Introduction: The Portrayal of Adoption in Popular Culture

Abstract

abstract:The present volume seeks both to acknowledge the present state of the portrayal of adoption in popular culture and to examine those aspects of adoption not usually acknowledged but nevertheless present in popular culture. The first three articles in this collection analyze the images of adoption in wellknown cultural artifacts: the Jurassic Park movies; three popular movies, largely geared to children, that portray the reunion of adoptees and biological parents in American Asian adoptions; and the depiction of motherhood, adoptive and otherwise, in the HBO series based on a contemporary and popular work of fiction, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. Alice Diver uses the law and literature to discusses the treatment of children produced by artificial technology, juxtaposing recent legal decisions that leave some children stateless and without rights with literary works that treat children with dubious, "unnatural" origins. Finally, Rukhsar Hussain discusses the derogatory representation in Indian Cinema of the hijra, nonbinary-identifying members of communities in South Asia.