Purity & Danger

One of the concepts that became clear for me in the second half of Adopted Territories is that nation, and the idea of a person embodying a nation, is not a cold, hard reality but rather a construct. Just as gender is mapped onto the contours of the body, so is nation mapped onto the land and the bodies within that land. The existence of transnational/transracial adoptees challenges the fundamental notions of nation and also of family. The return to Korea of the adoptees complicates the very idea of Korea as nothing more than a place that exists right now on the other side of the globe. Kim points out that, much like Massey's challenge of the time-space compression narrative, "one might say that for some adoptees travels across geographic space entail journeys back through time, thereby effectuating a temporalization of space." (185) The individual subjective experience of each adoptee frames how they will experience Korea when they travel within it. And for me, if I take the Massey and Parreñas and Kim and Ahmed together, I don't even know what I mean when I say that they will "experience Korea," because this Korea that I am writing about doesn't even really exist. What does it mean to travel to a place? What does it mean for someone to say that they have been to Korea? Do we take that to mean that they understand something about the place that another cannot understand without going there? Korea is a construct, just as the people within it, and within any place, lead lives that are largely based on constructs experienced as biological facts. What bothered me about the Kim last week was the fact that Kim doesn't explore the more universal idea of "he could be me, I could be him, he could be her" that she seemed to be implying only applies to adoptees. What I took issue with was that a Mexican baby could have been born, by chance, a Swedish baby, and an Iranian baby could have been a Laotian baby. The real chance has nothing to do with something in the baby's being Laotian, but rather the way that the baby will experience the world by virtue of this label of Laotian being assigned to it. It's the whole identity/subjectivity thing again.

I was also interested in Kim's mention of Julia Paley's "paradoxical participation," or the idea that "the encouragement of civic participation actively recruits individuals into the neoliberal rollback of state services and thereby displaces state accountability onto self-regulating, "responsibilized" subjects: 'Participation offered a sense of meaning to citizens at the same time as it limited avenues through which the citizens could act'." I wanted Kim to explore this idea more. I think that what Paley is saying is that by participating in the NGO's that support adoptees, private citizens are filling the void that the lack of governmental support has created. This is the same role that transnational adoption of Koreans filled in the first place, replacing the need for governmental social services and support.

I was also interested in the idea of the "orphan" being created and manipulated for the purposes of industrialization/capitalism narratives. As the UN studies that Kim cites show, a child's classification as "orphan" has little to do with whether or not that child's parents are alive or dead; it has everything to do with economic, political, and social pressures and realities. Kim writes that orphans in Western literature and film have "embodied both purity and danger." (262) I wonder in what ways these narratives of orphans that we have inherited from Victorian England shape the way governments create policies regarding adoption, foster care, and especially transnational adoptions. As I am interested in critical animal studies as well, I wonder how these narratives of orphanhood, of sentient beings "without" biological ties in the world, shape contemporary narratives about pet adoption. 

The second half of the Kim made me wonder, can there be such a thing as "transnational" feminisms, when the nation itself is a construct, and when individual people, and indeed governments, corporations, etc., already lead transnational lives, whether this means that their options and access are wide or whether the experiences of those with great access limit their access. I understand that we have to label the feminisms that we are learning about in some way, and this is perhaps the most accurate label for now, but you can't write "transnational" without the word "nation," and any feminism, by virtue of its inclusion or of its ignorance/arrogance/isolation, is necessarily "transnational."