The Disruption of Real Kinship
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Date
2012-02
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Abstract
Since the end of the Korean War (1950-1953), approximately 200,000 Korean children have been sent abroad for adoption. Two thirds of these children arrived in the United States, and they constitute the earliest and largest group of international adoptees in this country. The intention of this paper is to foreground theoretical understandings of kinship and family to produce new insights into transracial and transnational families. The term transnational captures the international nature of their family formation vis-à-vis intercountry adoption. At the same time, the term transracial highlights the inter-racial nature of the family formation as an estimated 75% of adoptees entered white families. This interrogation contends Korean adoption occurred to aid the reproduction of the heterosexual, white, middle class family. I also explore how the adoptive family also subverts heteronormative constructions of family not only through its non-genetic creation, but also for its transraciality – the dislocation adoptees’ experience in identity formation as racially Asian/culturally white subjects.
Description
Humanities: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)
Keywords
Korean adoption, Kinship, Adoptee identity