Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research about adoptions in Greece, this paper looks at the meaning of failure of ART for the construction of maternal self through adoption.

Paper long abstract:

Most women in Greece who are to adopt or have adopted a child have already experienced involuntary infertility in all its "tragic" effects. The existing research on IVF in Greece has stressed the tension and anguish of middle-class childless couples, showing that these couples try every way possible to "overcome" their "problem", striving to combine all available means of having a child when "nature refuses to help". They enter a "journey" which involves practices that they consider, as they have often confessed, "afflictive, painful, difficult, time-consuming".

However, this is also a journey into the symbolic interpretations and significations of the ways in which people define the "naturality" and the "actuality" of their kinship relations. It is a journey that allows these couples to arrange the experiences to which they are subject "in a certain order" and to integrate them in their own cultural perceptions, striving to make sense of them. In this sense, unsuccessful cycles of in vitro fertilization (IVF), consecutive miscarriages, and disappointments are exactly what forms the maternal subject and demonstrates that the adoptive mothers are "real", good" and "proper" ones (Paxson 2004).

Based on ethnographic research about adoptions in Greece, this paper looks at the meaning of failure of ART for the construction of maternal self through adoption. The "pain" of Medical Technologies to their bodies, the pain of failure, I will argue, is precisely what helps those women to be fully discursive autobiographers of their maternal subjectivity. ​