Bloodlines - Adoption, Crime, and the Search for Belonging

This study explores the relationship between crime fiction and adoption. A primary goal of this study is to investigate how the adoption trope reveals current cultural fears and fascination with kinship formations and essentialist notions of belonging, DNA and ancestry searches, and the controversial practice of adoption. Popular fiction, namely crime/detective fiction and the subgenre of adoption crime fiction, reflect scholarly debates within the field of Critical Adoption Studies, including but not limited to the ethics behind the adoption industrial complex and calls for its demise, struggles for reproductive justice, and redefinitions of parenting and kinship formations evidenced by LGBTQ and racialized identities. Another goal of this study is to highlight adoptee and birthparent voices and perspectives, illustrating how genre fiction can help to agitate for more inclusive representation. By intersecting elements of crime into the adoption story, these narratives illuminate the human cost and condition of current adoption practices.

List of contents

Introduction; 1. The Fears and Failures of Adoption; 2. Beyond the Single Adoption Story; 3. On DNA, Searching, and Belonging; Coda.

Summary

This study explores the relationship between crime fiction and adoption. A primary goal of this study is to investigate how the adoption trope reveals current cultural fears and fascination with kinship formations and essentialist notions of belonging, DNA and ancestry searches, and the controversial practice of adoption.

Foreword

How does examining adoption and crime reveal our fears of family formations, bloodlines, and ancestry?

Product details

• Authors: Jinny Huh, Jinny (University of Vermont) Huh, Huh Jinny
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.01.2025
• EAN: 9781009360968
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0936096-8
• No. of pages: 72
• Series: Elements in Crime Narratives
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Crime & mystery, FICTION / Literary, LITERARY CRITICISM / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Services, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Adoption & Fostering, Literature: history & criticism, Adoption & fostering, Crime and mystery fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Literature: history and criticism, Adoption and fostering