Love's limitations: Imagining and negotiating racial difference in Korean adoptee families.

摘要

From its beginning after the Korean War through the 1980's, it is estimated that over 200,000 Korean children were adopted internationally with over 130,000 adopted to the United States alone. My dissertation, Love's Limitations: Imagining and Negotiating Racial Difference In Korean Adoptee Families, looks at the dynamics of transnational transracial adoption from Korea by focusing on the relationship of adoptive parents and their adopted adult children. My project extends from previous studies, as it re-situates matched parents and their adult children in conversation with each other instead of treating them as separate areas of focus. I begin my dissertation with a set of questions about the ways in which Korean adoptees have been understood in terms of culture, ethnicity and race. How do families reconcile the apparent differences of race and national boundaries that transnational adoption exemplifies? How are racial ideologies shaped and transmitted through family structures? How do these transmissions affect the child's relationship to and positionality within racial formations in the United States, and what are the identities afforded to them both in childhood and as adults? Ultimately, how have White adoptive parents' notions of colorblindness impacted the construction of the Korean adoptee subjectivity?;My research draws from interviews I conducted with White adoptive parents and their Korean adoptee adult child in 2005. Through the narratives of both parents and child, we come to see the failures of colorblind ideologies as the adoptee struggles to find a sense of belonging within the contentions of Whiteness and racial difference. Korean adoptee narratives show the way that they have internalized racial and ethnic categories that inherently fail to incorporate their own identities and experiences. Therefore, I argue for transnational transracial adoptees to be situated more cohesively in Asian Americans histories, immigration and identities. I believe this will aid in the future generations of transnational transracial families to maintain an uncompromised and complex racial identity that moves out of liminal spaces of otherness, and into inclusive notions of belonging.