Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children: The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex

McKee, Kimberly D.

doi:10.1353/jks.2016.0007

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Even as the adoption industry claims to act in the best interest of the child, it operates both domestically and internationally as a market in which prospective adoptive parents are the consumers and adoptable children are the products (Mariner, 2019;McKee, 2016). The market centers around the desires of adoptive parents rather than the interests of children or birth parents.…”

Section: Myth #1: Adoption Is In the Best Interest Of The Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During the war, 10% of the Korean population was killed, 55 million people were displaced, and much of the Korean peninsula was devastated (Kim, 2010). U.S. and U.N. soldiers left behind multiracial children whom they fathered with Korean women through romantic relationships, buying sex, or sexual violence (McKee, 2016; Woo, 2019). Stigma against multiracial children and single mothers, as well as economic precarity and limited social welfare in the newly formed South Korea, fueled parents’ relinquishment of these children.…”

Section: Adoption: Interlocking Systems Of Oppressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding Adoption as a Reproductive Justice Issue

Wexler

Cai

McKee

et al. 2023

Psychology of Women Quarterly

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Adoption is frequently invoked as a universal social good—an uncomplicated win for adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents alike—that obviates the need for abortion. As antiabortionists weaponize adoption to attack reproductive rights, psychologists must recognize adoption as a key reproductive justice issue with significant, lifelong physical and psychological impacts, especially on adopted people and birth parents. Recognizing critical adoption studies as an application of a reproductive justice framework, we argue that psychologists must understand how adoption is both sustained by and reinforces structural inequality and global reproductive injustice. In a post- Roe reality, clinicians and researchers must critically examine adoption histories and myths in order to address the needs of the adoption triad. As an interdisciplinary team of researchers and clinicians in psychology; medicine; genetic counseling; and women's, gender, sexuality, and Asian American studies, we examine adoption's ties to settler colonialism, racism, classism, and imperialism and interrogate harmful dominant narratives about adoption. We then summarize clinical considerations for working with members of the adoption triad, future directions for research on adoption, and recommendations for both clinicians and researchers to advance adoption competence in the face of current attacks on reproductive rights in the United States.

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Section: Myth #1: Adoption Is In the Best Interest Of The Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Adoption: Interlocking Systems Of Oppressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Adoption as a Reproductive Justice Issue

Wexler

Cai

McKee

et al. 2023

Psychology of Women Quarterly

Self Cite

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“…In her article "Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children," Kimberly McKee has analyzed the history of Korean adoption, arguing that governments, adoption agencies, various state policies and regulations work in tandem to create what she calls the transnational adoption industrial complex, a "multimillion dollar industry spanning the globe." 12 Adoptee bodies were commodified by the nation-state, turned into currency, and carried across oceans by the global currents of capital. It is pertinent that Lisa Myeong-Joo, as an adoptee artist, has turned to performance art, using her own body-once subjected to the violence of the "transnational adoption industrial complex"-as the vehicle of resistance.…”

Section: The Indeterminacy Of Belonging: Korean-australian Adoption H...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Borders and Biology: Lisa Myeong-Joo’s Self-Portrait of a Circle (2016)

Shim¹

2022

Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal

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Performance allows me to feel something that I know in my body, that is for me. As ambiguous as that is at least I know it's real. Performance means reclaiming my body back after being adopted or being told different ways of being or what to do or fitting in with my adopted family or the society that I live in now.-Lisa Myeong-Joo 1The artist Lisa Myeong-Joo was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988 and was subsequently adopted by a family in Sydney, Australia, in 1989. 2 She returned to South Korea in 2016 for a residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, where she created her series Self-Portrait of a Circle. This essay analyzes Lisa Myeong-Joo's performative use of her own body to suggest a conscious unbelonging to place in three components of this series: a video work, a performance piece presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea in Changdong, and a series of five photographs taken in the streets around the residency site. In these three components of her series, Lisa Myeong-Joo embodies what the art historian Eun Jung Park, in her writing on Korean adoptee artists, has described as "risky subjectivity." 3 Park argues that the "sense of self and empowerment [found] in the past" is made risky for adoptees

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“…Drawing this parallel reaches back to earlier interpretations of transnational adoption as a colonial practice embedded in a larger history of exploitation of the Global South and the stratified migration dominated by the Global North (Eng 2006;Fieweger 1991;Hübinette 2007;Wekker et al 2007). These parallels seem to be justified when we consider the fact that transnational adoption is a demand-driven industry plagued by recurrent practices of abuse, child trafficking, and other irregularities (Smolin 2004;McKee 2016;Cheney and Rotabi 2015;Leifsen 2008).…”

Section: Coloniality and Decolonial Thinkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

From primal to colonial wound: Bolivian adoptees reclaiming the narrative of healing

Cawayu

Graeve

2020

Identities

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This paper provides a critical analysis of the narratives of Bolivian adoptees in Belgium. We discuss how the adoptees look back upon the imagery of family and culture invoked by their parents and wider social environment and how this imagery has affected their sense of self and belonging. We argue that the adoptees' narratives testify of a discursive struggle to reclaim control over their lives and histories. While they draw upon prevailing discourses that tend to imagine adoptees as 'wounded', they do so in diverse, complex and at times contradictory ways. Their perceptions of the familial and cultural imagery show that while they do not entirely reject the idea of being hurt, they seem to make a shift from explaining this 'wound' in individualpsychological terms to explaining it in social terms, making use of emerging anti-racist and decolonial perspectives.

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Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children: The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex

Cited by 17 publications

References 52 publications

Understanding Adoption as a Reproductive Justice Issue

Understanding Adoption as a Reproductive Justice Issue

Beyond Borders and Biology: Lisa Myeong-Joo’s Self-Portrait of a Circle (2016)

From primal to colonial wound: Bolivian adoptees reclaiming the narrative of healing

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