Introduction: 2015 Symonds Prize Essay

Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, the Editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) are delighted to award the 2015 Symonds Prize to Elizabeth Hughes, Ph.D., for her essay “There’s No Such Thing as a Whole Story: The Psychosocial Implications of Adopted Women’s Experiences of Finding Their Biological Fathers in Adulthood.” Hughes obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, and the prizing-winning essay is the first published work to emerge from an in-depth qualitative study that she undertook with adopted adult women, which formed the basis of her doctoral thesis.

SGS approaches the study of gender and sexuality as a particularly inventive space where practices, theories, concepts, and discourses coemerge, leading to what we might describe as “permanently mutable” understandings of gender and sexuality. The journal therefore regularly stages discussions between practitioners of various sorts—clinicians, activists, artists, and researchers working in science, social science, and the humanities—each bringing to their work their own particular methods for generating new understandings of gender and sexuality. As an empirical researcher, Hughes has a detailed and complex way of reading the narratives that she gathers and mining them for understandings of how adoption and gender are lived and discursively produced. Working in this way, her essay offers a grounded account of narratives that grapple with gender, sexuality, and adoption.

One of the innovations of Hughes’ essay is her starting point, her identification of the ways that adopted subjects are caught in a nexus of discourses that eventually lead to one place, the conviction that adopted individuals carry a “primal wound” inflicted by separation from the birth mother, which is seen as inherently traumatic. One result of the domination of this idea in the field of adoption studies is to obscure adopted women’s relations, both