Korean Transnational Adoption as an Act of Violence
Titcomb, Isabelle
Building on an emergent eld of critical adoption studies, this paper traces the transformation
of the Korean orphan into adoptee through the army camp, orphanage, women’s magazine, and family.
In doing so, it demonstrates how Korean transnational adoption stood at the nexus of discourses
concerning U.S. militarism, American consumerism, Cold War Orientalism, and white heternormative
kinship formation. It concludes that adoption was not the radical act that its architects heralded it to
be, rather it reproduced and rei ed pre-existing notions of race, gender, and sexuality founded in
Orientalism.
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