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Korean Adoption and U.S. National Belonging: Model Minority Migration, Race, and Whiteness, 1953-1978
| The current scholarship on Korea-U.S. international adoption (the transracial, transnational adoption of Korean children by primarily white American citizens) continues to be limited within the discourse of Asian Americans’ racialization within the U.S. histories of immigration exclusion and anti-Asian social, cultural, and political policies and constructs. While this analytic framework remains important, my paper utilizes an historically-specific migration studies lens to explore the time-specific, mid-1950s racialization of first-wave adopted Korean Americans, not as simply counter to the “normative” Asian American immigration experience, but within the emerging Cold War discourse of Asian Americans as model minorities (alongside such other immigrants as Japanese and Korean military brides). Looking at the exact origins of Korean immigration vis-à-vis international adoption illustrates adopted Korean Americans at the vanguard of this historical movement towards a model minority racialization of Asian Americans. By placing the migration patterns and familial inclusion of internationally adopted Korean children alongside that of their military bride counterparts and the rising model minority discourse of Asian Americans - and against the paralleling historical contestations of transracial African American and American Indian adoptions, my paper provides a nuanced historical exploration of the highly racialized U.S. national logics of belonging that informed (and were informed by) white Americans’ practices of family formation. Central to my paper are questions pertaining to gender, family, labor, and intimacy. In particular, my paper asks, “Between 1953-1978, from the emergence through the height of Korean international adoption, what specific forms of labor (reproductive, affective, institutionalized) were being performed (or restricted) through postwar family formations in the U.S.? What do these labors illuminate about the construction of the U.S. national body politic and the United States’ role in the reproductive global market?”
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