“Speculative Encounters: Animating Ambiguous Loss,” Critical Auto-ethnography Panel, 28 September 2024

Public narratives about adoption are rarely rooted in the experiences of those who live it. Adoption narratives prioritize the families that are made through adoption–with scarce accountability toward the families that are separated (Sisson, 2024). As an adoptee, my own family was separated (and established) through adoption. The Woman You Look For, my animated documentary in production–co-directed with animation artist Michaela Mueller–conceptualizes closed adoption as an insidious form of intersectional and state-based violence. Combining expressively painted scenes with animated archival documents and photographs, the film traces the irrevocable loss at the center of adoption and instigates thinking about multiple belongings. In this talk, I will share a sequence from the animatic to discuss the role of animation in providing accompaniment and imaginative possibilities for speculative encounters.

See the entire program for our symposium, Multimodal Engagements