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Rebuilding the colony: Elizabeth Geiser, Return to the Métropole: Spatial Trauma Responses in Pied-Noir Built Environments, MA dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2026 »

The adoption of settler colonialism: Alyssa Maureen Yukang Hemler, Battered and Beloved: An Analysis of Legal Violence Specific to International, Interracial Chinese American Adoptees, MA dissertation, UCLA, 2026

23Sep26

Abstract: “Battered and Beloved” analyzes how the Law inflicts, facilitates, and justifies legal violence towards international, interracial Chinese American adoptees through its categorization of adoptees as sources of labor, commodities, and possessions. To better understand how the Law inflicts legal violence against international, interracial Chinese American adoptees, “Battered and Beloved” traces the origins and progression of adoption laws, interrogates the underlying logics of modern adoption laws, and explores the lived experiences of international, interracial Chinese American adoptee women through oral histories. Through these methodologies, it is revealed that the United States settler colonial project imagines international, interracial Chinese American adoptees as an evergreen and replaceable labor force that can fulfil the myth of the nuclear family, carry out the logics of the settler colonial state, offer extractable labor for the settler colonial state, and produce the next generation of laborers. Legal violence against international, interracial Chinese American adoptees is pervasive and affects adoptee’s access to basic needs and their ability to exist within the settler colonial project. Laws concerning international, interracial Chinese American adoptees operate on settler colonial logics, labor extraction, and disposability rather than creating conditions in which children’s basic needs are met and material conditions are to a high standard of care.


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