Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering by Hosu Kim (review)

Research within adoption studies initially focused primarily on the practice of adoption and its outcomes. The scholars producing early adoption-related research, mostly within the disciplines of social work and psychology, were often adoption social workers or adoptive parents themselves. As a response to research that seemed to replicate power differentials across the “adoption constellation,” critical adoption scholars have instead produced scholarship that reveals the structural and social processes embedded in its practice. Using interdisciplinary approaches from feminist, postcolonial, geopolitical, biopolitical, critical race, and queer theory, critical adoption scholars have sought to complicate widely accepted notions of family, kinship, race, identity, humanitarianism, citizenship, and transnationalism. From within this emergent field of study, Hosu Kim’s book Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering importantly fills a glaring void. Although notable scholarship within the field has illuminated the geopolitics, structural inequalities, and gendered violence that render children adoptable, and has given a voice to the lived experiences of those adopted, there was a lack of scholastic inquiry on birth mothers. Kim’s “discursive-material-affective” (15) examination of four different sites— maternity homes, television search-and-reunion shows, a birth mothers’ internet forum, and an oral history collection—breaks new ground, challenging what she calls the “two divergent figures” (3) of birth mothers in South Korea. Although her research outlines the processes by which birth mothers become both legally erased and socially dead, citing Foucault’s heterotopia, Kim cites