UC Riverside

Molecular Longing: Adopted Koreans and the Navigation of Absence Through DNA, is an interdisciplinary exploration of how transnational, transracial Korean adoptees utilize paperwork, popular science, and genetic technologies to navigate material and affective absences produced by the violence of U.S. empire. While Korean transnational adoption importantly brings new families together, institutional practice often hinders the recovery of knowledge in personal adoption histories. That is, reliable information is difficult or impossible to find since “official” adoption records are frequently erroneous, falsified, or missing altogether. To contend with the affective losses produced by these absences, adult Korean adoptees increasingly turn to “scientific” options such as commercial genetic testing kits—themselves compromised forms of knowledge—to augment these otherwise unreliable paper trails. Utilizing ethnographic and discursive analysis, Molecular Longing applies a multi-scalar investigation of knowledge projects of/about Korean transnational, transracial adoption, including “state-based,” private corporate, collective digital, and personal archives. Chapter One, “The Presence of Absence: Gaps, Silences, and the Archive,” considers how absence, silence, and error not only overwhelmingly structure how kinship ties are created and managed in the formal adoption agency archive but are also indicative of its successful functioning. Chapter Two, “Creative (Un)Certainty and the Private Commercial DNA Database,” explores how consumer-based genetic testing company 23andMe situates itself to provide fast, reliable, and accessible knowledge that promises to reveal and expand personal histories while also presenting mutable networks of genetic-based relations. Lastly, Chapter Three, “The Limits of Relation: Contingent Connections and the KAD Cousin,” examines how genetic test results are then mobilized by individual Korean adoptees to reconfigure absence and unknowns in their personal histories. It analyzes two related phenomena: the emergence of a distinct Korean adoptee (KAD) DNA relation, termed the “KAD cousin,” and the growth of an informal, collective digital network of transnational, transracial Korean adoptees that forms through shared experience, genetic knowledge, and kinship desire. Across ethnic studies, critical adoption studies, and feminist science and technology studies, Molecular Longing ultimately argues that the scientific, biotechnological, and archival become sites where the affective and material losses produced by U.S. transpacific violence are mediated in complex and unsettling ways.