Redesigning Transnational Korean Adoptees' Togetherness in Deann Borshay Liem's Geographies of Kinship

abstract: The Korean adoptee film director Deann Borshay Liem makes visible four adult transnational Korean adoptees' voices in Geographies of Kinship (2019). Those voices grapple with a search for identity and a historical reckoning of child migration that are forged in loss. This essay offers a needed analysis of transnational Korean adoptees' performative labor that negotiates their discrete subjectivity in both their birth and adoptive countries: a care work to form relationships and create coexistence that I call convivial labor . The principal goal of this essay is to delineate in narrative terms what the care labor I designate as conviviality entails. The dialogue between conviviality and adoption calls attention to the transnational adoptee who is tasked with producing comfort and creating connection in intimate relations. In doing so, this essay claims that Geographies of Kinship becomes a source of critical analysis of transnational adoptee coexistence or conviviality as a political category.