The Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program selected Erin O'Malley, ASAM Minor and UAB Co-chair as the recipient of the Lynda S. Hart Undergraduate Award in Sexuality Studies.
Honors Thesis Title: I am Where I Come From: Narratives of Transgender Asian Adoptees
Honors Thesis Advisor: David Kazanjian, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Archana Kaku, Ph.D. Student in Political Theory
Abstract: In his book The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy David Eng writes of his Asian American students coming out to him “not as gay or lesbian but as transnational adoptees,” employing “the language of the closet in these revelations.” How then, might we consider the experience of transgender Asian adoptees who must “come out” as both transgender and adopted? This thesis seeks to answer this question by examining the documentaries aka SEOUL (2016) and Coming Full Circle: The Journey of A Korean Transgendered Adoptee (2015), which chronicle the return of two transgender adoptees to their birth country of Korea. By juxtaposing the dead names of aka SEOUL’s protagonist and the search for birth parents in Coming Full Circle, I contend that the complicated histories inhered in these texts constitute the lack of a “threshold” at which an adoptee comes to terms with their adoptee identity in the way they with their gender identity.
Bio: Erin O'Malley (they/them/theirs) will graduate as an inductee of Phi Beta Kappa and with honors in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and Comparative Literature. They are the recipient of the of 2021 Lynda S. Hart Undergraduate Award in Sexuality Studies. In the fall, they will be an Interdisciplinary Enrichment Fellow at Arizona State University's MFA Program in Creative Writing.