Discursive Children

    Prior to reading Adopted Territory by Eleana J. Kim and Castenada Ahmed's "Introduction to Uprootings and Regroundings," I followed a certain framework on adoption. Adoption, within my blissfully ignorant frame of mind, was a humanitarian, honorable way of adopting, especially in my circumstance as a gay male; Kim explains, "The humanitarian orphan erases and neutralizes the political-economic realities that lie at the root of abandonment and adoption" (Kim, 12).  The contemporary, culturally presented, prescription for obtaining children within male homosexual couples is Asian adoption.  As a product of my inculturation, this narrative of adopting (and "rescuing") a precious Asian daughter with my future (socially recognized) husband became a facet of my version of the Gay American Dream.  After these readings, my dreams and preconceptions of international adoption and a perfect Asian daughter have been problematized and shattered.  Exposing the  underlying and overarching aspects of transnational adoption forced a shift in my understanding and analyses of the processes and reasons for adoption.  Ahmed writes, "...the emergence of...flexible cosmopolitan cultures or civil societies still depends on the constraints of particular articulations of power, hierarchy, inequality and positioning" (Ahmed, 4).  My aforementioned prescribed narrative fits within Western, capitalistic "cosmopolitan cultures" that, most of the time subliminally, construct and reify their own notions of identity, politics, economics, and power.
   Within Adopted Territory, Kim describes Korean, transnational adoptions as hegemonic regimes that are interconnected with larger socioeconomic, historical, and gendered relations and contradictions.  Kim notes, "...Korean adoption is a highly contested, transnational field, that encompasses a range of nations, institutions, ideologies, laws, technologies, media, and social groups that hold stakes in its reputation and future" (Kim, 4).  Understanding and analyzing transnational adoption and its participants though the acknowledgment of its constructed, intersectional elements allows discoveries and acceptances of social and cultural contradictions; "Adoptees embody and expose the contradictions of the global" (Kim, 8).  By accentuating and investigating these contradictions, researchers, adoption agencies, adoptees, and adopters can more fully understand the spectrum of circumstances surrounding transnational adoption.  While these transnational adoptions are conventionally regarded as a humanitarian good and act of charity for "less fortunate" nations and "abandoned" children, in reality the adoption process is seeded with contradictory elements, even at its foundational level.  Using a historical lens to assess the reasonings and outcomes of early Korean adoptions, the myth of "saving" the progeny of a dysfunctional state were actually; "...part of a more universal state project to check population growth in the name of modernization and economic development" (Kim, 25).  These contradictory elements have seemingly seeped into the consciousness of those most touched by Korean transnational adoptions: the adoptees.
   Adoptees' sense of self and identity are caught in the flux crosshairs of the multifarious and intersectional elements that constructed and reified the systems in which they were first presented.  They are raised riding the lines between binaries of good-bad, domestic-foreign, rescued-abandoned; "...adoptees live within the dialectic of loss and gain...that produces the ambiguous figure of the transnational adoptee" (Kim, 19).  It is within their ambiguous and often contradictory notions of identity that the effects of, similarly contradictory, transnational adoption systems that funnels children of the East to nuclear families of the West.  Conventional aspects of our binary-supported language disrupt adequate explanations and iterations of adoptee experience and senses of identity and being.  Kim notes, "...their shared condition cannot be broached in the process of producing a vision of adult adoptee identity that still hews to normative modes of social discourse and decorum" (Kim, 167.  Global capitalism's obsession with binaries and overarching categorizations fail to recognize the intricate construction of adoption as a hegemonic system and the multifarious identities of adoptees.