Odd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption

Idzik, Sarah Hae-In

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ff2g-3444

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Odd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption

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Transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S. was institutionalized in the 1950s, when the Korean War left an estimated 100,000 Korean children orphaned or displaced. At the time, the practice was situated as a form of emergency rescue, an act of win-win humanitarianism in which average Americans could take part of rehabilitating the devastated Korean peninsula. Today, discourse explaining, justifying, and managing transnational adoption from Asia bears a surprisingly strong resemblance to that of the practice’s earliest days, in which would-be adopted children in Asia and the global South are figured as abandoned or orphaned children in need of help through stranger adoption to the West. The practice is widely understood to be almost an entirely positive experience for all parties: abandoned children need parents, and parents want children. There is little critical examination in dominant public discourse of the widespread belief that transnational adoption is an uncomplicated good deed. This dissertation complicates that belief. "Odd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption" critically examines dominant discourse on transnational adoption from its institutionalization in the 1950s to today, asking both how specific social, cultural, and historical conditions have shaped how Americans have talked about transnational adoption over time, and what lived realities these discursive practices create, for adoptees and non-adoptees alike, in terms of our capacities to imagine racial justice, kinship, and belonging. From continued reliance on the symbolic figure of the “waif” to the erasure of adoptees’ racial difference as they are absorbed into white nuclear families as paragons of postracial optimism, transnational adoption discourse marginalizes, racializes, and objectifies Asian American and other nonwhite adoptees. This process is all the more insidious because such adoptions are so often figured as a progressive and even radical practice. As an examination of transnational adoption discourse as a form of durable, flexible, and adaptable symbolic violence, this dissertation provides crucial insight into discursive practices that shape racial and colonial regimes. Further, its analysis in its final chapter of adoptee-produced public discourse, in which adult Asian American adoptees deliberately engage in refusals to perform gratitude, express counternarratives, and begin to develop an alternate epistemology of adoption and transnational migration, offers a better understanding of worldbuilding in action, and points towards a way of thinking adoption in common that contributes a more just world.

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