Dr. Patricia Sawin, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill will be on campus Tuesday, April 12, to deliver her talk, “Stories of Adoptive Family Formation—Essential and Contested,” to UO Folklore faculty and graduate students.

Members of families formed through international and/or transracial adoption face regular explicit and implicit challenges to their identity as a family—“How much did you pay for the baby? or Why didn’t your real mother want you?” Adoptive mothers especially assume the discursive work of defending their relationships, defining their family as “real,” and stabilizing their children’s sense of security. Mothers’ stories about the exceptional and unlikely circumstances through which a child became part of the family invoke a mysterious rightness to their belonging together that trumps divisive human definitions through blood or appearance. Mothers’ insistence upon relating these stories to me (both documentarian and presumed sympathetic fellow adoptive parent) raises questions about their motivations and the multiple anticipated voices to which they respond. Children still at home may co-narrate these stories, suggesting their initial value in solidifying identity for all family members, but adult adoptees are among those who criticize these accounts for writing birth families out of the picture.

Patricia Sawin is a folklorist trained in the Texas and Indiana traditions. She focuses her research on oral narrative and festival as means for negotiating individual, family, and community identity, with a particular interest in gender issues. She is the author of Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth Through Her Songs and Stories, and articles on fairy tales, feminist ethnography, the narrative construction of gender identity, Cajun mardi gras, and the Kalevala. She is currently conducting a research project on the experiences of families with internationally adopted children with an emphasis on “culture camps” as sites for the festive enactment of complex identities. She is associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Director of Graduate Studies, in which role she coordinates the Ph.D. program in American Studies and the M.A. program in Folklore.

Patricia Sawin Flyer