Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption

• Type of Material: Book
• Authors: Jieun Lee, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2025
• Publisher: The Ohio State University Press
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2025 by Jieun Lee
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215838.html
• ISBN: 978-0-8142-1583-8
• Series Title: Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
• Keywords: Asian American Studies; Race & Ethnic Studies
• Research Categories: Asian American studies; Ethnic studies; Asian studies

Abstract

Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption, Jieun Lee’s Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees’ birth family searches and reunions, theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist, gendered, and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so, Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience. Lee examines twelve works—from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark—including plays, musicals, solo performances, community-based theater, and performance art. Through her analysis, theater and performance becomes a means for reimagining adoptees’ identity, kinship, and sense of belonging. Further, these pieces encourage critical exploration of the history, politics, and social impacts of Korean transnational adoption. These works thus nurture a countermemory to engender redressive accountability and transpacific justice, pointing a way forward for remaking the transnational adoptee experience in the twenty-first century.