Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In his 2017 book, Mark Froud convincingly argues that the motif of the lost child is a key element in English-speaking, cultural narratives, being also inherently entangled with social traumas and crises. Indeed, the ongoing digital revolution has clearly highlighted the collective fascination with the stories and images of children (being) lost to various forms of physical and emotional violence. In the last three decades, the US has witnessed another facet of this familiar motif, as several cases of contested adoptions attracted unprecedented amount of media attention, igniting a wider national debate on the still-evolving concept of family as well as the corresponding topics of women’s rights, father’s rights, children’s rights, and the rights of minority groups. Interestingly, all of these years-long court battles reached their climaxes in moments of televised and widely-commented custody transfers. With the continuing development of digital technologies, the photographic and video captures of the transfers soon became widely-circulated public properties, in some sense immune to the effects of time. In my presentation, I will try to approach the issue of these televised transfers through the prism of media narratives surrounding the custody cases on the one hand and contemporary trauma theories as well as Jacques Derrida’s reading of photography as a medium on the other. As I will argue, the images of the transfers can be read as a representation of the sense of loss and uncertainty which can simultaneously symbolize both social and personal upheavals.