Caminhos da identidade: como se formam as identidades de pessoas que adotam filhos?

Abstract

The goal of the present dissertation is to expand the reflection about the sense and meaning of the social act the makes people adopt children. It has specifically the intention to verify how, in our society, the personal identity of an adult, of the feminine sex, who takes under adoption a child born from another woman and embodies the character of adoptive mother, is articulated, aiming to know what possibilities she would have to emancipate herself from the values and beliefs that support a culture which discriminates and questions the legitimacy of kinship relations, through adoptive bonds of union. Through a historical and legal research about the origin of adoptions in different cultures, as well as the analysis of the meaning of the social act of child adoption, the present work uses the syntagma of identity-metamorphosis-emancipation, studied by Ciampa, who proposes the idea of thinking identity as a construction in which the subject works on her emancipation from crystallized patterns. Establishing for herself the conditions in which to be in the world in the most autonomous and participative way, through the processes of metamorphoses and creative action, it is expected that the subject will build her identity by transforming and redefining beliefs to emancipate from values that may be preventing her life story to become happier and frear. Through the analysis of Lara's life story, the researcher was able to identify ..."" some of the paths she followed in composing the character of adoptive mother, that turn into a true and more emancipated identity