Description

Writers of PhDs have a unique, personal and in-depth
relationship
with their subject matter, which develops over a
number of years.
What happens when life intrudes so much into the
reading and
writing that it takes over the subject matter, so
that the original
struggle for objective scholarship threatens to
become subsumed in
emotion and self-discovery? The supervisor can do
worse than guide
their student towards the genre of life writing,
within which a
flourishing of sub-genres may be accommodating to such a
journey. For an Australian closed-records adoptee
caught up in the
reunion processes sparked by the 1990 changes to the
Adoption
Act, critical readings of Peter Carey, Janette Turner
Hospital and Luke
Davies developed into the invention of the Adopted
Body, the
Subject Adoptee and a new way of seeing: ado/aptive
reading and
writing. Perhaps in the field of ado/aptive theory,
the stolen
generations, inter-country adoptees and the white
closed-record
adoptees of Australia can re-invent themselves,
develop their
identities and create a genre of academic theory
unique to Australia.