“McKee applies a much-needed intersectional feminist adoptee of
color lens to Asian American stereotypes and adoption tropes in
media. Her focus on the women and girls harmed by these portrayals
fills an important gap within adoption studies and forwards adoption
as a productive topic among other fields of scholarship.” —Kim
Park Nelson, author of Invisible
Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and
Racial Exceptionalism
“With Adoption
Fantasies, McKee pushes us forward with generosity and rigor into
important albeit difficult conversations. Here is a necessary,
honest, but also expansive and highly researched interruption of both
the lived material contexts of transracial Asian adoption and the
more abstract, sometimes repetitive discourses of adoption
scholarship. McKee interrogates the joy, beauty, grief, fear, and
risks of Asian-adopted girl- and womanhood but also invites us to
elevate our shared whispered warnings into louder, bolder,
unapologetic declarations of refusal.” —Jenny Heijun Wills,
author of Older Sister, Not
Necessarily Related
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. Drawing on
adoption studies, Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies,
gender studies, and cultural studies, McKee analyzes the mechanisms
informing adoptees’ interactions with consumers of this
media—adoptive parents and families and strangers alike—and how
those exchanges and that media influence adoptees’ negotiations
with the world. From Modern Family to Sex and the City to the
notoriety surrounding Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen, among many
other instances, McKee scrutinizes the fetishization and
commodification of women and girls adopted from Asia to understand
their racialized experiences.