Adoption Fantasies: Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood

Publisher: The Ohio State University Press, November 2023

In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications—as adoptees and as Asian American women—and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee traces the life cycle of the adopted Asian woman, from the rendering of infant adoptee bodies in the white US imaginary, to Asian American fantasies of adoption, to encounters with the hypersexualization of Asian and Asian American women and girls in US popular culture. 

Degrees of Difference: Reflection of Women of Color on Graduate School

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2020

University commitments to diversity and inclusivity have yet to translate into support for women of color graduate students. Sexism, classism, homophobia, racial microaggressions, alienation, disillusionment, a lack of institutional and departmental support, limited help from family and partners, imposter syndrome, and narrow reading lists all remain commonplace. Indifference to the struggles of women of color in graduate school and widespread dismissal of their work further poison an atmosphere that suffocates not only ambition but a person's quality of life. In Degrees of Difference, women of color from diverse backgrounds give frank, unapologetic accounts of their battles (both internal and external) to navigate grad school and fulfill their ambitions. At the same time, the authors offer strategies for surviving the grind via stories of their own hard-won successes with self-care, building supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and resisting racism and unsupportive faculty and colleagues.

Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2019

Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship.
Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families�a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.