| Sumario: | The core question of this essay is whether adoption and adoptees still exist. I approach this puzzle by exploring what adoptee kinship might entail since "post-kinship" affiliation replaced traditional "blood-tie" filiation with the liberal discourse of universal love. Adoptee alienation persists despite the removal of biological kinship as the formulation that long held adoptees as partial and suspect members of family and society. Imagining nonbiocentric intra-adoptee kinship is a horizonal way to examining this seemingly anachronistic adoptee anxiety by interrogating the specific experience of subjective liminality imposed by the liberal adoption regime. My study makes four cumulative, braided observations in support of an overarching argument that the "postbiogenetic" normativity of progressive families and enlightened societies re-inscribes and reinforces adoptee subjectivities of anxious belonging. First, the adoption regime combines explicit inclusion and implicit exclusion of genetic others, in a discourse I call flesh-and-blood liberalism. Second, only adoptees perceive that the liberal love that disavows old biological kinship entails new biocentric fidelities to DNA-tracking, family physicality, and biopolitical fitness that still code adoptees as genetic suspects. Third, the love metaphor that represses its biological supplements compels adoptees to internalize individually the disavowed and silenced contradictions of biopolitical liberalism, whereas other subaltern groups collectively externalize the acknowledged social contradiction of racism, sexism, and so on. Fourth, seen as a regime of evolving repressive biocentric liberalism, adoption produces neurotic liminal subjects through a generalized suspicion at once privately felt and publicly denied. My overall argument is that flesh-and-blood liberalism only intensifies adoptee anxiety over equal status within modern biopower by deepening while disavowing the biocentric-physical criteria of legitimacy that immure adoptees in a neurotic subjectivity that dissuades kinship solidarity.
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