Making sense of an irregular adoption. Subjective trajectories of four French adoptees born in Romania in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

This article presents the results of qualitative research conducted with 20 adoptees, specifically the experiences of four French adoptees from Romania, who discovered significant irregularities in their adoptions. In the form of four ethnographic cases followed by a discussion, it describes the adoptees' bewilderment at their pre-adoptive trajectories and discusses the absence of collective frameworks and narratives in France through which they could apprehend their individual trajectories.