Myong Petersen, Lene, PhD Student

By Stine Adrian on 27 Aug | 0 comments

Lene Myong Petersen holds a MA in comparative literature from the University of Copenhagen. She is currently a PhD candidate at The Danish School of Education, and her dissertation is an interdisciplinary, qualitative study of Korean adoptees raised by white, Danish parents. The dissertation explores questions of identity, kinship, and racialization.

RESEARCH PROJECT
Discursive Economies of Intimacy: Transnational Adoption, Race, and Sexuality

As part of the GEXcel fellowship program I will work on a project that revolves around romantic/sexual intimacy. Drawing from the oral histories collected for my dissertation (work in progress) I wish to explore and  sophisticate understandings of sexualized desire as primarily organized around gender (and sometimes class) difference.

A variety of categories inform and produce desire. And likewise, desire articulates, transforms and fixates a variety of social categories, differences and hierarchies. My ambition is to think sexualized desire as an always and already racialized social category and as a doing of embodied social relations. My primary focus is to relate this to the lives and experiences of transnational adoptees.

I will, however, also employ the question of romantic/sexualized intimacies as a lens through which we may expand and qualify understandings of racial and ethnic formation in Denmark.