RESEARCH

For access to the below articles and other publications visit my Academia.edu page.

Forthcoming open access book with University of California Press (January 2025)
The Violence of Love: Race, Adoption, and Family in United States

The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with regard to transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. Showing how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—he argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomfiting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.  

Journal articles

Ma Vang and Kit Myers, “In the Wake of Floyd: Hmong American’s Refusal to be a U.S. Ally,” Amerasia Journal 47.1 (2021) 20-34.

Kit Myers, Amanda Baden, and Alfonso Ferguson, “Going Back ‘Home’: Adoptees Share Their Experiences of Hong Kong Adoptee Gathering,” Adoption Quarterly 23.3 (July 2020): 187-218, DOI: 10.1080/10926755.2020.1790452.

JaeRan Kim, Kit Myers, Kimberly McKee, and Elizabeth Raleigh, “Conceptualizing an Adoption Pedagogy: Expanding Beyond ‘Teaching Adoption,’” Adoption & Culture 7.1 (Spring 2019): 1-5.

“Complicating Birth-Culture Pedagogy at Asian Heritage Camps for Adoptees,” Adoption & Culture 7.1 (Spring 2019): 67-94.

 “Marking the Turn and New Stakes in (Critical) Adoption Studies.” Adoption & Culture 6.1 (Spring 2018): 17-20.

 “‘Real’ Families: Love and Violence in New Media Adoption Discourse.” Critical Discourse Studies 11.2 (Spring 2014): 175-193.

Book chapters

“Creating (Un)equal Families in The Child Citizenship Act of 2000.”In R. Ballard, N. Goodno, R. Cochran, Jr. & J. Milbrandt (Eds.), The Intercountry Adoption Debate: Dialogues Across Disciplines. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, 567-590.

Media