THE FRACTURED VALUES OF BEST INTERESTS: STRUGGLES AND SPACES OF TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION Stevie Larson A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography. Chapel Hill 2016 John Pickles Michael Hardt Jennifer Ho Alvaro Reyes Sara Smith © 2016 Stevie Larson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Stevie Larson: The Fractured Values of Best Interests: Struggles and Spaces of Transnational Adoption (Under the direction of John Pickles) Transnational adoption of children has been in practice for over sixty years, and it has developed and formalized to such an extent that scholars regard it as an efficient (even ruthless) system. But this approach largely fails to explain transnational adoption’s unruly heterogeneity, historical volatility, and highly uneven geography. I propose an alternative framework, one that approaches transnational adoption as an assemblage of social actors in struggle. The dissertation maps this assemblage as it shifts through three conjunctural eras – struggles over regulation of proper adoption conduct, class war over the rights and benefits in adoption, and disruptive subjectivities of adult adoptees – through each era’s primary civil society actors and agitators, the content and strategy of their organizing, and the lasting functions and consequences of their actions. Focusing particularly on the state of Minnesota and its unexpectedly large and politically active adult Korean adoptee community, I draw from civil society archives and adoptive parent and adoptee interviews to narrate a ‘people’s history’ of transnational adoption from the 1950s to today. This history demonstrates that the most defining issues that have structured and transformed transnational adoption – welfare state governance, race and class relations, adoptee needs and rights – came about in uneven spaces of radically contingent struggles that strive, often unsuccessfully, to regulate the autonomies and differentiations that saturate child welfare. iii It takes immense discipline, focus, and an all-around productive work ethic to undertake a project like this one. Or so I hear. On my more honest days I toss aside my weekly and monthly schedulers – an admirable archive of the self-imposed deadlines I missed, namely, all of them – and give in to wandering. To be sure, these perambulatory desires have led me down many a cul- de-sac of pointless distractions, but on my much more honest days I always return to the source of my restlessness: the terrains of struggle. My experiences and affective commitments to struggle have defined my academic training, just as my knowledge of certain radicals and their struggles inspired me to pursue the research for this dissertation. I have a hunger to read about, speak to, and be present for the politics such struggles evince, no matter the quiescence or turbulence of the times; this hunger brings out my best work, lost days ‘on the clock’ be damned. It turns out there were truly astounding struggles to be present for during my graduate career and in the research and writing for my dissertation. An incomplete list: the Arab Spring, Occupy, Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and uprisings from Wisconsin to Greece to Hong Kong. I dedicate this to them. They kept me honest, inspired, and yes, focused in my scholarly work. I was also present for the passing of giants (Eduardo Galeano), especially a cohort of lion- hearted Asian American radicals who have influenced me greatly (Fred Ho, Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs). I dedicate this to them also; among other things, they have shown how much can be done in just one lifetime – and how critical it is to engage a lifetime with both urgency and profound patience. I needed both of those qualities to bring the dissertation to fruition. But on this most honest of honest days, I must say I had but one person in mind for a dedication: Gabriel Dominic Johnson-Ortiz. Let me tell you something about Gaby: he had more enthusiasm and faith in social movements than anyone I’ve ever known, but he didn’t show it with eloquent speeches, radical lifestyle points, or obsessively building up activist street cred. He showed it through unwavering respect, humility, solidarity, and simply showing up. Through his actions, he taught me how to love your people, and he did it with ease and kindness. None of these comradely qualities were ever intuitive for me; I had to learn them, and Gaby was my educator. I owe my productive restlessness – my insistence on being present for the struggles, whenever and wherever they show – to him more than anyone else, and I thank him every day for that. To you, then, Gaby. Presente. I miss you terribly. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 3). This dissertation snapped itself together from assemblages aplenty: conversations, disputes, affinities, the free play of things, the cutting of things to order, the free play all over again. Here is an incomplete map of this activity, as true as I can get to how the mysterious making of knowledge – and its many, many secret agents – came to these pages. All these relations made it here; I am less the author than someone fortunate enough to have interpreted it. A map has no beginning, but you must start somewhere. I start with Caitlin Kee. I supervised her internship during the years I worked at a Minnesota nonprofit, and while I would normally discourage anyone from doing this, she decided at internship’s end to befriend her former boss. Sitting on a door stoop once, Caitlin casually (and with characteristic sarcasm and dry wit) discussed some of the frustrating politics in Minnesota’s Korean adoptee community. At that point I hadn’t even heard about adoptee politics whatsoever, let alone guessed its unusual contours. I asked her for more information so I could read up and learn; she gladly provided notes, web links, and a few people to talk to. Throughout this project she has been my go-to for advice, support, mutual ravings, and a needed kick in the pants once in a while. v I got my first real glimpse of adoptee politics at a national convergence I helped organize, the 2011 Asian/Pacific Islander American (APIA) Spoken Word and Poetry Summit in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Radical Korean adoptees made up part of the Summit organizing crew and also hosted workshops at the Summit that exposed the other non-adoptee attendees to some of the critical historical context and contemporary issues of Korean transnational adoption. After talking further with fellow Summit organizers and adoptees Julayne Lee and Katie Hae Leo, I was convinced to pursue adoptee (and adoption) politics in a dissertation research project. Ilona Moore learned about the project early on and put me in contact with Kelly Condit- Shrestha, who at the time was conducting a far more ambitious epic of a dissertation on the history of adoption – period. For reasons still unknown to me, Kelly didn’t just offer to talk – she arranged a get-together of the major Korean adoption studies folk in town to meet me for dinner. I remember feeling both astounded at this generosity and terrified to start making introductions well before I even knew what I was doing. It was the best collegial shove in the right direction one can expect from someone who still had almost no inkling as to who I was. Misrecognition has vexed the process of meeting and talking to adoptees. Facing the prospect of running around with an adoptee community that has been forceful about speaking for themselves rather than ceding their experiences for non-adopted individuals to tell, I was cautioned several times to declare my non-adopted position when meeting adoptees. Yet I failed to do this consistently or with much vigilance when the project began, even though I was well aware that my close adoptee friendships, Anglicized last name, phenotypically Asian features, and residence in Minnesota (not to mention my subject of research!) could easily lead people to think I was adopted. Sometimes this misrecognition led to words being confided in me that I should not have received, and implicit trust that I otherwise had no basis to deserve. In all such vi cases (which were thankfully few), I corrected the mistake as soon as I realized it, but at times this realization occurred so late that a few of my relationships were damaged, perhaps irreparably so. This paragraph is for them – not as empty apologia, but as a commitment to the careful ethics of scholarship that they taught me (directly and indirectly) through these experiences. My pathway to meeting and interviewing adoptive parents looked far more forlorn, as I was half-convinced that most members of adoptive parent group Organization for a United Response (OURS) were dead or long moved elsewhere. But I was very lucky to find in OURS Magazine that their former Board members had listed their addresses and phone numbers; even some thirty or forty years later, this contact information was still correct for some of the parents. I was also lucky in cold-calling the North American Council on Adoptable Children to have reached Joe Kroll, who at that time was NACAC’s Executive Director and a former OURS member. Between Joe’s gracious offerings from his contacts as well as the listings from the OURS Magazine, I was slowly able to find OURS parents.