Charlotte Carbone

Unadopt Me: critical queer adoptee consciousness and alternative family models

My thesis explores my transracial transnational Chinese adoptee experiences through a queer critical adoption lens with a multimedia exhibition. By contextualizing adoptee experiences in relation to and in dispute with dominant adoption narratives and practices that perpetuate white saviorism, I challenge the promotion of adoption as a feel-good individual humanitarian act for overseas systemic problems. To activate and recontextualize marginalized adoptee voices and perspectives, including the trauma and oppression adoptees experience, my exhibition explores personal and collective critical adoptee counter narratives through art objects and performance including a tattoo body archive, wearable memory garment, and sensory dream installation. With interdisciplinary artistic methods and blended theoretical frameworks, I critique dominant adoption narratives to propose and explore alternative queer models of family, kinship, and belonging.

Thesis Paper

 2024