Tell Me a Real Adoption Story

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Desperately Seeking Suzanne: Photographs in Suzanne Chick's Adoptee-narrative Searching for Charmian

In 1994, Suzanne Chick published Searching for Charmian, an adoptee autobiography that relates Chick's discovery of her birth-mother's identity. Chick had been aware from a young age that she was adopted, but only discovered in middle age that her birth-mother was well-known Australian author and journalist, Charmian Clift.Unlike the reconciliation trajectory that many adoption autobiographies take, a physical reunion between Clift and Chick was impossible as Clift committed suicide in 1969. In the absence of any prospect of physical reunion, Searching for Charmian relies upon other narrative structures. Resemblance as a marker of familial relationship becomes the text's organising principle, one that is thrown into relief with the numerous photographs Chick encounters in the course of her search, and a number of which are reproduced in the text. Significantly, the photographs of Clift are not only, or merely, the person they represent; Chick's narrative insists on the specific context of her adoption in order to create and read these photographs anew. The photographs are integral components of the life-narrative that turns around the importance of resemblance and difference in establishing this adoptee's identity. They are also potent markers of the ways in which visual media can transform ideas of family, of social relations and of the self

In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization

This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as "naturalizing" some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to "choose" babies while others must abandon them; and challenging the practices through which small states tweak transnational financial systems while allowing multinational corporations privileges denied small states. Legitimation work (re)configures jurisdictionality, transparency, and sovereignty - the constructs on which debates over globalization's consequences hinge. Examining how these constructs order, include, and exclude persons, goods, and practices sheds light on the boundaries, slippages, and connections between the legitimate and the illegitimate within global processes