Genealogies of Korean adoption: American Empire, militarization, and Yellow Desire

Abstract

This dissertation traces genealogies of Korean adoption that disrupt the dominant narrative of Korean adoption as a) a humanitarian rescue project and b) a reproduction of white heteronormative kinship in order to track the subject formation of the Korean orphan and adoptee. It does so by situating the emergence of Korean adoption neither in the Korean War (1950-1953) nor in the postwar recovery efforts of the U.S. but within the context of U.S. military occupation of the southern portion of Korea that began in 1945—five years prior to the Korean War and ten years before the “official” beginning of Korean adoption. In so doing, I argue that the figures of the Korean orphan and adoptee have defined neocolonial relations between the U.S. and Korea, as well as fostered white heteronormative constructions of the American family and nation. In Chapter One, I link the development of U.S. neocolonialism in South Korea to the neocolonial practice of Korean adoption by demonstrating how U.S. militarism and its policies of militarized humanitarianism became the precursors to this form of child welfare. I suggest that the Korean orphan ushered the arrival of what I call “American humanitarianism empire,” which enabled the U.S. to promote the myth of American exceptionalism while, at the same time, participate in imperial activities in the newly decolonized Korea. In Chapter Two, I argue that the discursive practice of, what I call, “yellow desire” facilitated the inclusion of Korean orphans into the U.S. domestic and national family. Informed by the 1950s Cold War Orientalist policies of racial integration, yellow desire runs on the logic that differences can be absorbed through assimilation. I contend that yellow desire is what compelled average white Americans to adopt Korean children during the era of Asian exclusion. In Chapter Three, I examine the process in which orphans became adoptees. As an institution of discipline and normalization, the orphanage as a “processing station” prepared the child to be incorporated into the white American home. It became the site where Korea’s social outcasts were shaped into useful subjects for the state: economically profitable for Korea and politically beneficial for the U.S. In this way, Korean adoption can be regarded as a civilizing project of modernity that ensures its success as a racially integrative project. Finally, in Chapter Four, I argue that the figure of the Korean adoptee—upon entrance into her new American family—documents the excesses, limits, and contradictions of Korean adoption as a project of empire and as a project of white normativity. Even though the adoptee is disciplined in the orphanage to seamlessly assimilate into her new adoptive family, the very presence of the adoptee’s body within the adoptive family disrupts the semblance of the all-American (read white) nuclear family. As a result, the adoptee’s presence exposes the nonnormative, queer dimensions of Korean adoption. Understanding the figures of the orphan and adoptee as geopolitical and socioeconomic constructions is significant because it not only denaturalizes Korean adoption but also illuminates the pivotal roles they played in building and preserving neocolonial relations between the U.S. and Korea. The dominant narrative of Korean adoption that depicts it as a “humanitarian project” or “rescue mission,” however, makes illegible the material conditions that produced it. By reorienting Korean adoption as a project of empire, I make legible the material conditions of U.S. military intervention and occupation, war, neocolonialism, and militarized humanitarianism—the very conditions that enabled the emergence and persistence of Korean adoption, as well as the subject formations of the orphan and adoptee.