***WORKING PAPER FOR THE 2015 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES***

Organizing without an anchor: Race-making, space-making, and the many trajectories of Korean adoptee politicization

Stevie Larson

Department of Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Abstract: The Special Adoption Law of 2012 in South Korea aims to replace the primacy of overseas adoption – formalized for over sixty years – with greater transparency, accountability, and support for Korean mothers. Adult adopted Koreans organizing in South Korea have been a catalyst for the Law’s passage, and not without contention – including dissent from other adoptees. While critical research on transnational adoption has been extremely productive for Asian American Studies scholars (many of whom are adoptees themselves), the controversy around the Special Adoption Law challenges us to consider a less examined area: adoptees’ political struggles. Critical geography and critical race theory are useful in this regard, because both schools situate questions of “politics” and “struggle” within the larger problem of organizing differentiated bodies and peoples on a global level. In this paper, I apply these approaches to Minnesota’s large adopted Korean population, focusing on the implicit (if often unacknowledged) productions of race and space in their activities and organizing, from “culture camps” to academic research to transnational activism. I argue that this close-knit community is riven with divergent political projects due in part to disparate commitments to relations of security or threat. I also examine the contrast between the overall political incoherence of US-based adoptees and the movement-building efforts of adoptees in Europe and South Korea.

Introduction

On June 29, 2011, South Korea’s National Assembly passed “The Special Act Relating to

Adoption,” commonly called the Special Adoption Law, one among many revisions to its

international adoption legislation since 1961; the law went into effect in August 2012 (Trenka,

Robinson & Stoker, 7 July 2011; Kim & Smith, 2009). Three years in the making, the Law’s

passage and initial implementation went practically unnoticed in mainstream news coverage. For

those on the ground, however, the Law was an organizing milestone, propelled into being by a

broad coalition of adult adopted Korean activists, Korean unwed mother and birth mother

organizations, and allied Korean NGOs – including Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption

Community of Korea (TRACK), Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), the Korean Unwed Mothers

Support Network (KUMSN), the Korean Unwed Mothers Families’ Association (KUMFA),

KoRoot (a guesthouse and advocacy group for adoptees), and the National Human Rights

Commission of Korea (NHRCK) – who had been campaigning for years for the rights of Korean

mothers and their children (“At hearing on adoption law,” 1 March 2009; “Korean intercountry

adoptees support,” 11 May 2009; Sang-Hun, 8 October 2009). The Special Adoption Law

contained provisions that shifted South Korea away from the longstanding primacy of

transnational adoption of Korean children to a new regulatory regime, characterized by greater

transparency and accountability in the adoption process, stronger support for birth and unwed

mothers, and the preservation of Korean families (Dobbs, 23 June 2011). Others in the adoption

world – particularly adoption agencies and adoption lobbying organizations – watched these

momentous developments with baited breath (Munro, 19 March 2012), but largely avoided

discussing the ramifications publicly (“Where’s the leadership?”, 11 July 2011).

By 2013, however, the Special Adoption Law was the target of one of the most

significant controversies to grace South Korea’s transnational adoption program in decades.

Skeptics pounced on data that suggested a rise in baby abandonments due to the Law’s passage,

supposedly because of additional documentation and tracking in the adoption process that birth

mothers wished to avoid (Borowiec, 7 October 2013). These accusations gained additional

weight when a Seoul-based pastor’s ethically dubious actions to ameliorate the situation – by

providing a “baby box” for mothers to abandon their children safely, a practice he had innovated

since 2009 – became widespread knowledge due to mostly favorable mediatization (Glionna, 20

June 2011; Kim, 7 October 2012). The adoptee groups behind the Law – particularly TRACK –

were regularly trotted out to defend their actions and rebut the discourses that were circulating

(Haruch, 9 September 2014.). Nor were they the only adoptee organizations weighing in;

Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK), helmed by adoptee Steve Morrison, attacked

the Special Adoption Law vociferously as a self-interested policy that advanced “angry”

adoptees’ interests over those of the child (“How long must this go on?”, 17 February 2014),

while other adoptees offered varying degrees of support or critique of the Law and the adoptee

organizing behind it (Heit, 28 February 2013; Jones, 18 January 2015).

Lost in the hubbub is the remarkable chain of events – the dispossession of Korean

children from their land, the eventual return of adoptees to Korea as adults, the decision by some

of these adoptees to pursue activism with others in Korea – that led to this disruption, a history

too complex to be recounted here. Instead, I want to draw attention to the struggles themselves,

particularly those of adoptees, who have developed immense forms of politicization despite the

compendium of efforts that have attempted to keep adoptees isolated, demobilized, and

politically anchorless. How can we understand such unlikely political struggles? Does it make

sense to explain dissenting politics among adoptees – as seen in the Special Adoption Law

controversy – as a clash of pro- and anti-adoption ideologies, or are there other mechanisms at

work? And how do these struggles function, beyond the specific issues (abandonment, family

preservation, adoption) that are involved?

Scholars have devised countless means for identifying and assessing political organizing.

Within my field of geography, social movement studies – focused on objective conditions of

struggle, mobilization of resources, movement discourses, identity work, tactics and strategies –

have been particularly influential (Harvey, 2009; Pulido, 2006; Routledge, 2009). For my

research and for this paper, however, I use more basic definitions and approaches, derived from

anarchist and autonomist scholars (Graeber, 2001; De Angelis, 2007): political struggle as

grounded in a unique set of values, developed in common with others, which people believe

should structure the world. Politicization arises from the recognition that one’s unique set of

values do not structure the world; rather, the world is characterized by ongoing differentiation

and different values in play. Any struggle – any organizing informed by this politicization – is an

attempt to make one’s values manifest in spite of overall differentiation; historically, this

manifestation is often won through violence, but strategic pressure and moral compulsion have

also been crucial. This vantage point does not privilege social movements; by this definition, a

gentrifying real estate company struggles to create political change as much as the movements

against it. But neither does it assume the real estate company has a free hand. Even powerful

social actors must struggle to remake a world that resists being organized into expected social

order. The Special Adoption Law – and the possibility of Korean transnational adoption virtually

ending after sixty years of formal operation – is but one testament to that reality.

Producing the world: denaturalizing race and space

In my efforts to theorize political projects of organizing and reorganizing the world –

especially with an eye to the basic nuts and bolts of human action – I continue to find compelling

two areas of interdisciplinary work: critical race studies and critical geography. Both schools

situate questions of “politics” and “struggle” as a problem of organizing differentiated bodies

and peoples on a global level. By fully denaturalizing the apparent stability of race and space,

these conversations make the chaotic and contesting activities of people come alive with a

diverse set of political articulations.

Of course, race has long had its “natural” sheen eviscerated by scholars who have

unearthed the contentious political struggles at race’s heart, as seen in the work on race’s shifting

and contradictory position in geopolitical, capitalist, and nationalist projects (Lowe, 1996), the

histories of hegemonic social formations of race in the US (Omi & Winant, 1994), and the recent

flood of interest in everyday, personal interactions that reproduce racial stereotypes through

microaggressions (Sue, 2010). Due to many critical adoption scholars’ foundations in ethnic

studies, racialization is central to their analyses, primarily as a question of identity. Interviews of

Korean adoptees and deconstruction of Korean adoptee writings and artistic works revolve

around how adoptees position their identity as negotiation, conflict, and queering of categories

like white, Asian American, Korean American, and mixed-race (Nelson, 2009; Pate, 2014; Kim,

2010; Koo, 2008; Brian, 2012). Dorow (2006) explicitly hails adult adoptee subjectivities as

politically significant due to their work in “unfixing stable categories of identity” (264).

This paper charts a parallel yet separate path to these discussions. Without discounting

the importance of sociopolitical and economic structures, violence and stereotyping, and

individual workings and reworking of identity, I wish to take up the demand articulated by

Wilderson (2010), namely that we must situate the experiences and empirics of race and racism

as secondary to the overall ontological paradigm of race. While there is great debate over the

definition of this paradigm, I am most drawn to theorists who see race’s ontology as a global

byproduct of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) referred to as “apparatuses of capture.” These

apparatuses – the State form, colonization, imperialism – produce out of differentiation both a

space of comparison (where all bodily differences cannot simply be different, but must be made

commensurable to each other) and center of appropriation (where the values assigned to

difference can be captured and used as wage labor, universalism, and so on). These gain racial

qualities through the injunction of a particular center of appropriation that must extend its grid of

comparison to all areas of the globe, measuring all bodies in its sweep through degrees of

deviance. Wynter (2003) locates this center of appropriation as the birth of modern coloniality,

namely, the conquest of the Americas and the ruptures this generated for the Europeans’ sense of

self and the world. Having previously regarded the hemisphere of the Americas as uninhabitable,

they had designed their social order around degrees of perfection emanating from earth to the

heavens (287); upon finding inhabitants, this order was gradually reorganized around degrees of

value from a particular subject, what Wynter calls Man, a bourgeois white European ethno-class,

against which all other human beings are ordered against as less-than-valued variations within

one mode of human being (303-310).

The important take-away point from Wynter’s analysis – which should be borne in mind

for the remainder of this paper – is that the imposition of race and racism as a project of human

ordering tends towards the devaluation of everyone (including those most proximate to the Man

subject), precisely because the domination of Man as a governing human order extinguishes

other forms or genres of human being that do not depend on violent commensurations and

appropriations of difference (2006: 116). But the overcoded and overrepresented Man subject is

also historically contingent; it need not have been, and can be otherwise, through people’s

struggles around coloniality. For this reason, the Man subject may hold but the arrangement of

bodily differences constantly shifts, as the cacophony of people’s struggles make some more

secure and some more insecure and threatening, some relatively more valued and some less

valued. People’s race-making, then, is revealed less in how they identity and more in their

commitment to overthrowing their devaluation. We can think of this as positions on a spectrum,

with one side being the unattainable Man subject (those most secure in the governing human

order), and the other side being those so dehumanized, damned, and disposable that they have

absolutely stake in maintaining coloniality (those most threatening to the governing human

order). One could call the former a position of “whiteness,” the latter a position of “blackness” or

“indigeneity,” but to suspend as much as possible the reification of phenotype (because white

people can and do seek to overthrow the current order just as non-white people can and do seek

to keep it), I will refer to both poles as security and threat. Racialization is thus a matter of

political commitment to freedom; does one desire to be “free” through “security” in an unfree

world by enjoying what few provisional benefits and privileges come their way via domination?

Or does one desire to be free as the “threat,” casting off the unfree world entirely and ending the

violent organization of human differences?

As for space, geographers have flourished in unearthing the politics of space, spaces of

politics, and political struggles (Agnew, 2002; Mitchell, 2003; Ó Tuathail, 1996), but few have

applied these efforts to transnational adoption and adoptee communities. The first well-known

attempt is Meier (1998), who interviewed adult Korean adoptees in Minnesota about their

identity work; fifteen years later, Miller (2013) interviewed adult Korean adoptees about their

experiences on “heritage tours” they undertook upon returning to their homeland. Both primarily

tackle transnational adoption using the same geographical inquiry: the relationship between

identity and place. This decision reflects common discourse; much of the speculation as to why

Minnesota houses such a large Korean adoptee community is premised on specific place

characteristics – a significant Scandinavian population, progressive leadership in welfare, liberal

attitudes – considered optimal for transnational adoption (Koo, 2008; Nelson, 2009; Kim, 2010).

But just as with most scholarship on race and its implicit privileging of identity work,

geographic work on place also privileges experiences of identification and negotiation rather

than the production of places themselves. The risk that comes with analyses of place is the

assumption of fixity: that is, relations of identity to place can only change so much because

places themselves do not change. When Meier ponders over qualities about Minnesota like its

“perceived tolerance and openness…as a host culture” and its “extensive array of social

services” (1998: 19) as a possible explanation for how the state became a transnational adoption

hub, he implicitly assumes that the state and its qualities were always there; the contingent

histories that produced these qualities (if we can be certain these qualities accurately describe

Minnesota) are left permanently suspended.

A recent turn in critical geography has offered a robust and exciting challenge to the

discourses of place as natural, fixed space, as described by Massey (1994):

Space is not static….‘Space’ is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global….Space is not a ‘flat’ surface in that sense because the social relations which create it are themselves dynamic by their very nature….This in turn means that the spatial has both an element of order and an element of chaos….Although the location of each (or a set) of a number of phenomena may be directly caused (we know why X is here and Y is there), the spatial positioning of one in relation to the other (X’s location in relation to Y) may not be directly caused….They are in that sense ‘unintended consequences’. Thus, the chaos of the spatial results from the happenstance juxtapositions, the accidental separations, the often paradoxical nature of the spatial arrangements that result from the operation of all these causalities….Thus, the relation between social relations and spatiality may vary between that of a fairly coherent system (where social and spatial form are mutually determinant) and that where the particular spatial form is not directly socially caused at all. (79-81)

This “relational space” approach asserts that the everyday world – right down to the mundane

architectures that seem sturdy as stone – must be recognized as the product of a ferocious amount

of cooperating (and non-cooperating) activity, planning, contestation, and failure, as well as by

accident and chance, with varying degrees of systematization and incoherence (Thrift, 2006); the

world as we know it is radically contingent on multiple contexts, histories, and problems that

could have been arranged and rearranged any number of other ways. This is why Massey insists

on the political potential of the space: the world could have been otherwise – and it can still be

otherwise (1999: 274). The outcome of spatial production is not a foregone conclusion, and

people who politically organize to restructure the world deploy an innumerable set of spatial

practices that move in many directions. Sometimes these practices adhere into order, sometimes

they spill out in unfathomable chaos; they reinforce power relations into steady channels as much

as disrupt them, mobilize zones of life and death, and expand and contract horizons of political

possibility. Again, as with race, “relational space” does not dismiss the sturdiness of spatial

structures and established systems, but it does openly question how useful it is to understand

politics and organizing through the lens of sturdiness rather than dynamism.

Reading organization, racialization, and spatialization together

Unpacking productions of race and space in people’s organization of the world has

proven to be a fruitful enterprise. The literature on global cities, for example, brilliantly uncovers

the proliferation of disparate bodies in the same locations – from the comfortable business elite

to the non-white and migrant janitors, nannies, and taxi drivers that make elite lives possible –

and the attempts (and failures) to keep these proximate zones of security and threat separate and

orderly (McIntyre & Nast, 2011). Innovative work on the changing circuits that maintain Black,

indigenous, and poor people in spaces of confinement, punishment, and the carceral is also

making inroads on these discussions (Gilmore, 2007). Most pertinent to this paper, the work of

several critical adoption studies scholars (Pate, 2014; Nelson, 2009; Cherot, 2006; Briggs, 2012)

– who have unflinchingly traced the racist projects of imperialism, colonialism, and

contemporary geopolitics in the intimate transformations of kinship and family – bears a striking

similarity to the geography subfield of “feminist geopolitics,” which has made great strides in

resisting the “god’s eye” view of the global by showing how local, private, and intimate practices

are the fuel for reproducing (and contesting) “big” processes of war, imperialism, migration, and

globalization (Mountz & Hyndman, 2006). As with critical adoption studies, the position of

children, families, and homes in these dynamics has garnered strong interest among feminist

geopolitics practitioners (Smith, 2013; Katz, 2008; Martin, 2012).

These latter conversations are foundational for my work, but I have also struggled with

two limitations that have generally emerged. One is a tendency toward abstractions that are

reasonable and eminently critical, yet are difficult to pinpoint empirically. I am strongly

sympathetic to scholarship that detects macro-scale processes and structures in micro-scale

phenomena, such as when Anagnost (2000) reads class war in the communications of

transnational adoptive parent cybercommunities, or Pate’s (2014) dissection of a raced, classed,

and gendered militarism in propaganda and imagery in the earliest iterations of Korean adoption.

But demonstrating that the production, arrangement, and utilization of local and intimate

elements contributes directly to national and global undertakings is a tall order, since it’s not

always clear how the micro-macro relations operate. The other limitation is our still insufficient

tools and methods for dissecting the making, organizing, and producing of the world. As Massey

(1999) acknowledges, it is much easier for even radical geographers to study space as largely

“fixed,” with all of its changes – political or no – as the domain of time and history, just as it is

easier for critical race scholars to subject ongoing differentiation into arbitrary formulaic grids of

racial identity that obscure processes of racial organization (a tendency that Puar (2007 &

January 2011) finds particularly troubling in a time of evermore nuanced neoliberal mechanisms

for capturing and controlling racial difference). I believe the expansion of inquiries into political

organizing – of individuals, groups, and movements – can at least engage productively with these

limitations, even if they cannot be solved. The play and interaction of social actors engaged in

struggle is concrete and well-documented, especially in the necessary archives – meeting

minutes, newsletters, publicity and press releases, correspondence with other groups – that many

organizations develop and maintain. As for the creation of tools that are best suited for analyzing

these struggles, I believe it is at least fruitful to delineate and apply a very different racial/spatial

conceptual vocabulary than the identity/place relationship that has been so thoroughly explored

and (to my mind) exhausted; I offer some possible conceptual avenues in the next section.

Before proceeding, I must raise two important caveats. Firstly, my position as a non-

adoptee researching adoptees locates me in a long-running tradition that is deeply problematic;

while I am no adoptive parent or adoption practitioner – the brunt of whom have produced most

of the scholarship and shape most of the discourses on adoption – I am still interpreting and

analyzing community experiences that are not my own. Adopted adults, birth parents, and poor

communities of color have long been marginalized by a system of knowledge production in child

welfare that privileges “experts” who, intentionally or not, claim to speak for silenced

subjectivities. I have striven to conduct and disseminate my research in a way that confronts the

culture of expertise, that prioritizes reflexivity and accountability, and that commits to “speaking

with” more than “speaking for.” But a conference paper undoubtedly privileges the author. My

efforts to avoid reducing and generalizing adoptees’ political and organizing experiences will

still reduce and generalize. My interest in bringing new ideas and understandings into adoptee

discourses will appear – at least in this paper – to be an imposition of knowledge rather than a

contribution. Until alternative forms of knowledge production are valued as seriously as those in

academia, or until the forms of knowledge production in academia are abolished entirely, the

best I can do is remind the reader that this paper’s contents – while valiant – necessarily fall short

in what they must convey. It is an ethical and political cross I both bear and resist.

The second caveat is a methodological one. This paper interprets a specific set of data:

publicly available documentation of adoptee organizing. This includes organizational websites

(specifically those based in Minnesota as well as politically active groups based in South Korea

and other locations), newspaper articles about these organizations, and independent adoptee

blogs (in this case, two well-known blogs – Harlow’s Monkey and Land of Gazillion Adoptees –

authored by Minnesotans) that partly document organizing work. Additionally, my research on

contemporary adoptee organizing included 28 interviews with people who have been active

within Minnesota’s Korean adoptee community for at least one year, including scholars, artists,

service professionals, and community organizers, among others. At this time, however, the

extensive data from these interviews is excluded from the paper because it has not yet been

sufficiently analyzed. The reader should thus bear in mind that while the website, blog, and news

accounts I’ve reviewed tend to align around common accounts of adoptee organizing, these only

convey part of the picture, and my interviews with adoptees will likely generate additional

complexities and deviations. I should also stress that my inquiry is limited to adoptees who have

chosen to be active in the adoptee community, so my discussion may not be applicable to the

much larger group of adoptees who have not participated in the adoptee community, although

their own forms of struggle and politicization should not be discounted.

What what we do does: glimpses into race/space practices

In their discussion of Michel Foucault’s analytics, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982)

emphasize his “local cynicism” of power. Rather than trace macro-scale ideologies and beliefs

that inform human action, Foucault assumes no deeper motivation; he takes human action to be

fairly straightforward, a series of responses to daily problems and issues that are conditioned by

contexts, available options, immediate desires, and limitations. What interests him, however, is

how the sum total of these actions and practices function:

Actors more or less know what they are doing when they do it and can often be quite clear in articulating it. But it does not follow that the broader consequences of these local actions are coordinated….There is a logic to the practices. There is a push towards a strategic objective, but no one is pushing….The overall effect…escaped the actors’ intentions, as well as those of anybody else. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982: 187)

Foucault himself put the concept memorably in a personal communication with the authors:

“People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they

don’t know is what what they do does” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982: 187).

In the spirit of this mode of analysis, I offer a possible typology of spatial practices that

appear most commonly among the adoptee communities and adoptee organizing I researched,

and provide comments as to how such practices function in the making of race and the

production of a delimited political horizon. I did not embark on this research by assuming

motivational or psychological orientations of the organizers (i.e. “they’re in denial of racism”),

or by ascribing structural allegiances to groups (i.e. “they refuse to challenge the government

because they want state funding”), or by claiming general political tendencies that envelop

everyone (i.e. this is all progress/whiteness/anti-adoption/Empire). The reader may arrive at such

conclusions upon reviewing the discussion below. However, I have deliberately limited my focus

to “what they do” and “why they do what they do” (that is, solely accounts of activity and

organizing and reflections about them, and taking these accounts at their word), with tentative

suggestions as to “what what they do does,” in order to properly capture the only definitive

characteristic of adoptee politicization I could discern: its thorough fracturing. I encourage the

reader to view this organizing with the same eye, instead of making unfounded cognitive leaps as

to what is “really going on” (if anything more really is).

ENCLAVE

The enclave carries many connotations – penal conditions of an imploded urban ghetto

(Wacquant, 2009), deregulated capital accumulation in Special Economic Zones (Sidaway,

2007) – but the kernel of its existence is extracting identity from differentiation, order from

chaos. The family and the home impose identity among very different individuals; the gated

community makes all its residents into good citizens and neighborhood watchdogs; the streets of

Ferguson hammer into each Black resident that they don’t count. Whether coasting on privilege

or inhabiting a “living death” (Sexton, 2011: 28), the enclave nevertheless is the strongest form

of psychological security and certainty; one knows who one is in the enclave, even if, per Fanon,

a “non-being” (2008). A good initial indicator of one’s racial, spatial, and political tendencies is

how committed one is to the enclave: are they places to stay, visit, escape, destroy?

The enclaving practices of family and home – and the wide range of emotions, affects,

and commitments that politicized adoptees navigate in such spaces – are a running undercurrent

in adoptee communities, but I am more intrigued by the long traditions of other enclaves in

Minnesota that were specifically formed for the Korean adoptee. As early as the 1970s, white

adoptive parent groups were organizing with Korean Americans to offer a wide range of regular

activities to expose their adopted children to aspects of Korean culture; these included at least

five Korean “culture camps,” three Korean dance groups, Korean drum groups, Korean martial

arts schools, Korean language immersion camps, and Korean church services and ministries

specifically for adoptees and their families. For a great many adoptees in Minnesota, their first

involvement in the adoptee community is a culture camp. The camps are extraordinarily

organized forms of enclaving: every summer, adoptive parents, adult adoptees, and other Korean

Americans gather hundreds of adoptee children and adolescents into exceptional spaces they

never otherwise go – parks, rural areas, private academies – and run them through a cornucopia

of Korean cultural education that most never otherwise learn, while housed in close quarters for a

week with other adoptees they never otherwise see in their daily lives. Only one of these camps

is now run by both adoptive parents and adult adoptees in leadership roles (Lapensky, 2013).

The spaces of camps, dance groups, and all such other organizational forms intend to do a

lot of work for adoptees: building self-esteem, preserving connections to one’s heritage,

providing adult adoptee role models (many of whom went through camp as youth), facilitating

socialization to a community of other adoptees and their parents (Vickery, 1998). Each of these

objectives point to values of resolving and mediating difference; the enclave strives to make the

Korean adoptee secure in Koreanness. The means by which this is done – through brief,

regimented times, in unfamiliar spaces, deploying arbitrary and limited elements of Korean

culture – may seem extreme and even re-traumatizing for some adult adoptees (“Home again,”

21 July 2008), but there are many others who remain committed to such spaces for years. One

Minnesotan adoptee in particular, Brooke Jee In Newmaster, has organized and headed entire

foundations, nonprofits, and countless workshops, classes, and events for Korean adoptees of all

ages; an attentive student of Korean music and dance, she writes that “I continue studying so I

can give the best experience to my students, connecting being American-Korean and being

Korean” (Newmaster, 2004). This move from self-alienation to secure identity through cultural

education bears some similarities to what Wynter (2006) called the “psychic emancipation” felt

by Black people through the “emotional influence” of the Black Aesthetic, Black Arts, and Black

Studies movements of the 1960s (115-116). But Wynter cautions that the emancipation of the

psyche did nothing to emancipate humanity from its overall devaluation (116); it appears, too,

that the securitized enclave – fundamental to many an adoptee identity and community –

ultimately casts a short political shadow.

BORDER

In the groundbreaking anthology Outsiders within (Trenka, Oparah, & Shin (Eds.), 2006),

Sunny Jo’s contribution – “The making of KAD1 nation” – does not wield the term “nation” as

mere metaphor:

[The] sense of belonging and loyalty with the KAD community has led some KADs to adopt children ourselves, either from Korea or elsewhere, while others have found spouses and significant others who are also KADs. Many make close friendships and ties with other KADs….These enclaves of tightly knit KAD organizations, friends, families, and couples are the foundation upon which future KAD nationalism and ethnicity will build. (289)

1 KAD is one of many terms that have been coined by Korean adoptees to refer to themselves.

Jo’s emphasis on the “nationality” of Korean adoptees as not natural but developed out of an

“ethnogenesis” (287) of increasing commensurability and connection between adoptee

“enclaves” (characterized similarly to my analysis above) aligns well with this paper’s emphasis

on the relational and political production of the world and its communities. However, “nation”

and “nationalism” are terms premised on identity more than difference, the joining of like with

like into a coherent unity (in Jo’s case, the secure unity of a unique ethnoculture) when, in

reality, communities and nations are riven with incoherence and fracturing due to the untamable

radical differentiation at their center. This is not to say that focusing on “borders” gets us much

further; Mezzadra and Neilson (March 2008) note that the emergent field of “border studies” is

driven by an “overwhelming concern for issues of security and identity” (para. 1). But Mezzadra

and Neilson argue that borders point to much more than identity; they are not things, but

processes and social relations that reproduce heterogeneity, “the different kinds of mobilities that

traverse and intersect in different spaces” (para. 3). Ferguson (2006) echoes this interpretation,

saying that bordering is a differentiation project that turns flows into “hops,” efficiently linking

enclaves “while excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie between the points” (47).

Bordering – the production of evermore nuanced inclusions and exclusions, channels and

blockages – is a fundamental survival strategy for people of color; psychologically and socially,

it commits to the values of community as a weaving of lines of filiation and alliance, the comfort

of having people who “get” you amidst a crowd of people who might not. Bordering is close to

yet distinct from enclaves; while the relations, divisions, and mediations of the enclave are

intentionally rigid, borders are flexible and relative autonomous practices that determine people’s

maneuverings among spaces of identity. Bordering is particularly prominent at large

convergences of people, such as conferences, where formal caucuses and informal gatherings

frequently pocket the chaos of differentiation and danger with temporary zones of security – thus

the term “safe spaces.” The demand and need for borders was expressed early by adoptee

participants in the annual conferences of the Korean Adoptee-Adoptive Family Network

(KAAN); by the third such conference in Seattle in 2001, the conference coordinators had

consented to some initial borders, “designating sessions as “adult adoptee only” and other

sessions as “all adults” in order to “integrate needs of the adult adopted Koreans to be together”

(Vickery, 2001: 29). Adoptive parent grumblings over these arrangements grew much louder at

the next KAAN conference, held in the Twin Cities; they felt the borders severely lessened

interaction and “made it more like two conferences than one” (Vickery, 2002: 59). One adoptive

parent reflected on “the undercurrent of tension” when the conference closed with a discussion

over flexibilizing the borders at future conferences, namely by holding joint adoptee-adoptive

parent sessions:

Most of the discussion came from the adoptees, about their need to have a non-parent moderator, strict guidelines for the conduct of parents, and edicts for such a discussion….The more I heard, the more I felt that adoptive parents can never get it quite right….The message we get is “don’t say anything, don’t ask questions, and don’t offend an adoptee”….If we’re going to get anywhere close to understanding and helping one another through the complex world of Korean adoption, both sides need to be willing to listen, to hear what is being said… (Lapensky, 2002: 70)

Is this defensiveness? In a convoluted way, yes; Lapensky defends the KAAN conference as an

enclave where adoptees and adoptive parents unify around “understanding and helping one

another,” but her spatial practice is a different one from the adoptees, whose requests for

impartial moderators and codes of conduct appear to be reasonable efforts at policing the

borders, not attacking the unity of the conference (if such unity even exists).2

2 I have witnessed this misrecognition – typically, where white and non-white people come together in “dialogue” but the former group’s enclaving frustrates the latter group’s insistence on borders – abundantly as an organizer. As one example, Asian American-led protests against a 2013 showing of Miss Saigon in Minnesota were rife with such “dialogues” that one Korean adoptee recounts vividly and distressingly: “All the White people were nice, and I felt the very familiar, particular pressure to be a nice person of color so as to encourage them to continue being nice….In our own very special regional way, our anti-institutionalized-racism event managed to exhibit and exacerbate an incredible amount of institutionalized racism….This event was productive for the White people in the room. But the people of color left traumatized” (Kee, 5 November 2013: paras. 17-19).

Policing is the guarantor of security on the border, but also its Achilles’ heel; lines of

loyalty can be thoroughly unforgiving for those made unwelcome. A Harlow’s Monkey post

mentions an adoptee who “tentatively attended some Korean adoptee social events but quickly

felt she didn’t fit,” a common experience at all borders, not just those made by adoptees (“An

adoptee model for activism,” 20 August 2013: para. 1). The commentary is right to argue that

“cliquishness” is “used against us by others to diminish and dismiss the crux of what our

common message is – that it is OUR message, however messy and complex and contradictory it

seems” (para. 3). Yet when the radically politicized Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) first made

an appearance in 2004 at the largest of all Korean adoptee conferences, the International Korean

Adoptee Associations (IKAA) Gathering in Seoul, the borders went up, as Gathering organizers

“insisted that providing a safe, nonjudgmental space for adoptees…should remain a priority”

(Haruch, 9 September 2014: para. 54). Not all complexities and contradictions are equal and

allowable; some are ejected from the “safe space.” Adoptee communities should not be

diminished for this – nor should any communities that border – but the limitations and harms of

bordering should give us pause all the same.

TERRITORY

Eleana Kim’s examination of transnational adoptee networks sports a provocative

geographic title: Adopted territory (2010). But her use of “territory” is not a traditional

definition; rather, Kim argues that adoptee networks constitute a “deterritorialized social

formation” (2010: 15), a bundle of flows and connectivities that articulate “in diacritical relation”

(14) to dominant forms and discourses in the adoption world, a “transnational Korean adoptee

counterpublic” (9). While Kim emphasizes the network characteristics of adoptee communities, I

wish to deploy here a modest use of “territory” – in this case, the claims to spaces beyond the

zones of security (enclaves and borders), or at least the insistence on the right to occupy such

spaces. “Deterritorialized social formations” are not permanently deterritorialized, as Deleuze

and Guattari assert (1977: 382), but are constantly reterritorializing on strategic sites of interest,

on the spaces where we want some skin in the game.

The most recognizable form of territorialization is the politics of representation: efforts to

include people made absent, to bring greater visibility to the marginalized, to have a voice in

matters; that is, representational politics tend to commit to the values of ideal liberal democracy

and racial pluralism. Out of all spatial practices, territory seems particularly resonant right now;

adoptees in Minnesota and beyond have long demanded seats at multiple tables and are finally

getting them. Minnesota adoptees have successfully carved out territory in academic conferences

and symposia about adoption, worked to adjust adoption practices through employment at

adoption agencies, and populated arts and media with their voices (“MN Korean adoptees who

kick ass,” 30 April 2012; “Event: “Intercountry adoption””, 26 January 2013; “Talk with me

about…adoptee support groups,” 19 June 2012). Ami Nafzger, a Minnesotan adoptee, was

especially instrumental in founding adoptee-oriented services in both Minnesota (AdopSource)

and Korea (the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, or G.O.A.’L.), intervening in an adoption world

where adult adoptees’ needs and desires are poorly engaged, if at all (Nafzger, 2006; “Minnesota

News Briefs,” 2007/2008).

The coherence around territorial practices is perhaps best demonstrated by an incident in

July of 2012. Minnesota Public Radio (an affiliate of National Public Radio) arranged a panel to

discuss the consequences of the rapid global decline in transnational adoption since 2004; as par

for the course, the participants were local agency representatives and adoptive parents, while

others in the adoption community were left out. These snubs occur constantly in the adoption

world, only this time it was interrupted with a mobilization over territory. A Minnesotan adoptee,

Kevin Ost-Vollmers, called into the show to directly challenge the absence of adoptees on the

panel, and subsequent half-measures by MPR to make amends merely amplified the intensity of

critiques – launched mostly over blogs and social media – and demands for including adoptee

perspectives, made by adoptees and their allies (“MPR, international adoption, and oh wait…”, 9

July 2012; “WTF MPR?,” 10 July 2012; “What next?”, 11 July 2012). MPR finally folded and

created a follow-up panel featuring Minnesotan adoptees Kim Park Nelson, JaeRan Kim, and

Kelly Fern, although the company explicitly asserted its territorial prerogative by limiting the

discussion to “safe” questions of racial and cultural identity instead of the debate over the

transnational adoption decline (“The most satisfying unsatisfying show,” 13 July 2012).

While enclaving and bordering are situated more towards commitments of security,

territorializing demonstrates a flirtation with commitments to threat – the embrace of being a

thorn in society as much as a stakeholder. As a Harlow’s Monkey reflection on the MPR debacle

notes, the real victory was not just the “amazing advocacy” for adult adoptee voices, but also

“the ways in which adoptees and our adoptive parent and professional allies roundly rejected the

status quo” and insisted on making the institutions of media uneasy (“NPR’s round table on

adoption,” 10 December 2012: para. 2). But threat of this nature runs up against a firm limit. As

Weizman (2011) argues, a seat at the table comes with a dangerous cost: the elimination of true

political antagonism. To territorialize – to stake a claim – is to perform a parity and

commensurability among all other stakeholders, when in fact the differences and disparities

among them may be radically opposed; to even hint at the possibility that not everyone is

“working together,” that not all voices can be reconciled, is to endanger one’s provisional seat at

the table, what Povinelli (2002) calls the devastating “cunning of recognition.” MPR was

certainly cunning to “recognize” adoptee voices while deftly denuding their ability to raise

political critiques and confrontations. Is the outstretched hand of representation a poisoned one?

What would it have meant to refuse the territory of MPR and produce different spaces?

TERRAIN

Terrain is relatively ignored in geography, but critical geographer Gordillo (April 2014)

attempts to resuscitate the term as the domain of “material multiplicity” (para. 28), populated

with more unknowns than knowns, the raw material of struggles for control, a space “central to

the politics of domination and emancipation” (para. 33). Let’s get down to brass tacks: terrain is

the space of war, of enemies, of defining lines of coalition and opposition. To commit to the

terrain is to relinquish security for riskier horizons: the visions of justice and freedom (or just as

readily, injustice and unfreedom), which often boil down not to resolution of differences (as in

enclaves), establishment of utopic outposts (borders), or even formal equality (territories), but in

who wins or loses the struggle – outcomes that are frequently life-and-death for those involved.

Terrain-making is the most difficult of all the spatial practices thus far discussed, due to

the multiplicities at work, the unknown subjects and subjectivities, the rapidly shifting conditions

and opportunities. To make a political project tangible from this chaos, terrain practices diverge

from those of enclave, border, and territory through highly strategic organizing built off of

several components: critical analysis of the world and its conditions, identification of the

battlegrounds and their connections, and the building of new relations through prepared

encounters and showdowns. The work around the Special Adoption Law demonstrates all of

these qualities, not only through coalition development that overcame significant divisions

(nationalities, language barriers, stigmas) between groups, but also through trenchant research

and analyses of the stakes – the growing global crisis of neoliberal states protecting markets

more than populations, as one example – that directly pinpointed services for mothers and

children as a key battleground to tackle (“Transnational adoption,” 6 August 2009; “Korean

gov’t encouraged parents,” 20 July 2014). In Minnesota, adoptee political education has led to

generative encounters with communities more removed from the adoption world, including other

Korean Americans (“Thoughts on the 5th National Moim,” 13 May 2013) and broader Asian

American and people of color subjectivities (“Event: Community discussion on Miss Saigon,” 4

September 2013), both of which developed fronts for anti-racist struggle. Nor can one ignore the

role of adoptees who have become critical scholars of adoption, especially those who not only

territorialize onto conversations long held without them, but also make these conversations a

terrain for fighting dominant and unjust discourses.

The producers and navigators of terrains develop a familiarity with threat – with

communities and conditions under threat and a threat to society – but the desire to embrace

oneself as threat, to embrace one’s criminality and “fugitivity” (Moten & Harney, 2013: 50) is to

harken a terrain that many refuse to traverse. Geopolitically, the Left avoids engaging with issues

in a country like North Korea, a depressingly persistent enclaving of Korea’s other half into a

universally abjected space, proving fatal to some adoptees’ careful research and outreach to

potential allies to rally opposition to the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act, a cynical “child

rescue” bill signed into law in 2013 (and notably supported by other adoptee groups like MPAK)

(“North Korean Refugee Adoption Act,” 5 December 2011; Dobbs & Hong, 2012; “Obama signs

HR 1464 into law,” 25 January 2013). Failures and defeats are par for the course on the terrain,

but this particular struggle, a struggle on behalf of a pariah state, suggests the possible limits of

inhabiting battlegrounds too lopsided to impact.

Not yet a conclusion

My interest here is not the uniqueness of Korean adoptee politicization, racialization, and

spatialization (although the contours for this community are surely unique); rather, I want to

situate adoptee practices as common ones enacted by individuals and communities from local to

global scales. Whatever distinctions among groups can be identified from this framework are not

based on self-claimed identity, but rather the degree of investment and commitment to some

practices more than others. I take divides in the adoptee community very seriously as the

consequences of differentiated commitments. So while it is true that adoptees may dabble in all

these productions – enclaves, borders, territories, and terrains – at any one time, one cannot

deduce that they move in a unified direction – despite the insistence of one adoptee, in a Land of

Gazillion Adoptees blog post, that “what we are really working for, no matter who we are, is

CHANGE” (“Who do we think we are?”, 12 June 2012: para. 2). Change is multidirectional:

some prioritize bordering, some can’t live without the terrain, and some would willingly let go of

all other practices as long as they could keep building enclaves. Adoptees – like all other

politicized groups, communities, and social actors – arrive at their own trajectories based on

specific desires, capacities, and limit points. Further, we should not assume inherent divides

between, say, the transnational Boycott/Divest/Sanction movement in support of Palestinians and

the transnational organizing of Korean adoptees in support of unwed mothers; these seemingly

unrelated strands may be much closer to occupying a common political project, in spite of their

sharply divergent identities and experiences. What matters is not what we do and why we do it,

but “what what we do does.” And it is difficult to ignore, based on the above analyses, that the

doing of what Korean adoptees do seems less governed by a teleology of progress and more by a

multitude of dissonant political, spatial, and racial logics. Granted, the outcomes of these

trajectories are still unconcluded, just as all adoptee organizing is. What I hope I have

demonstrated is that the lack of fixity in people’s making of space, race, and politics is no

downside for study; adoptees on the move – on many moves – compel our attention to the

unfinished, whether or not we learn to move with them.

I wish to express my gratitude to the dozens of adoptees in Minnesota and beyond who gave over their time and energy to talk with me about adoptee organizing and adoptee communities. There are too many to mention here, but I note in particular two of them – Caitlin Jeonghye Kee and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs – who have steadfastly supported this research and implicitly made my work stronger through their sharp political insights. Additional thanks to Daniel Ibn Zayd, a Lebanese adoptee whose passionate encouragement has been astounding, considering we haven’t even met; without his writings – especially on adoption, Fanon, and decolonization – the seed for this article would have never sprouted. Despite my close sense of comradeship with these three individuals, the words in this article – and any errors or flaws – are mine alone.

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