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.
Transnational Adoption is becoming an important form of global family formation in the U.S. and European societies. It creates relationships between sending and adoptive parties that cross national, racial, and cultural boundaries. While there is global recognition of this practice, little attention has been given to the sending parties, i.e., birthparents and the sending countries. Noting a long history of South Korea's involvement in the practice of transnational adoption as a key sending country, my dissertation examines the recent social phenomenon of the emergence of Korean birthmothers in Korean popular media, specifically television and the Internet. Central to my dissertation is an analysis of the intricate processes through which the figure of the birthmother is mediated and performed as a mother, which I call virtual mothering. Virtual mothering, which I am employing as an analytical as well as a methodological framework, illuminates the discursive and affective domain in which Korean birthmothers' motherhood is rendered intelligible. This analysis offers a critical understanding of Korea's adoption discourse with the further aim of facilitating mourning for the losses involved in this fifty-year-long practice of transnational adoption.
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.
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