This thesis attempts to bridge together seemingly disparate scholarly thoughts—the legacies of U.S. interventions into Asia, past and present American immigration policy, the American family, Asian American history & organizing, and the growing body of literature on transnational adoptees—in order to properly contextualize the fraught spaces in which transnational/racial Asian American adoptees & adoptee activists navigate in 2019. Through multi-sited ethnography, participant-observation, and oral history, I explore the dynamics between transnational/racial Asian American adoptees’ identity, community, and activism in the context of the fight against deportations of adoptees without citizenship in a time of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia in the United States. Situating Asian American adoptees within broader histories of U.S. immigration, militarized humanitarianism, empire, and adoption, I trace the peculiar positioning of transnational Asian adoptees and the bifurcation of the adoptee citizenship movement to contradictory U.S. adoptive migration law. I argue that the deportations of adoptees without citizenship and the brutal family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border have powerfully catalyzed adoptee politicization, immigrant identification, and activism, countering the past 70 years of Asian adoption. Finally, I argue that such adoptee activism heralds the stirrings of a radical adoptee justice movement rooted in both a sense of universal adoptee peoplehood and the reclamation of adoptees’ intersectional identities as adoptees, people of color, and immigrants. Highlighting how Asian American adoptees are reworking categories of identity, belonging, and community through activism, I conclude that transnational/racial Asian American adoptees must be understood as belonging not only to national and ethnic diasporas, but also to a contingent diaspora of kinship severance across time and space. In doing so, this project attempts to correct the erasure of transnational/racial Asian adoptee activism in discussions of American immigration, Asian America, reproductive justice, and activism.
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Citation
Wexler, Emma J.,
"Invisible Immigrants: The Politics of Transnational/racial Asian American Adoptees"
(2020).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/gvmw-ng08
