Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea
Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea

Author: Hosu Kim

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 113753852X

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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.

Meeting Once More
Meeting Once More

Author: Elise M. Prébin

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-05-06

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0814760856

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Examines the impact of adoptees on their birth country and birth families A great mobilization began in South Korea in the 1990s: adult transnational adoptees began to return to their birth country and meet for the first time with their birth parents—sometimes in televised encounters which garnered high ratings. What makes the case of South Korea remarkable is the sheer scale of the activity that has taken place around the adult adoptees' return, and by extension the national significance that has been accorded to these family meetings. Informed by the author’s own experience as an adoptee and two years of ethnographic research in Seoul, as well as an analysis of the popular television program "I Want to See This Person Again," which reunites families, Meeting Once More sheds light on an understudied aspect of transnational adoption: the impact of adoptees on their birth country, and especially on their birth families. The volume offers a complex and fascinating contribution to the study of new kinship models, migration, and the anthropology of media, as well as to the study of South Korea.

International Korean Adoption
International Korean Adoption

Author: Kathleen Ja Sook Bergquist

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1136441794

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Discover the roots of international transracial adoption International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice explores the long history of international transracial adoption. Scholars present the expert multidisciplinary perspectives and up-to-date research on this most significant and longstanding form of international child welfare practice. Viewpoints and research are discussed from the academic disciplines of psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, social work, and anthropology. The chapters examine sociohistorical background, the forming of new families, reflections on Korean adoption, birth country perspectives, global perspectives, implications for practice, and archival, historical, and current resources on Korean adoption. International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice provides fresh insight into the origins, development, and institutionalization of Korean adoption. Through original research and personal accounts, this revealing text explores how Korean adoptees and their families fit into their family roles—and offers clear perspectives on adoption as child welfare practice. Global implications and politics, as well as the very personal experiences are examined in detail. This source is a one-of-a-kind look into the full spectrum of information pertaining to Korean adoption. Topics in International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice include: adoption from the Korean perspective historical origins of Korean adoption in the United States adjustments of young adult adoptees marketing to choosy adopters ethnic identity perspectives on the importance of race and culture in parenting birth mothers’ perspectives sociological approach to race and identity representations of adoptees in Korean popular culture adoption in Australia and the Netherlands much, much more International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice is illuminating reading for adoptees, adoptive parents, practitioners, educators, students, and any child welfare professional.

Disrupting Kinship
Disrupting Kinship

Author: Kimberly D. McKee

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2019-03-02

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0252051122

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Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.

Adopted Territory
Adopted Territory

Author: Eleana J. Kim

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-11-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0822346958

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An ethnography examining the history of Korean adoption to West, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization.

Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption
Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption

Author: Jessica Walton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1351132296

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This book investigates the experiences of South Koreans adopted into Western families and the complexity of what it means to "feel identity" beyond what is written in official adoption files. Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption is based on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and interviews with adult Korean adoptees from the United States, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden. It seeks to probe beneath the surface of what is "known" and examines identity as an embodied process of making that which is "unknown" into something that can be meaningfully grasped and felt. Furthermore, drawing on the author’s own experiences as a transnational, transracial Korean adoptee, this book analyses the racial and cultural negotiations of "whiteness" and "Korean-ness" in the lives of adoptees and the blurriness which results in-between. Highlighting the role of memory and the body in the formation of identities, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Korean Studies, Ethnicity Studies and Anthropology as well as Asian culture and society more generally.

Reframing Transracial Adoption
Reframing Transracial Adoption

Author: Kristi Brian

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2012-05-11

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1439901856

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Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family. Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called "colorblind" adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses. Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.

The Global ‘Orphan’ Adoption System
The Global ‘Orphan’ Adoption System

Author: Lee Kyung-eun

Publisher: 펜립

Published: 2021-12-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 8996879886

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S. Korea is one of the major sending countries in the “transnational experiment of child care”, invented by the human community after World War II. Among all sending countries of adoptees, S. Korea is actually the country where the practice of inter-country adoption had its genesis. The fundamental source of power which sustains inter-country adoption practices is, as Dr. Nigel Cantwell mentions in his endorsement, the pervasive “glowing image” of adoption. In other words, the dominant perception of adoption as salvation is a key obstacle which prevents a more accurate mapping of the reality of inter-country adoption. In her new book, Dr. Kyung-eun Lee wields international laws as her surgical blade in order to dissect the practice of inter-country adoption from S. Korea. She uncovers the fact that the S. Korean government and private adoption agencies as partners have made “orphans” systematically, widely, but ironically within legal boundaries. As a result, adoptees’ human rights have been violated on a massive scale. Dr. Lee points out the negligence of the international society which was aware of Korea’s failure in complying with the international legal system. She reminds the international community, especially those of the receiving countries, of their responsibility to demand that sending countries such as S. Korea enhance their legal systems in order to protect child rights. Growing requests from adult international adoptees to find their identities and information on their adoption reveals much evidence that adoptees’ rights were violated by the inter-country adoption system. Many countries have begun to investigate past abuses and malpractices within the adoption system, and are finding a way to recover adoptees’ rights from the unethical and illegal practices which have taken place in the past, and which are still inherent within the system. This book should serve as invaluable guidance to government officials, legal experts, researchers and adoption-related stakeholders who wish to transform the current global “orphan” adoption system into the alternative care system for the best interests of the child.

Cultures of Transnational Adoption
Cultures of Transnational Adoption

Author: Toby Alice Volkman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2005-06-10

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0822386925

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During the 1990s, the number of children adopted from poorer countries to the more affluent West grew exponentially. Close to 140,000 transnational adoptions occurred in the United States alone. While in an earlier era, adoption across borders was assumed to be straightforward—a child traveled to a new country and stayed there—by the late twentieth century, adoptees were expected to acquaint themselves with the countries of their birth and explore their multiple identities. Listservs, Web sites, and organizations creating international communities of adoptive parents and adoptees proliferated. With contributors including several adoptive parents, this unique collection looks at how transnational adoption creates and transforms cultures. The cultural experiences considered in this volume raise important questions about race and nation; about kinship, biology, and belonging; and about the politics of the sending and receiving nations. Several essayists explore the images and narratives related to transnational adoption. Others examine the recent preoccupation with “roots” and “birth cultures.” They describe a trip during which a group of Chilean adoptees and their Swedish parents traveled “home” to Chile, the “culture camps” attended by thousands of young-adult Korean adoptees whom South Korea is now eager to reclaim as “overseas Koreans,” and adopted children from China and their North American parents grappling with the question of what “Chinese” or “Chinese American” identity might mean. Essays on Korean birth mothers, Chinese parents who adopt children within China, and the circulation of children in Brazilian families reveal the complexities surrounding adoption within the so-called sending countries. Together, the contributors trace the new geographies of kinship and belonging created by transnational adoption. Contributors. Lisa Cartwright, Claudia Fonseca, Elizabeth Alice Honig, Kay Johnson, Laurel Kendall, Eleana Kim, Toby Alice Volkman, Barbara Yngvesson

To Save the Children of Korea
To Save the Children of Korea

Author: Arissa H Oh

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-06-17

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0804795339

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“The important . . . largely unknown story of American adoption of Korean children since the Korean War . . . with remarkably extensive research and great verve.” —Charles K. Armstrong, Columbia University Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race “GI babies,” it became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, To Save the Children of Korea shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial US-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government policies, and nationalisms. Korean adoption served as a kind of template as international adoption began, in the late 1960s, to expand to new sending and receiving countries. Ultimately, Oh demonstrates that although Korea was not the first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the place where organized, systematic international adoption was born. “Absolutely fascinating.” —Giulia Miller, Times Higher Education “ Gracefully written. . . . Oh shows us how domestic politics and desires are intertwined with geopolitical relationships and aims.” —Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University “Poignant, wide-ranging analysis and research.” —Kevin Y. Kim, Canadian Journal of History “Illuminates how the spheres of ‘public’ and ‘private,’ ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ are deeply imbricated and complicate American ideologies about family, nation, and race.” —Kira A. Donnell, Adoption & Culture