This dissertation uses a cultural rhetorics methodology of story and relationality to examine the role of racial isolation in the leadership practices of Korean American adoptee community leaders. While scholarship in Writing and Rhetoric has used story and relationality to critique the historical erasure of racially marginalized peoples, the discipline has yet to do so from the specific perspective of transnational transracial adoptees. That transnational transracial adoptees are overwhelmingly adopted into predominantly White homes and communities and must thus develop their racial (person of color) and cultural (White American) identities separately uniquely positions them to further nuance discussions of race and racial literacy. In this study, I interviewed four past and present leaders of an adult Korean American adoptee organization in the Midwest. A theoretical framework of relational literacy both emerged from and guided my analyses of their stories and yielded three key findings about racial isolation: (1) racial isolation can occur among people of the same race/positionality; (2) disorientation can occur in the initial stages of intentionally building relationships with other adoptees as a result of racial isolation; and (3) racial isolation is not only a matter of physical environment but also of ever-shifting emotional, intellectual, and spiritual states.These insights suggest that Korean American adoptees' leadership practices of facilitating relationships (between adoptees, Korean culture, Korea, critical histories of adoption, Asian Americans), establishing safe spaces for programming, revising essentialized racial and ethnic categories (i.e., "Korean American" and "Asian American"), facilitating relationships between their and other adoptee organizations, and cultivating the next generation of adoptee community leaders are contingent on adoptee leaders' own experiences with racial isolation. Moreover, analysis shows that adoptee leaders' own experiences with racial isolation also inform what and how they design and implement programming for membership. The final chapter identifies how a framework of relational literacy can be widely applied in Writing and Rhetoric scholarship, as well as its contributions to the fields of Asian American rhetoric, cultural rhetorics, and adoption studies.
Read
