Hosu Kim, "A Flickering Motherhood Korean Birthmothers' Internet Community" (Page 5 of 5)

V. Conclusion

In this article, I consider "The Sad Love Stories of Mothers Who Sent Their Babies Away for Adoption" (아이를  입양보낸  엄마들의  슬픈  사랑이야기), an unprecedented Internet-based community of Korean birthmothers who have given up their children for foreign adoption. Although their children are no longer physically present in their lives, these birthmothers perform as virtual mothers by sharing stories of their unspeakable losses, thus building a sense of solidarity with one another and through the site. I called this particular mothering virtual to capture its non-traditional nature.

My concept of virtual mothering is grounded in the notion of 'machinic assemblage', i.e., a construction of organic bodies and mechanical machines. This epistemological and ontological shift from a human-centered paradigm opens the possibility of a new body politics in this age of global teletechnology. Virtual mothering, strictly speaking, refers to becoming of a mother through the interface with computer technology, and emphasize performativity. In other words, the bodies and subjectivities of birthmothers are not manifest, but always already in the process of configuration through their performance. This notion offers a new direction in which to imagine a maternal body and motherhood, extending beyond the binary logic of the social constructivism of sex/gender. 'Virtual mothering', therefore, provides a discursive framework in which the motherhood of birthmothers and of adoptive mothers is understood not in terms of lack but rather in terms of a continuum of mothering.

This virtual community demands a critical examination of the practice of transnational adoption and women's sexuality in a transnational feminist framework. As birthmothers' accounts indicate, there is a high correlation between 'illegitimate' babies and the decision to give up a child for adoption. In other words, Korean women relinquish their babies to maintain the middle class, heterosexual norms of the family in their society. Meanwhile, most adoptive mothers in the U.S. and Western Europe desire to acquire these "social orphans" to fulfill their fantasy of the heterosexual family. This stark divide in biological, cultural, political resources pits these two groups of women in opposition to one another, creating a political vacuum, rather than a critical dialogue on women's reproductive rights that crosses the boundaries of race, class, sexuality and nationality. The struggles of Korean contemporary birthmothers documented at this Internet website uncovers a crisis in the feminist politics surrounding women's reproductive rights and reveals a practice stratified by the logic of transnational capitalism and the racial restructuring of family formation in the "first world".

In closing, how might we imagine a feminist framework in which birthmothers and adoptive mothers recognize the complex dynamics of obstacles and privileges that bind them, and yet to push forward to build a non-exclusionary feminist activism for women's re/productive rights? I offer this posting by a birthmother who identifies herself as "I love you, Jaewhan"

(재환아사랑한다)
date: 2005.09.20 04:41

I used to visit here and left my message to you everyday. I am thinking of you less and less these days. I did not forget about you. You are always deep inside of me. But if I start thinking of you again, it gives you a hard time so I am afraid. Am I not a decent person?

Utterly aware of the social stigma against unmarried mothers in Korea, this virtual birthmother, along with scores of cyberspace women at the site, display their resilience and disrupt the seamless circulation of family, citizenship, and motherhood in the trans/nationalistic discourse of re/production. The birthmothers may leave the Web, but their traces of mothering become archived bodies of performing birthmothers, ready to join bodies in the future, marking an embodied (web) site of resistance.

Endnotes

1. J. Kim, Mee-hon-mo ui daehahn Yeonku (A study of unwed mothers), unpublished master's thesis, Ewha Women's University, 1974. [Return to text]

2. Sara Kane, "The movement of children for international adoption: An epistemological perspective," The Social Science Journal 31, no. 4 (1993): 323-339. [Return to text]

3. Matthew Rothschild, "Baby for sale. South Koreans make them, Americans buy them," Progressive (Jan 1988): 18-23. [Return to text]

4. Yet, this number does not indicate the actual number of birthmothers who actively visit the site. About half of the registered members were one-time visitors. Excluding them, the site had about 300 people, ranging in age from 11 to 55 at the end of November 2005. Based on voluntary self-identification claims, this listserv currently has about 100 birthmothers, 3 birthfathers, 70 (prospective) adoptive parents, and 13 adoptees; the rest (117) are categorized as others. [Return to text]

5. Ann Anagnost, "Maternal Labor in a Transnational Circuit," in Consuming Motherhood, ed. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 145. [Return to text]

6. ID: ILMARE; ID: 닉네임. [Return to text]

7. Barbara K. Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: Norton, 1989). [Return to text]

8. John Johnston, "Machinic Assemblage," Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (1999): 27-48, 28. [Return to text]

9. Ibid., 43. [Return to text]

10. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 25. [Return to text]

11. John Johnston, "Machinic Assemblage"; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). [Return to text]

12. K. Argyle and Rob Shields, "Is there a body in the Net?" in Cultures of InterNet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, ed. Rob Shields (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), 69. [Return to text]

13. Dori Laub, "Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening," in Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 57. [Return to text]

14. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 167. [Return to text]

15. Some adopt random nouns—e.g. 닉네임 (id)—or a string of English characters with no concrete meaning in English. Often those jumbled strings of English characters are decoded into a Korean name or another significant word when the computer keyboard shifts to Korean character sets. For example, "gywjd" becomes (hyojung; 효정) in Korean character sets. This is a site of deterritorializing English character from its own signification; it creates a Korean name with an easy shift-key of a different language set, while maintaining facile anonymity of the participant. [Return to text]

16. Marianne Hirsch and Valeri Smith, "Feminism and Cultural Memory," Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 1-19. [Return to text]

17. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experiences (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), [Return to text]7.

18. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 130-131. [Return to text]

19. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9. [Return to text]

20. Caruth, Unclaimed Experiences. [Return to text]