The child who was left behind: ‘Dynamic temporality’ and interpretations of history in transnational adoption

Abstract

This article draws on psychological theory relating to the emergence of self and subjectivity to examine transnational adoptee experiences of their own circulation as children. The article juxtaposes state policies and adoptive parent discourses that standardize adoption as a unidirectional process that requires a clean break from the past, and more complex renditions by the adopted themselves of subjectivity as a temporally dynamic and open-ended process of coming into being. Drawing on narratives of return by adoptees born in Ethiopia, India, and Korea who were adopted by parents in Sweden and the United States, the article suggests that their experiences in the orphanages, hospitals, and families from which they were adopted complicate understandings of what it means to circulate, while opening up standardizing descriptions of family, childhood, and belonging.