| dc.description.abstract | There exist myriad intimacies from friendship to allyship but kinship—biological kinship—is still a dominating criterion by which all other intimacies are measured, even in statements that express an association stronger than consanguinity. Consequently, modern plenary adoption is construed as the Other to biological kinship, which is the rhetorical touchstone for intimacy. Using Kenneth Burke’s “Semantic and Poetic Meaning,” this dissertation examines the semantic and poetic meaning of adoption and the ways they intersect, shift over time, and can produce greater understanding and usefulness through prescriptive adoption languages, film, comics, and poetry. Prescriptive adoption languages are lexicons put forth by interest groups to normalize adoption and those involved in adoption, resisting the primacy of biology as a dominant signifier of kinship while also replicating the referents of biological kinship, and thus reiterating adoption’s position as an imitation of biological kinship. The Kung Fu Panda trilogy (2008-2016), Lion (2016), Superman: American Alien by Max Landis (2015-2016), Loki: Agent of Asgard by Al Ewing (2014-2016), and The Adoption Papers by Jackie Kay (1991) are texts that use the language of their medium and the language of adoption to convey the complex feelings around the apparatus of adoption. Lion and the Kung Fu Panda trilogy explore the semantic and poetic meanings of adoption, search, and reunion through Google Earth and the principle of qi, reflecting the emotional journeys those in the adoption constellation partake in to understand their role as kin in community. The adoptee comic book characters Superman and Loki are figures of belonging while at the same time representatives of the oxymoronic position many transracial and intercountry adoptees find themselves in as perpetual outsiders in a binary world with power that complicates the established familial and biological formations of power and kinship. This dissertation closes with an examination of polyvocality as a means of building an imaginary polyphonic kinship in Jackie Kay’s poetry collection/memoir The Adoption Papers. The texts examined reveal that far from causing a clean break, adoption creates a multiplicity of bonds between parties that exist both internally and externally, with continuous reassessment and reevaluation of those ties over time. The semantic and poetic meanings of adoption show how this modern international legal practice, plenary adoption, is both an anesthetic legal ceremony and an ongoing lived experience filled with an abundance of mixed feelings for adoptees and their kin. | |
