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Consider these two images. Both pictures were taken in South Korea. Figure 1 is a still image from a film produced by the Department of Defense on Christmas Eve in 1953, five months after the Korean War ended in a cease-fire agreement along the thirty-eighth parallel, or the demilitarized zone.1 It features three orphans held in the arms of servicemen from IX Corps who organized a Christmas party for them. The second image was featured in a 1955 Life magazine article to document the inauguration of Harry Holt as the founding father of Korean adoption via the unprecedented adoption of these eight mixed-race Korean children. This single event has been considered the birth of Korean adoption as we now know it.2 Indeed, historical accounts of Korean adoption almost always begin with Holt’s adoption of these children. The story goes something like this. At the end of the Korean War, thousands of Korean children were orphaned. Harry Holt saw a need and decided to do something about it. Not only did he adopt eight Korean orphans (despite having six biological children of his own), but he also started his own adoption agency so that other American couples could adopt. Projected as a humanitarian rescue, in which kind and generous Americans opened their hearts and homes to needy orphans, this image has become the dominant face of Korean adoption. What happens if we situate the emergence of Korean adoption in Figure 1 rather than Figure 2? When paired alongside the first image, “Holt Family Portrait” becomes entwined in a complex set of historical and geopolitical conditions. Figure 1 makes visible the militarized, gendered, racialized, sexualized, and imperialist dimensions of Korean adoption that the second photo elides through the depiction of Korean adoption as both a rescue project and a reproduction of white heteronormative kinship building. What Figure 1 makes explicit that Figure 2 conceals is the direct relationship 1 INTRODUCTION Challenging the Official Story of Korean Adoption between U.S. military occupation and Korean adoption. This is precisely what is wrong with the “Holt Family Portrait” becoming the face of Korean adoption: it eschews the role that the U.S. military played in creating the conditions in which Korean children could be made available for adoption. Beginning the story of Korean adoption with the act of rescue elides everything that came before that rescue. From Orphan to Adoptee challenges this story of Korean adoption by situating it in Figure 1 in order to provide alternative genealogies of Korean adoption and the children involved: the orphan and the adoptee. By investigating the material conditions that made these two images possible, I locate Korean adoption within the context of U.S. militarization and empirebuilding projects during the Cold War era in order to illuminate the role that Korean children—both orphans and adoptees—played in facilitating neocolonial relations between the United States and Korea. More to the point, I reveal that the “Holt Family Portrait” is no less implicated in U.S. militarism; rather, I contend that these images are simply two versions of the same thing: American empire. In so doing, my project bridges the emergent field of critical adoption studies with transnational American studies by framing Korean adoption as a sine qua non of U.S. neocolonialism in Korea. Taking into consideration these two images is particularly significant because a genealogical investigation of Korean adoption cannot take place without a rigorous accounting of the children involved. Without the figures of the Korean orphan and adoptee, Korean adoption could not exist. The arrival of the Korean orphan and adoptee signals the arrival of Korean adoption. Thus, a central objective of this book is to mine alternative histories of Korean adoption while at the same time investigating the subject formation of the orphan and the adoptee. Because the same forces that produced Korean adoption also produced the figures of the Korean orphan and adoptee, a genealogical investigation of Korean adoption is also a genealogical investigation of these two images. In this book, I call for a reorientation of how we understand the history and persistence of Korean adoption by taking into consideration the geopolitical , socioeconomic, and cultural conditions of the Cold War era. Specifically , I situate Korean adoption and the subject formations of the Korean orphan and Korean adoptee within the following contexts: U.S. militarism, Cold War Orientalism, and white heteronormative kinship formation. On the basis of my archival research, I locate the emergence of Korean adoption...

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