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Drawing the Adult Child: U.S. Graphic Memoir and the Anthropologies of Kinship and Personhood
Author(s) -
Magee Siobhan
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1111/anhu.12239
Subject(s) - personhood , kinship , memoir , context (archaeology) , sociology , key (lock) , anthropology , genealogy , history , epistemology , art history , philosophy , archaeology , ecology , biology
Summary This article argues the usefulness of the culturally pervasive and impactful genre of graphic memoir for addressing gaps in the anthropologies of kinship and personhood. It identifies a key figure in some sections of U.S. society: the “adult child.” Adult childness emerges from the graphic memoirs discussed here as when a person finds themselves particularly conscious of having (or having had) parents. To the perennially debated question of what connects kin in a U.S. context the article proposes: the past. Key facets of U.S. personhood and kinship are founded on the tenet that what happens in the lives of one’s parents and one’s childhood go a long way to explaining who an adult is.