Date of Award
Fall 2021
Document Type
Thesis
Terms of Use
© 2021 Isabelle Titcomb. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History Department
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
Titcomb, Isabelle , '22, "Korean Transnational Adoption as an Act of Violence" (2021). Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards. 542.
https://works.swarthmore.edu/theses/542