International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

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Patricia Farrar (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)
Semanalysis: Reconceptualising Julia Kristeva’s work as a method for researching the loss of a baby to adoption

To speak of motherhood is to speak of mothers with babies; however, for many women, motherhood is without babies. Around the world, women continue to lose the babies to whom they have given birth: babies lost through surrogacy, trafficking and adoption.  While surrogacy and trafficking are cloaked in a stealthy silence, adoption is the open, smiling face of baby stealing. When a baby is adopted, the mother becomes invisible as all traces of her identity are erased. She is the abject; but the loss of her baby is, for her, abjection.

In this paper I analyse the meaning of losing a baby to adoption through the work of Julia Kristeva: her theories of abjection, motherhood, the speaking subject and semanalysis. According to Julia Kristeva* (1981:vii) semanalysis is a process which describes a particular phenomenon while analysing, critiquing and dissolving the meaning of that phenomenon. Semanalysis involves the dialectical oscillation between discourses of the social, "the symbolic order ", and those of the personal, "the semiotic order", which can be represented by the figure of a double helix.  As the symbolic and the semiotic intertwine, the tensions of meaning at their borders are critiqued through the process of semanalysis.  Kristeva has identified a "thetic phase" where the semiotic ruptures the symbolic, and which can be visualised as the scission of the two helical strands.

Through the process of semanalysis, I analysed the hegemonic (politicolegal, social, medical and media) discourses of the symbolic and the counterdiscourses (women's voices) of the semiotic, and thus exposed the tensions of meaning in losing a baby to adoption. The thetic phase provided a space for personal expressions of losing a baby to adoption through works of literature and art as exemplified by my deconstruction of an extract from Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror” (1982), in “Abjection: A Poetic Reading”.

Based on my research, I will explain how Kristeva’s theory of semanalysis can be reconceptualised as a research method, whereby tensions between symbolic and hegemonic discourses are informed by the thetic. I will also show how I used the method of semanalysis to analyse, critique and dissolve the meaning of losing a baby to adoption and so propose how the method of semanalysis can open up exciting possibilities for an innovative approach to research.