Kit Myers | University of California, Merced (original) (raw)

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Papers by Kit Myers

Amerasia Journal, 2021

This article analyzes the tenuous relationship between refugees and African Americans, specifical... more This article analyzes the tenuous relationship between refugees and African Americans, specifically Hmong Americans in relation to Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers, one of whom is Hmong. We argue that Hmong expose the messiness of race relations in the U.S. due to their implication as a U.S. ally in Southeast Asia. While Hmong refugees/Americans can be called to enact violence on behalf of the U.S. militarized state, Hmong American activists refuse the reprised role of the ally, insisting on justice for Floyd and other Black people killed by the police.

Adoption & Culture, 2019

This essay explores how adoptive parents employ birth-culture pedagogy in summer camps for Korean... more This essay explores how adoptive parents employ birth-culture pedagogy in summer camps for Korean- and Vietnamese-American adoptees. Such pedagogy celebrates adoptees’ so-called missing ethnic pasts and builds stronger family relations. Yet it also employs an orientalist version of culture that erases birth parents while reifying narrow conceptualizations of culture and kinship.

This essay interrogates the U.S. Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (CCA) through legal and discursive... more This essay interrogates the U.S. Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (CCA) through legal and discursive analysis of the congressional hearings, records, and the act itself to understand the ways in which citizenship and adoption are discussed and practiced as liberal gifts from the West to needy orphans of the Third World. The CCA was a response, in part, to the deportation of adult adoptees who did not have U.S. citizenship and had committed minor crimes that are deemed deportable offenses due to terrorism and anti-immigrations laws passed in 1996. I show how the law attempts to equalize and legitimate adoptive families. Yet, in vying for equal status, the law and its proponents further marginalize birth families and non-adopted immigrant families, who do not have privileged access and can still be deported. Ultimately, the final version of the CCA also highlights the requirement for adult immigrants, adopted (and no longer “helpless orphans” in need of rescue) or not, to be proper neoliberal subjects. It further demonstrates the ways in which certain subjects can, on the one hand be celebrated by and “belong” to the nation as part of “forever families,” and on the other, still be so easily expelled.

Critical Discourse Studies, Nov 20, 2013

This essay examines a New York Times special transnational/racial adoption blog series, ‘Relative... more This essay examines a New York Times special transnational/racial adoption blog series, ‘Relative Choices’, to interrogate how statements of love in adoption discourse engender symbolic violence in order to narrowly define ‘real’ family. The blogs are an important site of inquiry because of the ways in which new technology enables individuals with access to the Internet the ability to contribute to knowledge production. These transnational/racial adoption blog entries generated more than 1000 comments by adoptees, adoptive parents, and interested readers. The statements that emerged from the blogs and comments included denying adoptees' history, claiming the title of ‘real’ parent, and articulating statements of love. This essay complicates new media adoption discourse to show how symbolic discursive violence is hidden and embedded in adoptive family-making.

Dissertation: University of California, San Diego, Jun 2013

My dissertation is about the violence of love in transnational/racial adoptive family-making. I d... more My dissertation is about the violence of love in transnational/racial adoptive family-making. I define adoption and any statement affirming adoption as “love”—or more specifically a loving act, statement, or possibility—that operates at the personal and familial; agency and industry; and legal and trans/national levels. But I also show how past and present transnational/racial adoptions from Asia to the United States are imbricated in hidden or unmarked structural-historical, representational, and traumatic violence. My project answers the questions: How is “love” defined and employed by the various actors—adoptive parents, adoption agencies, and the state—who are involved in transnational/racial adoptions? What role does racial difference play in adoptive family-making? How is adoption a “violent” act? More specifically, how are constructions of il/legible and il/legitimate families shaped by adoption discourse, structures, and practices in the United States? Each chapter of Race and the Violence of Love examines a different site of knowledge production about the transnational/racial adoptive family. Through archival, legal, new media, and ethnographic methods, I analyze positive adoption language and social scientific studies; legal discourse and practice; popular adoption discourse through blogs and their comments; and birth culture and adoptee summer camps.

I make two claims to position how the “violence of love” relates to and functions in adoptive family-making: 1) Adoption professionals and social scientists, government officials, the public, and adoptive parents have imagined and applied the concept of love in personal, symbolic, and (neo)liberal legal ways that transgressed normative biological, same-race, and same-nation kinship. These forms of love have been used to normalize transnational/racial adoption as a form of freedom from violence and “in the best interest,” where U.S. adoptive families and the United States are the better family and nation in relation to the birth family and nation (or what I call “opposite” future) for the child in need. 2) Such adoption representations and practices, however, are simultaneously and differently attached to intersecting and overlapping forms of structural-historical, representation, and traumatic violence that happen before, after, and outside of transnational/racial adoption. In other words, Race and the Violence of Love interrogates the configuration of the adoptive family as transgressive and non-normative but also the site for which racial and gendered subjects and global geographies as well as the idea of normative families and motherhood are simultaneously reconsolidated. The implications of this research include embracing adoption and family as non-normative and considering the generative possibilities of examining the violence of love within adoptive-family in relation to other sites of family and the “home” that exist such as childhood, marriage, im/migration, domestic work, nursing, and surrogacy.