Lost and Found

Abstract

This essay revisits my earlier work on the intersections of adoption, relationships, performativity, and storytelling. Some years removed from adopting a child, learning about my grandmother's adoption, and writing how relationships are made in the performance of stories, I reconsider the power of texts that tell us into and out of being. Using pluralized voices—differences in form and mode of exchange and address—I write to show how identities and lives are performed in relation to others. Through modularity, I use repetition to show how more-or-less discrete forms and scenes happen again and again not only in accounts of our lives, but also in our identities and relationships. Specifically, I write in and through a series of changes, losses, and discoveries: the death of my grandmother, the disintegration of my marriage, the decision not to adopt another child, the forging of a new queer identity, and the gifts that a return to writing these stories provides.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.