Affetti e pratiche dell’ordinario. Il valore dell’analogia nelle immagini private delle famiglie adottive transnazionali

The desire to create effects of resemblance and continuity among members of the same family is evident in home movies and photographs, especially those produced on the occasion of the arrival of newborns. Indeed, the image of a baby is still a blank canvas on which to draw socially, rather than genetically, elaborated hereditary traits. The same situation occurs in transnational and transracial adoption cases: adoptive parents regard resemblance to strengthen emotional bonds, relying on the mediation of images because they can visually model physical, character and behavioural connections. In this sense, domestic visual practices offer the opportunity to interrogate the cultural power of bodily similarities and connections since, in identification phenomena, the subject forms himself/herself by analogy with those who have preceded them or belong to their family in the present. By analysing the different uses of family images in adoption processes, this contribution first retrieves the main theoretical contributions dealing with analogy as a mode of creation, affective relation, and social structure of the 'ordinary' (Silverman, Lloyd, Gibbs, Stewart). Secondly, it focuses on the visual production of adoptive families to reinterpret the analogy under the sign of the extended relationship, as it replaces the debt of genealogical filiation with the logic of the connection and sharing of multiple and demultiplied roots.