CFP 2011 AAA: The Languages of Adoption

[Frekko, Susan]

CFP: The Languages of Adoption
2011 AAA
Co-organized by Susan Frekko (Goucher College) and Jessaca Leinaweaver (Brown University)

Please send 250-word abstracts to Susan Frekko (susan.frekko at goucher.edu<mailto:susan.frekko at goucher.edu>) by March 7, 2011.

In 2009 adoption advocates protested against a line in the trailer of the horror film "Orphan," in which a 9-year-old adoptee reveals herself to be a deranged murderer.   As a result of the protest, the original line "It must be difficult to love an adopted child as much as your own," became "I don't think Mommy likes me very much."  This linguistic change from a general claim to a particularistic statement addressed protesters' fears that the film would discourage viewers from adopting older children.  A claim that adoption was incompatible with love became a statement about a particular adoptive mother who did not like her adopted child (love no longer being at issue).  Because of its particularity, the new line bore no implications for adoption in general.  Moreover, it replaced language suggesting that an adopted child cannot be "one's own."  These linguistic changes made the trailer more acceptable to adoption advocates (although the plot remained troublesome to them).  This is just one example of the many ways that language is implicated in the practices, experiences and perceptions of adoption.

Recent work in anthropology has demonstrated that kinship, like other social relations, is largely produced through language and linguistic encounters.  Though language is central to adoption, few analyses of adoption offer close treatment of linguistic phenomena, and few analyses of the linguistic contours of kinship consider the diverse practices of adoption in detail.  The papers in this panel offer a range of perspectives on the questions, "What roles does language play in the practices, experiences and perceptions of adoption?" and conversely, "How do the practices, experiences and perceptions of adoption structure language use?"   Language influences adoption in places such as Catalonia where linguistic behavior of potential adopters in screening interviews results in them being labeled "suitable" or "not suitable" to adopt.  Perceptions of adoption influence language use in places such as Ecuador where, for example, child-focused NGOs employ linguistic strategies to ensure that their humanitarian efforts are not perceived as adoption (Brysk 2000).

This panel's exploration of the relationship between language and adoption emphasizes traces, tidemarks, and legacies of classical anthropological kinship studies, which from its inception considered language, from kin terminologies to the historical relationship between philological models of language and ethnological models of nations and races.  The recent revitalization of "kinship studies" under the banner of relatedness has provoked exploration both of adoption as a window on the ways that humans construct relatedness and of language's centrality to practices of kinship cross-culturally.

Paper themes may include but are not limited to:

The language of the bureaucratic and legal processes of adoption
Linguistic gatekeeping in adoption screening processes
Differences in talk about formal and informal adoption
Rumors and gossip about child trafficking
Adoption in discourse about biology, genetics and/or relatedness
The development or use of PAL or Positive Adoption Language
Connections between adoption and poetry or song
Linguistic or discursive strategies of NGOs involved in international adoption
Adoption in discourses of morality, nationhood, modernity, etc.
Language socialization of adoptees
Treatments of children's heritage language by adoptive parents and communities
Conflicting language ideologies in sending and receiving countries
The articulation of language with race, class or gender in birth and/or adoptive families
Linguistic challenges for researchers of adoption