implied strongly that non-bodies, like the physical geographies of the child’s present and past, become identity points with influence in this model (the reservation, for instance, has an embodiment to which the child belongs, on which it might be situated, and whose geography influences placement decisions and the formation of the child’s own identity). In this presentation, I’d like to situate Jacob’s model more largely in our discipline, specifically in the discourses of gendered relationality in identity construction outside Native American adoption practice. That is, I think of this work she’s doing first as a much-needed revision to the triad-model in adoption studies generally and in understanding the generation of identity categories as/in adoption practice. Secondly, I want to investigate the model as the construction of an embodied and gendered geography of particularly female adoptee identity in the space between “adoptee” and the bureaucracies that control access to their identity-papers (courts, registries, the INS, the FBI). I’ll be looking at life narratives represented on the website Bastard Nation about and by female adoptees and their experience with accessing their identifying data for the construction of a relational, intersectional identity: “female closed-records adoptee.”