| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 98 === ABSTRACT
Both The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life present counternarratives to dominant transnational adoption narratives which mostly emphasize the point that transnational adoption means social benefit for children and it is a practice of humanitarianism, love, generosity, and morality. In The Language of Blood, the adoptee is bitter about being taken away from her birth family. Trenka directly questions the practice of transnational adoption by presenting her lived experience as an example. In A Gesture Life, there is a tension between the narrator’s nonchalance to the practice of transnational adoption and the impact of the experience on the adoptee. Chang-rae Lee does not question transnational adoption by confronting the practice directly. By describing how the practice is taken for granted and normalized, A Gesture Life questions what makes transnational adoption necessary.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter focuses on examining of Korean-American adoption, starting from a general review of transnational adoption history between Korean and the U.S. and the cultural background of the practice, and precedes to engage in a study on the gender dynamics within the practice, then to an overview on current researches on transnational adoption narratives, and finally to the social context of The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life. The second part consists of an examination of the dominant discourses of transnational adoption and a close reading of The Language of Blood to analyze the clash between the representations of transnational adoption by the adoptee and that in the dominant narrative, and to reflect on the movement of the female body within the practice of transnational adoption. Chapter three includes a close reading of A Gesture Life and an analysis of the protagonist’s experiences as both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, to study the sense of un-belongingness, adopter-adoptee relation, and the exploitation of women’s bodies in the patriarchal ideology as involved in transnational adoption. Chapter four concludes the thesis with a suggestion that the transnational adoption narrative should be an open one to include more heterogeneous experiences in order to educate people about what is involved and at stake in the practice of transnational adoption and to demand a rethinking on the practice of transnational adoption.
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