Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering

by Hosu Kim

This book illuminates the hidden history of South Korean birth mothers involved in the 60-year-long practice of transnational adoption. The author presents a performance-based ethnography of maternity homes, a television search show, an internet forum, and an oral history collection to develop the concept of virtual mothering, a theoretical framework in which the birth mothers' experiences of separating from, and then reconnecting with, the child, as well as their painful,ambivalent narratives of adoption losses, are rendered, felt and registered. In this, the author refuses a universal notion of motherhood. Her critique of transnational adoption and its relentless effects on birth mothers’ lives points to the everyday, normalized, gendered violence against working-class, poor, single mothers in South Korea’s modern nation-state development and illuminates the biopolitical functions of transnational adoption in managing an "excess" population. Simultaneously, her creative analysis reveals a counter-public, and counter-history, proposing the collective grievances of birth mothers.

Genres: Nonfiction

258 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2018

Reviews

[Terri Dreismeier · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I continue to come to understand my son’s death from suicide, delving into the past history of transnational adoption has opened my eyes and perspective towards both Korea and the US relationship in this regard. My son was adopted from Korea and tragically took his life at the age of 22. Stemming from abandonment and trauma the first 8 months of his life, I was at least able to find some context and reasons from the stories and lived experiences and narratives.

[KT · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good examination of South Korea's family planning policy, which was initiated under the aegis of foreign aid organisations as part of its postwar recovery, and provides the ideological mechanism by which certain children and families were rendered excess population, unworthy of protection or care, as well as the role of foreign aid organisations in orphan relief efforts, which combined formed the practical and affective basis for a humanitarian market of excess Korean children
The child welfare initiatives via transnational adoption and the family welfare policy via family planning, both originated in the convergence of the USA's Cold War-era geopolitical and economic interests and South Korea's national security interests, thus paving the way to institutionalise what began as an emergency orphan relief program to develop into a permanent institution for child welfare