Abstract
Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and segregated routes. My Americanist contribution, however, zooms in on a recent development of autobiographical works that establish narratives of origin beyond normative boundaries of race and heterosexual reproduction. A number of predominantly white queer parents of black adoptees have turned their family history into children’s read-along books as a medium for pedagogical empowerment that employs first-person narration in the presumable voice of the adoptee. In Arwen and Her Daddies (2009), for instance, Arwen invites the reader into a story of family formation with the following opening words: “Do you know how I and my Dads became a family?” My analysis understands these objects as verbal-visual origin stories which render intelligible a conversion from differently racialized strangers into kin. I frame this mode of narration as ‘adoptee ventriloquism’ that might tell us more about adult desires of queers for familial recognition than about the needs of their adopted children.
Highlights
The Queerness of GenealogySince the 1970’s, genealogy has expanded formally as well as ideologically and seen multiculturalist and queer appropriations
Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and segregated routes
I frame this mode of narration as ‘adoptee ventriloquism’ that might tell us more about adult desires of queers for familial recognition than about the needs of their adopted children
Summary
Since the 1970’s, genealogy has expanded formally as well as ideologically and seen multiculturalist and queer appropriations Along these lines, Americans increasingly construct a sense of personal and familial beginnings through everyday practices such as autobiographical storytelling, from Barack Obama’s bestseller memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to the picture books on gay adoption that I discuss in this article. Americans increasingly construct a sense of personal and familial beginnings through everyday practices such as autobiographical storytelling, from Barack Obama’s bestseller memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to the picture books on gay adoption that I discuss in this article My engagement with this material is invested in two main objectives. I move my analytical lens from formalized to non-formalized adoption in the US and end by focusing transnational adoption to show how queer genealogies stretch across the color line into children’s literature, and beyond the Atlantic in unexpected ways
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