"Let's Not Get Hysterical": Was He Ever Her Father?

At the end of 1992, Soon Yi Previn's name was seared into the American imaginary as the interloper of Mia Farrow's more than ten-year romance to Woody Allen. Farrow's adopted daughter was simultaneously cast as victim and villain in the ensuing custody case over the three Farrow-Allen children. The article explores how discourses of adoption, race, disability, and postmodern kinship impacted the ways in which Previn was characterized in the media. Scholarship on father-daughter incest intersects with mainstream pathologization of "defective" adoptees and the fetishization of the Asian woman's body. The article examines the legacy of Allen and Previn's sexual transgression and implications of Orientalist fantasy as real—as seen in their eventual marital union. Specifically, this article is interested in the impact of this realization of Orientalist fantasies in the lives of Asian woman adoptees and their white fathers. Through interrogating the anxieties produced by Allen and Previn's sexual transgression, the author uncovers how discourses of hypersexuality, Orientalism, incest, and kinship are intertwined and troubled.