Familiarizing the Stranger: Asian American Adoptees and 'the American South'

Based on interviews I conducted with four adult Asian American adoptees, each of them adopted into predominantly white families and raised in the regional U.S. South, I argue that both transnational/-racial adoption and ‘Southern-ness’ are analytics for a queer-interpellative relationality. That is, adoptive and Southern relations register of homologous structure of queer intimacy, each characterized by attempts to establish white-familial normativity through transformation of ‘the strange’ (and ‘the stranger’) into ‘the familiar.’ For the interviewees, ‘Southern-ness’ is a performative mode evincing a peculiar arrangement of explicit hospitality and implicit judgment and structuring and fortifying Southern relations, familial recognition, and community belonging. As adoption, specifically transracial adoption, entails a ventured process of racial transfiguration—the literal familiarizing of the racial stranger—the experiences of Asian American adoptees in a Southern context not only registers this peculiar tension between strange-ness and familiarity but allows us to examine how this tension is racialized by attempts to manage the adoptee’s racial difference in order to make her familial and familiar. I trace how the interviewees articulated themselves with, and against, such notions of Southern-ness and have negotiated their place, as transracial adoptees, in a strangely familiar world