Unsettling Acts

<div> <p>Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption Jieun Lee's <i>Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption</i> challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees' birth family searches and reunions theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist gendered and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience.<br> <br> Lee examines twelve works-from South Korea the United States the United Kingdom Belgium and Denmark-including plays musicals solo performances community-based theater and performance art. Through her analysis theater and performance become a means for reimagining adoptees' identity kinship and sense of belonging. Further these pieces encourage critical exploration of the history politics and social impacts of Korean transnational adoption. These works thus nurture a countermemory to engender redressive accountability and transpacific justice pointing a way forward for remaking the transnational adoptee experience in the twenty-first century.</p> </div>