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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

In the past years, adoption—both domestic and transnational—has increasingly come under scrutiny for the systemic illicit practices, fraud and abuse that mark this practice (Loibl 2019). Critical adoption scholars have already earlier criticized the inequalities that fuel the ‘adoption industrial complex’ (Cantwell 2017; McKee 2016), making for a flow of children from racialized, working-class, poor families and communities, often located in the Global South, Eastern Europe or other peripheral regions, towards economically stronger, mostly white, privileged couples and singles located in global or regional centers. While adoptees themselves have been at the forefront of demands for (radical) reform and abolition of adoption, resistance to such demands is strong (Hübinette 2025; Withaeckx 2024).

Underpinning such resistances and the desire to continue adoption is an ideology informed by discourses of love and humanitarianism. Adoption is often presented as the ultimate expression of selfless love, a win-win-situation in which all members of the so-called adoption triad could only gain: a ‘birth’ mother selflessly giving up her child to offer it a better future; adoptive parents willing to open up their family to an unrelated, but desired child; an adoptee grateful to be saved a life of misery and/or impending death (Wexler et al. 2023). Birth fathers are usually left out of this picture1. On a societal level, engaging in adoption presents nation states with an opportunity to present themselves as humanitarian, multicultural societies, with ‘colourblindness’ eradicating the endemic racism of these societies (Hübinette 2024).

The insidiousness of discourses of love in the adoptive family has important consequences for how those involved in adoption—adoptees, parents, but also other family members and society at large—imagine their subjective selves, as well as how they (can) relate to meaningful others. Scholars have started to examine how relationships and affect in the adoptive family are informed and constrained by particular understandings of love, often connected to the notion of ‘attachment’ (De Graeve 2012; Myong and Bissenbakker 2021). Discourses of love have increasingly become salient in adoption practices. Emphasizing the aim of creating ‘loving families’ adds to the assumed moral legitimacy of adoption. It conjures an image of adoption as situated in a private realm, as if unaffected by the geopolitical inequalities and structural-historical violence that actually shape the adoption system (Myers 2025; Myong and Bissenbakker 2021). Love has also been deconstructed as expressing Eurocentric normative ideals surrounding the nuclear family in Western neoliberal societies. These involve norms of intensive parenting, expecting parents to invest considerable time, resources and attention in children as prerequisites for ‘proper’ care (De Graeve and Longman 2013; Ishizuka 2019). In the adoptive family, this translates into intensified demands on adoptive parents to demonstrate ‘self-sacrifice and the investment of time and effort’ (Myong and Bissenbakker 2021, p. 166). On the other hand, adoptees are expected to accept the parents’ gift of love by expressing love in return2. Myong and Bissenbakker conceptualize this as a shift from ‘cultural assimilation’ to ‘affective assimilation’, as a concern with the adoptee’s ‘linguistic, racial and cultural adaptability’ has now been replaced by ‘a focus on the adoptee’s affective (love) potential and ability to attach themselves to the adoptive family’ (Myong and Bissenbakker 2021, p. 167). On this view, adoptees’ feelings of discontent, anger, sadness or frustration come to be understood as pathologized expressions of maladjustment and abnormality (McKee 2019; Merritt 2024).

Understandings of love in the adoptive family are also entwined with the imposition and normalization of the nuclear family as the idealized environment for reproductive relations, intimacy, private love and care-taking. Adoption, as it has been modernized and rationalized since the 19th century, functions, thereby, in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, it destabilizes norms of consanguinity by enabling the establishment of legal ties and inheritance between non-genetic kin. On the other hand, it is set up to mimic the nuclear consanguineous family as best as possible, by replacing rather than supplementing families of birth (Herman 2002, p. 340). Euromodern adoption then is built upon the erasure of families of origin from adoptees’ lives, crafting families by processes of kinning and un-kinning, that enable and legitimate the removal of children from certain environments and their transfer into more ‘appropriate’ families (Fonseca 2011; Högbacka 2016)3. This is supported by a variety of procedures, such as the erasure of birth parents’ names from birth certificates, the changing of names, racial and cultural matching, and the imposition of practices of secrecy and sealing, preventing adoptees from accessing (full) information about biogenetic kin. Across nations, there are differences in degrees of openness and availability of adoptees’ files, and recent adoption practices increasingly encourage more openness, implying, for example, contact between birth and adoptive parents both before and after the adoption. Yet, as Euromodern adoption is conceived to shape nuclear families by reducing rather than expanding the number of a child’s carers, even contemporary ‘open’ adoptions remain attached to norms of exclusive parenthood (Novy 2024, p. 9). More recent adoption practices in Western countries have evolved alongside changes in societal norms around family-making. The increase and normalization of transracial and transnational adoption has diminished the need for phenotypical matching. Adoption has also been celebrated as a practice able to queer the family, creating non-traditional families based on ‘choice’ rather than ‘blood’, enabling parenthood by singles and same-sex couples, destabilizing and even abolishing the ideal of the heterosexual family (Eng 2003; Lewis 2019). However, even such reconfiguration of the adoptive family is not necessarily subversive, as they might just as well be complicit in the perpetuation of the gendered, racialized and heteronormative inequalities upon which the adoption system is built (De Graeve 2014; Posocco 2014).

The dominance of this paradigm of love in the adoptive family is not just problematic in the way it burdens the adoptee with the expectation to perform affective work in the family. It is also entwined with particular understandings of love, kinship and intimacy, and therefore limits our potential to imagine alternative forms of family life that are not built upon Eurocentric, heteronormative family ideals (Myong and Bissenbakker 2021, p. 168). When interrogating the way love is mobilized in the adoptive family, it is useful to consider emotions not for what they assumedly are, but for what they do. I consider emotions not as ontological, inherent qualities residing in subjects, but as effects of our engagement with others, carrying judgements towards those others and orienting us in particular ways—either towards them, or away from them (Ahmed 2004, pp. 6–7). Such an approach enables us to see how love functions in the adoptive family as a way to attach the adoptee to a particular space, thereby detaching them from other spaces and families; orienting them towards a limited number of objects of affection (a set of—ideally—two adoptive parents) and disorienting them from other (sets of) parents that might intrude in that space. Adoptive love thereby attaches itself to other affects like loyalty and gratefulness, binding the adoptee to a family and nation that have received them while expecting families and communities of origin to recede into the background, relegated to a role of—at best—secondary importance.

In what follows, I want to engage with the question of what kind(s) of love have been erased in the adoptive family, how this impacts upon adoptees’ subjectivity, and which ways of imagining the self, in its connection to 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 (Ladjali 2013) and The girl I am, was and never will be by US author Shannon Gibney (Gibney 2023). 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 (Lugones 1987). First, however, I start by discussing how scholars have recognized adoption as ‘a site of figurative possibility’ (McLeod 2015, p. 5). The power of adoptees’ writing to disrupt, question and challenge normative understandings of self and other, and to speak of ways of being that do not have a place yet in common imaginings of the family and identity, has been studied mostly in literary and anthropological scholarship. Yet, I also argue that such scholarship tends to overestimate the hold that dominant biocentric narratives have over adoptees, which again eclipses how adoptees’ searches may elude dominant interpretative frameworks. Again, Lugones’ decolonial approach offers promising avenues to understand adoptees’ desires to search in other ways.

2. Adoption Narratives: Re-Enabling Potential Worlds

Stories about adoption abound, with some of them reproducing normative models of family-making and dominant ideals of exclusive parenting (Novy 2005, p. 7). But the practice of adoption itself has been appreciated for its potential to open up ‘alternative ways of imagining families in transcultural, non-biocentric, post-racial and queer terms, amongst others’ (McLeod 2015, p. 5), with adoptees’ writing providing ‘alternative ontologies of self’ (McLeod 2015, p. 23). On this view, adoption has the potential to radically disrupt the ideologies based on homogeneity, purity and exclusivity that inform family-making. Central in such efforts is the role of narrative as a tool for writers to make sense of themselves and take back control over their life story. Reconceiving identity as narrative, and not as pregiven—whether by the dictates of biology or by the new identity imposed through adoption—enables adoptees to take agency and to rewrite their own narratives in ways that can accommodate the actual complexity of their identities (Carsten 2000; Homans 2006).

Writings about adoption are especially appreciated for the way they disrupt dominant narratives that present identities as homogeneous, bounded, essential and authentic, and that conceive of adoptees’ searches as a quest to retrieve their ‘true’, ‘real parents’ and ‘authentic identities’ (Ahluwalia 2007). Adoptees, as well as their adoptive parents, are often presented as compelled by biocentric discourses which conceive of adoptees as incomplete as long as they lack knowledge of their biogenetic ‘origin’ and connection with their biogenetic kin. Scholars critical of such essentialist, biocentric understanding of identity are equally wary of how adoptees themselves become ‘haunted by the conviction that there is an origin’ and use adoption narratives to make such an origin (Homans 2006, p. 6). Instead, they plead for ‘reconditioned narrative structures that bear better witness to the multidirectional cultural inventories that plait biogenetic with adoptive legacies and pluralize origins across seemingly diverse places and temporalities’ (McLeod 2015, pp. 29–30). McLeod, for example, reads adoption narratives for their potential to articulate an understanding of identity that centralizes ‘interaction, attachment, coexistence and association’ (McLeod 2015, p. 24). Moreover, conceiving of identity as complex and multiple from the start—inspired by a variety of influences in which nature, nurture, imagination and narrative converge—also enables us to debunk the idea of a ‘pure origin’ and of an assumed ‘immanent meaning or being’ that could be derived from that (McLeod 2015, p. 24).

When interpreting adoption narratives no longer as a quest for ‘real’ relatives, pure beginnings and authentic identities, adoption can be seen as providing new opportunities, with its potential to ‘create new material and psychic structures’, informing ‘a poststructuralist account and accounting of family and kinship, and of identity, community, and nation’ (Eng 2003, p. 33). Thereby, instead of (vainly) attempting to retrieve the past, narratives of trauma and adoption can become ‘about the creation of something new’ (Homans 2006, p. 8) as ‘members of the adoption community could be better off accepting the fictiveness, the artificiality, of what represents or replaces those origins’ (Homans 2006, p. 23).

Such readings of adoption narratives are helpful in their warranted critiques on biocentrism and their reading of adoption narratives for their potential to complicate identity. Yet I do feel that the assumption that actual adoptees are always motivated by biocentrism is overdrawn, as adoptees’ desires to search can also have other motivations (e.g., sense of justice, simple curiosity, need to know about medical history…) and are not exhausted by a desire to search for an assumed ‘pure origin’. Adoptees who search are not always yearning for a ‘pure origin’, nor are they always expecting to find narrative ‘closure’ or final stability when searching for their first families. This might be overrating the impact of dominant cultural discourses on actual adoptees, who are not equally shaped and determined by such narratives. Instead, I want to complement these analyses by arguing that adoptees’ searches and existential interrogations are not exhausted by the pressure of biocentric cultural ideals or the pulling of essentialist notions of ‘culture’ and ‘homeland’.

Moreover, while such scholars do recognize the inequalities and harms on which modern adoption is built, presenting this practice as an ‘opportunity’ heralding ‘new’ understandings of family, identity and kinship is problematic for the way it erases adoption’s history and its intrinsic entwinement with coloniality. Euromodern adoption, and its normalization of secrecy, its irreversible separation of children from parents and communities, and its dismissal of certain types of parents through de-kinning, should be understood in its continuities with colonial and postcolonial strategies of fragmenting and erasing pre-existing worlds (Gondouin and Thapar-Björkert 2022; Wexler et al. 2023). I conceive of adoption, therefore, as ‘inherently entangled with colonialism, racial capitalism, nation-building, middle-class aspirations, dis/ability, policing of mothers and families’ and ‘replicated in myriad variations across geopolitical and intersectional positionalities’ (Hordijk et al. 2025). This particular form of adoption cannot be compared to other forms of (informal) childcare where children might circulate amongst other family members or caregivers, but that do not imply the erasure of preceding identities and connections (Nnama-Okechukwu et al. 2023). Seeing adoption as an ‘opportunity’ to enable ‘new’, queer, poststructuralist understandings of the family stops short of questioning how adoption itself actively erases and disables previously/already existing forms of identity and kinship (Azoulay 2019). It legitimizes Euromodern adoption as a practice that has a future and can continue to forge ‘new’ families and identities that cross boundaries, regardless of its function in actively producing and upholding such boundaries.

Following Audre Lorde’s statement that ‘the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde 1984), I see adoption as so entwined with the processes of severing, fragmenting and disabling inherent to the imperial/colonial project, that it cannot be salvaged to produce ‘new’ futures, as if these could be disengaged from that legacy. I thus consider adoption not as an enabling, but as an erasing force. We can better understand adoptees not as making something new, but as returning to the past in order to enable the potential shared histories that were erased by adoption, to re-exist (Azoulay 2019). I turn to Lugones’ articulation of world-traveling, love, and multiplicity because it enables me to flesh out the multiple attachments and complexities marking adoptees’ lives, without assuming that what they are searching for is necessarily an ‘origin’.

3. Traveling Worlds: From Arrogant to Loving Perception

3.1. Lugones on Love and World-Traveling

In her ground-breaking essay ‘Playfulness, “world-traveling” and loving perception’ (Lugones 1987), feminist philosopher Maria Lugones builds an understanding of love from the notion of arrogant perception, which she borrowed from Marilyn Frye (Frye 1983) but also re-articulates in important ways. Both of them start from a problematization of something that is called ‘love’ but is actually what they come to understand as ‘arrogant perception’. Lugones recalls how, growing up, she failed to love her mother. Loving her mother, as she was taught, implied that she made use of her mother’s services, taking for granted her mother’s role to serve and care for others in the context of the patriarchal family. Additionally, Lugones was also expected to identify with her mother in the sense of wanting to become just like her. For the young defiant Lugones, however, this would mean to accept in her turn the subservient role assigned to her mother, which she refused: ‘To love her was supposed to be of a piece with both my abusing her and with my being open to being abused’ (Lugones 1987, p. 5).

In such an abusive relationship—presented as love—the self builds up her own identity, existence and growth to the detriment of the other, who becomes completely subsumed, with the self ‘grafting the other’ onto itself4. On this account, then, arrogant perception is an abusive intimacy involving a tight entanglement between self and other—mistakenly understood as love. Precisely because of this entanglement of abuse, identification and love, extricating oneself from such a relationship becomes a tricky endeavor, ridden with confusion and guilt. Indeed, Lugones continues to explain her disarray once she started to refuse the abusive relationship with her mother. Believing that she should no longer identify with her mother, she started to see them both as ‘beings of quite a different sort’. Feeling compelled to abandon her mother, while this was actually not what she wanted, resulted in a feeling of being fragmented, of not being whole:

I had a sense of not being quite integrated, my self was missing because I could not identify with her, I could not see myself in her, I could not welcome her world. I saw myself as separate from her, a different sort of being, not quite of the same species.

(Lugones 1987, p. 6)

For Lugones, however, dependence and connection are indispensable parts of human lives, something that one needs to feel ‘complete’5: ‘I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am profoundly dependent on others without having to be their subordinate, their slave, their servant’ (Lugones 1987, p. 8).

What then would it mean to love without perceiving the other arrogantly? A loving perception would involve an identification with the others, that fully recognizes one’s connection to and dependency on that other: ‘the possibility that my self and the self of the one I love may be importantly tied to each other in many complicated ways’ (Lugones 1987, p. 8). But importantly, instead of understanding ‘identification’ with the other as ‘grafting of the other onto the self’, love requires a profound understanding of the other as she sees and understands her self. This involves looking at the other and the other’s world ‘with her eyes’, witnessing ‘her own sense of herself within her world’. This would enable a form of identification that is not out to graft the other onto the self, but that enables one to see the other as a subject and the relationship with the other as one in which both actors can understand each other, make meaning together, ‘to be through loving each other’ (Lugones 1987, p. 8). Loving then requires what Lugones calls world-traveling: traveling to each other’s worlds in order to see the other no longer as an object serving our needs, but as a subject whom we can connect and engage with.

An important aspect of this loving perception, then, is the recognition of what Lugones names ‘worlds’6. Lugones’ worlds are not hypothetical, utopian world-views or pure products of the imagination, though they are partly that. Worlds are real in the sense that they have to ‘inhabited at present by some flesh and blood people’ (Lugones 1987, p. 9). A world may be an actual society, governed by dominant cultural norms and prescriptions, or one governed by non-dominant norms. It may be a whole society, but it can also be ‘a tiny portion of a particular society’ (Lugones 1987, p. 10). Lugones derived her understanding of different worlds from her experiences as a woman from an ethnic minority community living among an ethnic majority (US White/Anglo men and women). In such a position, one often experiences a feeling of unease and discomfort, deriving from the experience of ‘being different in different worlds’. For immigrants like Lugones, there are worlds in which they feel at ease: understanding the language, knowing the norms to be followed, feeling bonded and loved, sharing a history and common understanding of shared memories and practical jokes (Lugones 1987, p. 12). Yet in other worlds, they experience unease, arising not just from an unfamiliarity with dominant norms and habits, but also from being perceived as different than how they experience themselves in other worlds (Ortega 2016, p. 88)7. World traveling then is most likely to be experienced by people who ‘have the distinct experience of being different in different “worlds” and of having the capacity to remember other “worlds” and ourselves in them’ (Lugones 1987, p. 11). When traveling through worlds, world travelers experience ‘epistemic shifts’ as they pass through different ‘worlds of sense’ and notice the shifts from worlds in which they feel relatively at ease to others in which they might feel alienated, out of place, and in which they (need to) become ‘different’ persons (Ortega 2016, p. 90). Individuals can be constructed and understood differently according to the world in which they find themselves, and these constructions might be ambiguous and conflicting.

3.2. Multiplicity: Being in and Between Worlds

By its emphasis on multiplicity, simultaneity and complexity, world traveling provides an understanding of identity that challenges dominant notions of the self as homogeneous, stable, unified and fixed. The world traveling subject is one that is multiple, yet nonfragmented, moving through social worlds that are unstable and heterogeneous (Ortega 2016, p. 91). For Lugones, this recognition of ‘being multiple’ translates into a belief that we exist as an ontologically existing multiplicity of selves, each of which might be constructed very differently from the other(s). She goes as far as rejecting any idea of an ‘underlying I’ that would provide a sense of continuity between those selves. Following Ortega, I subscribe to a less radical ideal of ‘the multiplicitous self’ as a self that ‘has various social identities and the possibility of being in various worlds’, while also having the need or possibility to travel from world to world. Such a self is subject to power relations that ‘construct the multiplicitous self in various ways’ and, often ill at ease, ‘is deeply aware of the experience of liminality’ (Ortega 2016, p. 66). Such a notion of ‘being-between worlds’ and ‘being between worlds’ does not preclude the existence of a more or less constant, underlying ‘I’.

Importantly, this simultaneity and multiplicity of existing is a real experience for many people, especially outsiders, though it might be denied or problematized by others who feel completely at ease in their worlds, do not feel compelled to travel between worlds, and might therefore completely dismiss the experience of those who (feel compelled to) travel between worlds. But a denial of this experience would ‘constrain, erase, or deem aberrant experience that has within it significant insights into non-imperialistic understanding between people’ (Lugones 1987, p. 11).

3.3. Adoptees’ World-Traveling

We can usefully apply Lugones’ theory of world-traveling and multiplicitous being to complement our understanding of adoption experiences. For adoptees, world-traveling captures an experience of longing for another reality, a history, an experience that belongs to them, but that has been erased and made inaccessible to them by others. World-traveling can help us to understand adoptees’ desire to search as not necessarily induced by a biocentric compulsion for a ‘pure’ origin or ‘real’ relatives. We can understand their restlessness and unease as the confrontation with traces and memories of other worlds, and their searches as efforts to reclaim and re-establish connections between worlds that exist alongside each other, but whose passage has been obstructed by adoption.

Likewise, Lugones’ conceptualization of love enables us to understand adoptees’ feeling of incompleteness not in terms of the mysterious calls of biology or a yearning for authenticity, but as arising from their particular positioning as adoptees within the Western nuclear family which conceives of parenthood as exclusive and considers intrusions from beyond—like the existence of another set of parents—as potential threats. This aligns with Ahmed’s understanding of love as a doing, a way to attach the adoptee to their adoptive world by positioning some as deserving objects of affection, while others recede from view (Ahmed 2004). In what follows, I first present some notes on the genre of autofiction before introducing the novels and presenting the analysis.

4. Autofictionalizing Adoption

The novels I will be analyzing can be categorized as autofiction; ‘a genre close to autobiography and yet quite distinct from it’ (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 204)8. Autofiction is marked by its contradictory combination of ‘two opposite types of narratives. Just like autobiography, it is a narrative based on the principle of the equation of the ‘ three identities’ (the author is also the narrator and the main character). Yet it claims to be fiction in its narrative and in terms of its peritextual allegations (title, back cover) (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 203). While both autobiography and autofiction provide narratives built up from factual, autobiographic experiences, ‘traditional’ autobiography aims at describing a really existing character as realistically as possible, while ‘autofiction fictionalizes a character which really lived’ (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 205). By letting go of claims to realistic portrayals that could reflect authentic and ‘true’ experiences, autofiction arose in tandem with postmodern concerns and doubts about ‘subject, identity, truth, sincerity and self-writing’ (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 205). By intentionally blurring the line between author and character, facts and fiction, memory and imagination, autofiction is marked by hybridity, as it demonstrates ‘the hybrid, unstable, unpredictable, fragmented and scattered aspects of life, memory and textual reconstruction of the everyday’ (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 206).

Autofiction has been seen as enabling a departure from dominant, Eurocentric logics of understanding the self, resisting ‘the singular I’ and its concomitant understandings of identity as bounded, fixed and homogeneous. By departing from traditional conventions and presenting authors/narrators/main characters as inherently multiple, conflicted and fragmented, autofiction suitably allows the expression of experiences of (cultural) hybridity and métissage (Jordan 2013, p. 81). This blurring of boundaries is often also expressed through stylistic and linguistic experimentation, e.g., by integrating multiple forms of text and media—photographs, drawings, poetry, official documents—as additional ways to question (self)representations and ‘evidence that might lead to the self’ (Jordan 2013, p. 83). Jordan notes a ‘privileged connection between women’s autofiction and trauma’ as autofiction provides ‘a unique locus for confronting emotional wounds that are beyond articulation’ (Jordan 2013, p. 79).

By relinquishing any appeal to an authentic truth, autofiction provides authors with a great deal of freedom to rewrite and reinvent the narratives surrounding their lives. Unbound by the ‘autobiographical pact’, autofictional authors often deliberately interfere with ‘objective truth’, by changing dates or other ‘true’ facts or describing alternative versions of the self. Such creative self-awareness is also expressed through the meta-discursive character of such texts, as authors will often integrate comments on their ‘way of literary telling these events’ (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 211).

Particularly for adoptee authors, whose lives have been marked from the beginning by a lack of control and agency over important decisions in their lives, then, engaging with autofiction can be an empowering experience, enabling them to make sense of the complexities of their lives and of their multiplicitous selves. Adoptees’ life writing has already formed ‘a formidable and rapidly growing canon’, displaying a large variety of formats, styles and experiences (Hipchen and Deans 2003). While the notion of ‘autofiction’ seems as yet rather rare in adoption scholarship—to the advantage of terms like ‘autobiography’ or ‘life writing’—in this article, I provide an analysis of two texts which, based on the characteristics described above, can be qualified as autofictional, as they are marked by hybridity and meta-reflections, and challenge dominant understandings of identity as they become constituted through adoption. For these authors, the use of autofiction expresses their sense that providing a ‘factual’, ‘objective’ biographical account of their lives is impossible anyway. Authenticity and veracity do not come about through futile efforts of trying to separate the ‘facts’ from the ‘fiction’, but through fully assuming the impossibility of such an endeavor, and by deliberately blurring the lines between fact and fiction (Ferreira-Meyers 2015, p. 212).

Shâb or the night by Cécile Ladjali9 (Ladjali 2013) is described as ‘an autobiographical novel’ in which the author, born to an Iranian mother in Switzerland and adopted by a French couple, reminisces about her life and relationship with her adoptive family. The novel starts out as, and was initially intended to be, a traditional autobiography. However, once Cécile’s adoptive mother becomes affected by a mysterious, life-threatening disease, the account becomes explicitly meta-reflective, as Cécile—ridden by guilt—reflects on the (assumed) impact of her writing on her adoptive mother. Yet instead of throwing away the manuscript, she eventually decides to ‘balance’ the text and continues with an account containing her search for her birth mother and her own struggles with constituting her own family life. The second half of the book more explicitly integrates imagined situations and dialogues, in her efforts to explore the worlds and perspectives of her birth parents and her Iranian background.

Sharon Gibney’s The Girl I Am, Was and Never Will Be (Gibney 2023) is described as ‘a speculative memoir of transracial adoption’ combining realism and facts (evidenced by the reproduction of pictures, official documents, medical reports, death certificates…) with memory, imagination and elements of science fiction. Shannon is a mixed-race girl born to an Afro-American father and white American mother and adopted by a white family. Her life and story run parallel with Erin’s, the self (Erin) she could have been if she had not been adopted. Shannon/Erin and other potential selves co-exist as alter egos in parallel worlds, sharing similar experiences of marginalization and exclusion, as both grow up as Black children among white families, neither of them knowing their birth father. Fact and fiction are explicitly blurred, as Shannon/Erin’s father—respectively deceased/disappeared—is brought back into their existence through the time machine that he built, enabling the characters to travel through space/time and to meet.

For my analysis, I applied a close reading of the novels, combining a deductive approach—starting from Lugones’ conceptual framework on love and world-traveling—with induction, as I remained attentive to experiences that might deviate from, or add to, this pre-identified framework. I identified four main themes—‘being not at ease’, ‘arrogant perception’, ‘loving perception’ and ‘world-traveling’—and coded fragments of the texts under these headings. This enabled me to see similarities between the texts, but also important divergences, as the author developed very different strategies to handle the complexities of their worlds and identities. In the final analysis, I combined these findings under two broad themes—‘stories of love and anxiety’ and ‘adoptees traveling worlds’—enabling me to juxtapose and contrast the narratives. Moreover, this analysis is informed by my own positionality as a transracial, domestic adoptee, and by my search for theorizations that can help in conveying the confusions that accompany adoption, while also offering tools for understanding and valorizing this complexity. With my analysis, I hope to do justice to the particularity of adoptees’ experiences, while also offering insights that can be useful for understanding the experiences of many others whose identities cannot be fully explained by hegemonic, monolithic conceptualizations of identity.

5. Analysis

In my reading of the novels alongside Lugones’ theory of love and world-traveling, I will explore the following questions: How do the authors experience love in the adoptive family? How do expectations surrounding their affective labor inform their sense of self and shape their relationship with meaningful others? How do the authors come to realize and experience their connection to different worlds, and how does that translate into a questioning of the world they live in, and into efforts both to explore other world(s) and to connect them? And lastly, which strategies do the authors develop to enable another kind of love in the adoptive family?

5.1. Stories of Love and Anxiety

In the dominant adoption narrative, (colourblind) love is often mobilized as the device that builds families from previously unrelated parents and children. Cécile’s parents decide to adopt her as Julie, the adoptive mother, failed to get pregnant, while ‘Robert et Julie desired nothing else but babies’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 20). Shannon’s parents already had two biogenetic children, yet adopted her at five months old because they wanted a daughter more than anything (Gibney 2023, p. 90). This overriding desire for a particular child might involve the negotiation of other, less desirable, characteristics. When faced with the adoption agency’s question whether they would accept ‘a typed child’—a euphemistic description of her racialised appearance—Cécile’s parents have their concerns but conclude that a bit of ‘typing’ would not be that bad, given the father’s own Algerian background.

And the letter that Julie and Robert drafted for the child support services of the canton of Vaude stipulated therefore this ultimate request: We would prefer, as far as possible, that the child is not too typed.

(Ladjali 2013, p. 28)

As Eng notes, such preferences belie an understanding of love as exclusive and based upon a bond of unconditional love between two people, opening up ‘the terrain of commodification—one of exchangeability and substitutability’ (Eng 2003, p. 14). The discourse of love that becomes mobilized, serves as a tool to manage the arbitrariness of the adoption procedure and facilitating the process of ‘kinning’ by presenting the adoption as a romantic story of predestination (González García and Wesseling 2013, p. 264) In Ahmed’s terms, love works here to orient the parents and child towards each other, binding them together by overcoming the differences that initially distinguish them (Ahmed 2004, p. 7).

In Shâb, this trope is played out when, at six months old, Cécile first meets with her adoptive parents and immediately falls asleep in her adoptive mother’s arms. Mme Philibert, the director of the Swiss orphanage, declares that ‘I think she was waiting for you.’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 13) and reassures the parents that ‘the only job they have is to love Cécile’, upon which they answer ‘Oh, that will be easy, Mme Philibert’ (ibid.).

In The girl, Shannon is explicitly critical of the love story spun by ‘adoption literature’, with its depiction of the birth mother ‘who loves her baby very much but cannot take care of it’ and the ‘kindly, upper-middle-class, usually white couple who desperately wants a child’ now given the chance to create a ‘new colourblind family’ with the ‘poor, brown, cast-off orphan’: ‘Love conquers all’ (p. 53). She is keenly aware, however, that this story is built upon loss and erasure, orienting the adoptee away from everything preceding the adoption:

Once the birth mother has given up the child, she is no longer part of the story. Once the child is adopted, there is no talk of loss of first family, culture, language or community. The adoption is simply a bureaucratic event that happened, and then is over. Since the birth father was not part of the story from the beginning, he is not part of the adoptee’s story as it progresses.

(Gibney 2023, p. 53)

In Shâb, this erasure is thematized by the recurrent theme of blindness, symbolized by Cécile’s adoptive name—‘a blind saint’s name’—that came to replace her first name, Roshan.

Cécile. What a weird idea to have chosen a blind saint’s first name. (…) their [adoptive parents’] plan was of a redoubtable efficiency: blinding me with a French first name which would forbid me to look back.

(Ladjali 2013, p. 15)

Such erasures are at the root of other, more disturbing effects that quickly come to complicate the ‘love story’. The adoptive families are in particular marked by fear and anxiety, induced by their deviation from ‘normal’ families. Cécile describes her adoptive parents as constantly ‘anxious’, an anxiety that became ‘constitutive of their person’:

They feared nothing as much as that someone would take me back and that in the eyes of the whole world, their situation would seem illegal. They developed very early the feeling that their love was illegitimate. A contraband love, to sum it up.

(Ladjali 2013, p. 14)

An important source of anxiety haunting the adoptive family is the specter of the birth parents. Even though adoptive parents might declare themselves open to their child’s (potential) desire to search for and reconnect with the other parents, anxieties about the loyalty of the child and the potential intrusion of outsiders into their intimate sphere persist. Likewise, Shannon is aware of her parents’ hurt as she proceeds with searching and contacting her birth parents:

I think about my parents back home in Ann Arbor, who were incredibly hurt when I told them about the search, and my brothers, who don’t understand why I need to do it at all (if I’m honest, I’m not sure I do, either).

(Gibney 2023, pp. 128–29)

While this does not deter Shannon from pursuing her search, the adoptive parents’ unwillingness or inability to manage their own feelings burdens adoptees with the labor of managing such emotions and of subordinating their own desires. Therefore, the adoptees themselves are often haunted by anxieties. Throughout her narrative, Cécile struggles with her fear of being abandoned (again) by her adoptive parents. Feeling compelled to please her parents to avoid rejection, she blames herself when her mother catches a mysterious, deadly disease, conjecturing that her writing and her search for her birth mother might have affected her adoptive mother.

Did she contract this mysterious disease in order to efface herself? Leave space for the other mother? Maybe she guessed that I was writing this cursed text, Shâb ou la nuit, and the grief killed her? (…) I threw away the manuscript.

(Ladjali 2013, p. 201)

Shannon struggles with anxieties and anger about the many unanswered questions in her life and the lack of control these represent. A recurring image haunting her is her fear that she might not be real, but is actually a robot, controlled by somebody else:

I can feel the old familiar fear on the other side of the door inside me, the one that is usually chained shut when I am lying in bed at night and my mind races—the door I either studiously ignore or nonchalantly walk past in daily life. She hates that door with everything in her. Hates its ability to knock her over when she usually has everything in control. Hates its audacity to exist. And now it is flung wide open, the fear leaping out of her in the form of questions she can’t answer, that no one could. (…) What if you’re a robot and someone else is controlling you, controlling even these thoughts.

(Gibney 2023, p. 23)

Despite the unease that these silences cause, the authors themselves are invested in strategies of silencing and suppression. Their efforts to fit into the family as best as possible can be read as a consequence of arrogant perception, as they shape themselves into the person who fits their parents’ needs and expectations. This implies the suppression of those parts of themselves that do not fit into the profile. This can be considered as another form of affective labor, as the parents take for granted the adoptee’s role to serve and care for others. Cécile actively suppresses her curiosity about her background ‘because I would have been scared to hurt them’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 72). Later, feeling embarrassed that her mother never graduated from high school, she reins in her own academic ambitions in order to remain ‘her mother’s daughter’: ‘maybe I wouldn’t even be that good at school in order to remain my mother’s daughter. Yes, especially remain her daughter’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 82).

In a way, such emotional labor involves a role reversal, as the children care for their parents and sacrifice their own needs in order to fulfill the needs of the adults who are supposed to care for them. Significantly, both stories contain scenes in which the authors present themselves as ‘their parents’ parent’. When caring for her ailing father, as one would for a baby’, Cécile wonders ‘whether, when my mother would die in turn, I would have the impression to give birth to her’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 111). When her mother adoptive does fall ill, she declares that ‘I became my mother’s mother’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 177). The same expression is later used for her birth mother, with whom Cécile eventually establishes contact. The latter does not show any comprehension for Cécile’s doubts and confusion, which leaves her once again with ‘the impression of being my mother’s mother’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 235).

In The Girl, Shannon’s father, when looking through an opening wormhole, witnesses a scene of a Black woman taking care of two young unruly white kids, whom she addresses as ‘Mom and Dad’: ‘It’s so strange. They just appeared one day: BAM! Two little babies on her bed, and she’s been running to keep up with them since’ (Gibney 2023, p. 154). This additional alter ego of Shannon/Erin is now the mother of her adoptive parents, with the adoptee again burdened with the labour of caring for demanding parents.

In this environment, the authors develop strategies to manage the expectations put upon them, as well as to make sense of themselves, of the environment they find themselves in and of the erasures that are, in Shannon’s words, pushing at the ‘other side of the door’ (Gibney 2023, p. 23). Not surprisingly, for both authors, storytelling becomes an important tool for filling in the blanks and managing the erasures in their lives. Telling stories enables them to counter the reductional identities projected upon them, turning arrogance into loving perception, as they try to understand the motivations, needs and desires of meaningful others around them. The use of words to articulate the (repressed) imaginations, desires, fantasies… that have animated their thoughts and questionings thus far, is experienced as a powerful tool. Cécile discovers the power of words when she moves out of the parental house and goes to college to study French literature. A biography of Rimbaud, which happens to contain 30 blank pages in its middle, is conceived as a presage, symbolizing the role that words will come to play in her reconstruction of her life:

Because the words constructed me a bit more every day, those that I read in private or before my class and especially those I started to write about Iran in secret.

(Ladjali 2013, pp. 139–40)

Shannon explains how she needs to integrate the devices of speculative fiction and imagination in her story as ‘the tools of mainstream literary fiction are inadequate for investigating my questions’ (Gibney 2023, p. 25). In a short reflection, she describes ‘the space between stories’ as the space where multiple existences are possible:

In this space, in the space between the stories… in the space between what really happened, what could have happened, what almost happened, what did happen to another girl with another mother who relinquished her and another absent Black father… in this space is where we exist, where we have always existed. Where truth is born and exiled.

(Gibney 2023, p. 59)

This sentiment is echoed by Cécile, when she describes ‘the limbo’ as the place where she lived (Ladjali 2013, p. 241) and where she can write from ‘because this intermediate space promised not salvation nor damnation, but only blank pages to blacken. A program for eternity, really’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 242). Intuitively then, both Cécile and Shannon experience themselves as occupying a position of liminality, of ‘in-betweenness’ (Ortega 2016, p. 64). Unlike Lugones’ immigrant outsiders, however, as adoptees, they do not have (yet) the conscious experience of belonging to other worlds and of being able to travel within them. Nevertheless, as the other worlds keep on intruding into their current one, world-traveling becomes a possibility that might be welcomed and embraced (Shannon) or feared and rejected (Cécile).

5.2. Adoptees Traveling Worlds

Adoptees, usually from a very young age, grow up in a delineated world, formed by the confines of the nuclear adoptive family and the Western nation state in which they grow up and from which they internalize the knowledge and habits. Unlike Lugones’ world travelers then, one might expect adoptees not to have formed very distinct memories of the worlds from which they were taken. Yet from early on, the sense of unease and discomfort they experience in their world gradually points them towards the existence of the world they once traveled from and which they still carry within them. For transracial adoptees like Cécile and Shannon, their sense of unease and non-belonging is readily induced by their phenotypical features and the openness about their adoption, which makes them quickly aware that they are different. In Shannon’s words:

In some very basic and important ways, you and your family are not normal. You do not perform kinship the way the majority of the people and families you know and see in mainstream media do.

(Gibney 2023, p. 151)

Besides feeling and knowing their difference, the stories describe numerous experiences in which traces of another world intrude into the one they know. Some of these traces come in as (vague) memories or feelings of recognition, which seem to have sunk into their bodies. As newborn babies, Shannon and her alter ego Erin express that the memory of birth is something that is permanently ‘lodged’ and ‘carried’ within their bodies, whether they are adopted (Shannon) or not (Erin):

We recognize her voice, and we gurgle. (…) We register my mother’s sobs, and they lodge permanently at the base of our spine, where we will carry them always.

(Gibney 2023, p. 52)

Similarly, Shannon describes her birth mother as experiencing the separation from her child as phantom pain, as if ‘someone cut off a limb and is now walking around with it acting like it is theirs, but that her bleeding body remembers’ (Gibney 2023, p. 78). Shannon suggests that the physical connections between bodies cannot be destroyed without leaving a trace, as she believes that ‘the body remembers all that is lost’ (Gibney 2023, p. 175).

Such memories may be activated by epistemic shifts: events that provide an ‘ aperture to different worlds’, highlighting aspects of the self that are different from the ones that characterize her in her current (adoptive) world (Ortega 2016, p. 89). Such shifts are often not cognitive or rational, but indicated by smells, visuals, sounds or even vaguer feelings of ‘déjà-vu’. Such an important shift happens for Cécile when, as a child, she watches the musical West Side Story with her mother. The vision of brown people, engaged in a captivating story of rivalry and love, and the figure of the veiled Maria, represent for her an ‘aesthetic shock’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 82)10: it is the first time she can imagine a world in which brown people like her could be beautiful. Not only did she finally recognize herself in cultural imagery, but the scene also activates a sense of recognition, by presenting a woman who ‘looked like an Iranian’.

I entered a new world to which my mother had just opened the door. (…) Maria wore a black veil on her head. Like the Holy Virgin, I told myself, but a black Holy Virgin who inspired fear. While listening to the music, I looked at the pictures of Nathalie Wood who interpreted Maria. She was beautiful. Brown, but beautiful. I was so haughty to think that I looked a bit like her. (…) Clearly, Jeannine left something to me that winter evening. Nathalie Wood, as a Pietà veiled in black, holding Tony in her arms, looked like an Iranian. But that, I couldn’t tell myself, even if deep down inside I already knew. Even if, essentially, I had always known.

(Ladjali 2013, pp. 84–85)

Such shifts can also occur during actual travel to places that rekindle a sense of familiarity. When Cécile travels to Iran, she has the impression of recognizing the city’s characteristic smell (kerosene) and recognizing a particular green color, as if she had ‘always had it in mind’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 211).

While such passages evoke biocentric accounts, they cannot be reduced to a purely imagined yearning for connection with the birth mother or country. Such experiences align with the notion of ‘embodied memory’, implying that memories can be understood as ‘the reactivation of sensorimotor patterns’ originally associated with particular events, which can be reactivated (or simulated) by the body (Ianì 2023, p. 1). At the same time, it is not clear whether these memories are actually ‘real’ or the product of desire, overlain with stereotypical imageries of the ‘birth culture’ which might have been fed to the adoptee from a very early age. Cécile, for example, who was born in Switzerland, had never actually been in Iran, nor is it likely she would have seen her Iranian mother dressed as ‘a Pietà veiled in black’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 84). However, the issue here is not so much whether such memories represent ‘the truth’ or are figments of the imagination. As Shannon explains, the ‘real’ and the ‘speculative’ are already so entwined in adoptees’ lives that ‘the speculative ‘is our “real lives”’ (Gibney 2023, p. 12). The openings created through these senses of recognition are not so much pathways to the ‘truth’ as indications that there are aspects of the self that cannot just be erased, questions about the self that continue to ‘gnaw at us’ and require to explore those other worlds, in order to ‘make sense’ of the life that self is living, as well as the one that self could have been living:

Some aspect of adoptees’ birth stories that gnaws at us because it just doesn’t make sense. Some tale of our origins too blurry to be seen or understood. In many ways, this is why the speculative realm of wormholes and timelines intersecting exists for many of us near or beside our “real lives”. Who would I be now if I had been raised in Korea? How many birth siblings do I have out there? (…) In this way, the speculative is not conjecture for adoptees. The speculative is “our real lives”.

(Gibney 2023, pp. 11–12)

These experiences of recollecting, as well as the way they inevitably blur the ‘real’ with conjecture and fantasy, should be read along with the affective investments expected from adoptees, and the inability or unwillingness of the adoptive family to recognize the adoptee’s identity pre-existing the adoption. The expectation to fit into the adoptive family, and the accompanying erasure of their pre-adoptive life, require adoptees to actively suppress any memories they might have, as they literally become overwritten by the ‘new’ origin stories narrated in the adoptive family. As in Shannon’s account, memories might be reduced to dreams, but agency can be reclaimed by using fantasies to become closer to the worlds that have been made inaccessible (Eng 2003, p. 22).

The sense of existing as a multiplicitous being, existing between and in-between worlds, is further expressed by both Cécile’s and Shannon’s sense of being (at least) double. Cécile always had the sentiment of ‘being double’. Her impression of belonging to two different worlds—implying two sets of parents, two names, two birth certificates—is confirmed when she needs her birth certificate in order to register her newborn son. She discovers that a second birth certificate is attached to hers, containing her Iranian name as well as the names of her birth mother and of her maternal grandparents.

I always had the sentiment of being double. At 26 years old, I finally held the written proof that transformed my doubts into certitude. I would be able to weld the present impressions to the intuitions related to the crossed out past. Suture, thanks to the syllables of that name, night and day.

(Ladjali 2013, p. 150)

In The Girl, the author and main character Shannon does not just feel double; she is actually double, as Shannon’s life is paralleled by that of her alter ego Erin, with the first being the adopted Shannon and the second being Shannon-if-not-adopted. They live parallel lives, at times repeating the same activities (having dinner at Shannon’s maternal grandmother, searching for their father, walking through the portal…). At times, they even meet: through cursory glances exchanged through the portals created by their father’s time machine, but also physically crossing each other. Even without meeting, they live in each other’s minds all the time, recognizing each other’s presence. In a dream-like conversation, the two get into each other’s heads, exchanging names and places, as ‘two me’s’ co-existing at different timelines:

The girl I could have been, says Shannon. The girl I am, says Erin.

The girl I never was, but could always see.

The two timelines, the two me’s existing at the point of a wormhole, they both say.

(Gibney 2023, p. 14)

In both accounts, then, we find powerful expressions of multiplicitous being and the occurrence of epistemic shifts that reminisce about other worlds to which the adoptee feels connected, but which are made inaccessible to her. While the stories present similarities in their representation of the loving/arrogant relation in the adoptive family, as well as expressions of multiplicitous being and world-traveling, they also provide very different takes on how adoptees might respond to their predicament. Cécile continues to struggle with her multiplicity, finding in the end that she, as well as her world, cannot handle the co-existence of her multiple identities. When traveling back from Iran to France, wearing the mandatory veil to which she became attached somehow, she describes the airplane cabin—a liminal space ‘between the earth and the stars’—as a place in which her two identities are ‘compatible’:

In full sky, within this intermediate space situated between the earth and the stars, I was both French and Iranian. For the first time, the two identities were compatible, and this because of a piece of cloth that curiously enabled me to envisage all the facets of my conscience.

(Ladjali 2013, p. 219)

The experience last, however, only ‘until the moment of landing’, when she sheds her Iranian identity and fully embraces a singular French one. Her fear about being physically connected to another (invisible) being that intrudes into her self, of being ‘habited, divided’, also comes to the fore in her anxieties about being pregnant: ‘I would be habited, divided, alienated. In order to write, I needed to be alone with myself. Being one, not divided’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 243). Cécile, in the end, comes to terms with the adoption story. When coming across an educational book for her adoptive parents titled ‘The chicken and the duckling’, she approvingly reads a familiar adoption tale about how a childless chicken takes in a lonely duckling that, by misfortune, lost track of its mother. Without wondering about the implications for the mother duck—who might grieve or search for her missing child—Cécile concludes that ‘my adoptive parents had managed well and that I was the fruit of a miracle’ (p. 221). This story becomes mirrored by her eventual rejection of her birth mother and her inability to conceive of a space in which two mothers can co-exist. When first contacting her birth mother after the passing away of her adoptive mother, she emphasizes that she would have never done it if the latter were still alive: ‘these were things that were not done’ (p. 231). Later encounters with her birth mother are coloured by Cécile’s aversion towards her, repeating that ‘she is not my mother’ (p. 233). Cécile then relegates her multiple being to the margins and repositions herself into a singular world in which she can feel ‘one, not divided’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 243).

Shannon’s account paints a co-existence of multiple worlds and selves, blurring boundaries between time, space, life, death, past, present, imagination and reality. While words have been, and remain useful for her to reclaim agency and re-narrate stories, she is also wary about ‘the illusion of finality’ that words might evoke, the ongoing erasures that continue to occur, the desires of others to fixate on stories and pin down reality:

The thing about words is, they give the illusion of finality. (…) Which is one of the reasons why I hate the words to this particular story. Because there is so much more those words erase. So many possibilities and realities that I don’t even know. But at least I know that I don’t know. To anyone hearing the story, the words define absolute reality.

(Gibney 2023, p. 191)

Shannon’s story refuses closure in favor of an ongoing and ever-changing multiplicity of being, maintaining the openings and wormholes that enable one to re-tell the stories again and again.

To what extent, then, do the narratives weave in alternative ways of loving and being into the adoptive family? In both accounts, telling stories serves as a way for the authors to engage in loving perception: words enable them to travel to others’ worlds—to see with the other’s eyes—as they try to understand the motivations, needs, desires… of meaningful others around them. Despite Cécile’s negative perception of her birth mother and her unwillingness to let her enter her life, storytelling helps her to cultivate understanding about her motivations to relinquish her. While she herself suffers a miscarriage, she dreams about her birth mother’s short-lived encounter with her birth father and the dire conditions in which she felt compelled to abandon her baby daughter. This, in the end, enables understanding and allows Cécile to forego her earlier harsh judgments: ‘I understood more and more the silenced things. I understood the silence and could see the absence’ (Ladjali 2013, p. 287).

Shannon’s active embrace of multiplicity enables her to go much further in her critical interrogation of the nuclear family with its demands for exclusivity, of the system of adoption itself that enables new families and connections, while simultaneously ripping apart others: ‘What is a family, if not a set of relations that people in powerful institutions create, transform, or dissolve through official documents?’ (Gibney 2023, p. 11). Shannon comes to manage the paradoxical complexities of adoption, celebrating and welcoming the re-established connections with biogenetic family—‘the daily satisfaction of finally having a family that looks like me’ (Gibney 2023, p. 47)—while not in any way romanticizing these relationships as if they would offer easy answers to her struggles: ‘I am also beginning to see that my new connection with my birth mother is just another complex relationship to negotiate’ (Gibney 2023, p. 194). In the end, her engagement with world-traveling enables her to re-imagine and re-create the connections that adoption disabled, and to re-open the portals to other worlds that never should have been closed in the first place.

6. Conclusions

Reading autofictional adoption narratives alongside Lugones’ articulation of world-traveling, love and multiplicitous identity enables us to understand adoptees’ searches as not just shaped by hegemonic narratives determining them to retrieve essential, authentic or pure beginnings. Their stories can be understood as attempts to reconnect with pre-existing worlds and meaningful others, made inaccessible by the Euromodern institution of adoption that is marked by secrecy and erasure. Discourses of love in the adoptive family play a crucial role in orienting adoptees away from these worlds, reducing them to providers of affective labor and binding them to the nuclear family by expectations of loyalty and gratefulness.

As multiplicitous, liminal selves, existing in and between worlds, adoptees need to come to terms with the traces of these worlds, as they keep on intruding in their lives, memories, dreams and fantasies. Lugones’ theorization of love and world-traveling is helpful in putting into words what exactly it is that has been erased by the love story spun by the Euromodern adoption system, and makes us understand adoptees’ yearning to know otherwise than as a search for a ‘pure’ origin.