Kim and Ahmed

"Being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached" (Ahmed et al., 1, emphasis original).

I begin here with this early quote from the introduction to Uprootings/Regroundings because the readings for this week seem to be pointing us towards an understanding that "home" is far more complex than how we may have conceived of it previously. Uprootings/Regroundings makes this work central in its investigation into the ways that concepts of home and migration can problematically "entail the displacement of others from their homes," repeating a cycle of "spatialized relations of power" (6). As Ahmed et al. state in the closing of the introduction, "In gathering this work together, we seek to trouble simplified claims concerning the nature of home and migration in contemporary lives and worlds" (15). In grappling with the idea of "home," and its ties to mobility/movement/migration, I attempted to work through the problematic relationship between our considerations of what it means to "be at home" and what it means to "displace" others from their home. More broadly, I thought a lot about the ways in which the subject is both constructed by the sense of belonging to others (in a way, being at home with them) and through the sense of belonging to oneself (perhaps by knowing, understanding, and articulating one's identities).

In her book, Adopted Territories, Eleana J. Kim finds the same problematic of understanding the self in relation to others and in relation to place as being central to the difficulties with which Korean adoptees must negotiate in understanding both themselves and their relations to others. This struggle for understanding the self in relation to others is a very important focus of Kim's book, which situates "Korean adoption and the emergence of the Korean adult adoptee counterpublic within the political and economic transformations of the late twentieth century" (38). In relation to Ahmed, Kim displaces our commonly held consensus about the meanings and understandings of "home" and belonging. I think that it is important to understand that both of these works are challenging liberal notions of individualism and mobility, which are necessary in the process of our conceptions of self-making and self-knowing. In other words, the more I can move away from home and come back; the more I can relate to my family of origin; the more I can use economic resources accrued by family, the more liberally Me I can be and belong, both to my family and to myself. This point is a focus in Kim: "Adoptee's daily confrontations with the problematics of belonging suggest that dominant epistemes of personhood and self-making–kinship, race, and nation–continue to be powerfully salient despite the breakdown of biogenetic definitions of family, the defunct myth of the biological basis of race, and the predicted erosion of power of the nation-state under globalization" (130).

Importantly, I think that these questions raised by Ahmed and Kim are necessary to our class' contestations of the liberal subject and the role of the global in our displacement of the West from our ostensible feminist interventions. As Ahmed notes, "We take as a model those feminist studies that have been concerned with the intersectionality of race, class, gender and sexuality in the making and theorizing of transnational domains…These approaches have laid the groundwork for our own thinking about feminist and post-colonial interventions in the realm of the transnational and global, suggesting both that the nature of uprootings and regroundings are linked to such differences and that a focus on these differences requires new ways of theorizing home and migration" (3). It is in our rethinking of home that allows us to reorient ourselves to understandings of (queerer) homes; homes built through bounding outside of familial ties, where we belong more completely to ourselves and to others.