Tearing the Seams: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Study of Korean-American Adoption Stories

Language and discourse are central forces shaping representations of self and family creation in adoption narratives. Informed by theorizations of agency, as well as language and legitimacy, two transnational adopted persons engage in a collaborative autoethnography through electronically exchanged letters about the authors’ experiences as international and interracial Korean-American adopted persons. The resulting analysis uncovered how language and identity can intersect in adoption narratives, complicating adopted persons’ stories and their telling of them. The authors also explored the agentive potential of mushfake as hybrid and emerging discourse/Discourse. In narrating their experiences, the authors illuminated how adopted persons and other members of marginalized groups can exercise their agentive authority to take up and demand recognition of self-proclaimed identities which are situated in spaces of in-betweenness and becoming.