- Title
- "It's a complicated thing": A biographical-narrative exploration of the experiences and identities of adult intercountry adoptees in Australia
- Creator
- Goode, Elizabeth
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Since the late 1960s, more than 10,000 infants and children have been adopted from overseas by Australian parents (Rosenwald, 2009a). Many of these adoptees are now adults in their twenties, thirties and forties. Most were adopted from Asian countries by ‘white’ parents, and came of age in a sociocultural milieu shaped by assimilationist discourses and simplistic understandings of what it means to be an intercountry adoptee. These adults are now in a position to offer nuanced reflections on their experiences, identities and relationships from childhood through to early and middle adulthood. As a postgraduate researcher, this has also been an intensely personal project, for I myself was adopted to Australia from South Korea in the mid-1980s. Drawing on biographical-narrative and autoethnographic data, the research explores and explains how a sample of adult intercountry adoptees make sense of being transnationally, and in most cases also transracially and transculturally, adopted. It also examines the extent to which they feel a sense of belonging to personally-salient people and places, and how their identifications and senses of self have changed over their lifetimes. This original research exposes the complexity and diversity across these intercountry adoptees’ lives by focusing in-depth on their sensemaking about matters of adoption, family, identity and belonging. Nine individuals born in Asian countries and adopted to Australian parents in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s participated in biographical-narrative interviews, sharing their life stories and perspectives on self and belonging over multiple interactions with the researcher. I also contributed autoethnographic data to the study, drawing on journal entries, personal emails, and memories. My autoethnographic voice extends and supplements the varied insights interviewees provided, especially regarding aspects of experience that I was able to contribute a unique or deepened perspective on. Importantly, this inquiry has yielded rich, complex and contrasting accounts that centre around themes of familial and cultural non/belonging. It specifically highlights the significance of family relationships in adoptees’ evolving perceptions of self and adoption, as well as the importance of connections with other adoptees. The diversity and indeterminacy of participants’ cultural identifications in adulthood, plus the intersectional and multifaceted nature of their identities, is also foregrounded. This thesis thereby illuminates that constructing identity as an intercountry, transracial adoptee is a lifelong, multi-dimensional, and highly personal experience that entails intricate interplay between individual sensemaking and wider sociocultural ideas about family, adoption, ‘race’ and belonging.
- Subject
- cultural identity; intercountry adoption; family; narrative inquiry; autoethnography
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1410362
- Identifier
- uon:36171
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Elizabeth Goode
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 115 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |