The Scholar and Feminist Online
Published by The Barnard Center for Research on Women
www.barnard.edu/sfonline

Issue 5.2
Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance
Spring 2007

A Flickering Motherhood
Korean Birthmothers' Internet Community
Hosu Kim

Who could have imagined the impact of the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City on women's lives in Korea? And yet, only two hours after the World Trade Center fell, the following message concerning the welfare of a Korean baby who had been adopted by a US family appeared on a Korean Internet community message board.

Date: 2001.09.12 12:07

Subject: I am worried

The Twin Towers in New York were completely destroyed by terrorists. It was unbelievable. Some thousands of people lost their lives. I heard a few Koreans were killed. What if one of the numerous victims was related to my baby? . . . What if he was my baby's father? . . . I shouldn't think this way. The dream of my baby last night might tell me something, though. I wish I had contact information for her. I know my baby went to Minnesota but do not know where exactly. This worries me a lot. Maybe I should just think positively.

The Web site—아이를 입양보낸 엄마들의 슬픈 사랑이야기—provides a forum for Korean birthmothers and, as its translated title makes clear, a place where these women can share "The Sad Love Stories of Mothers Who Sent Their Babies Away for Adoption." This article explores the ways in which contemporary Korean women who've given their babies up for adoption use Internet technology to "virtually mother," that is, to mediate and negotiate the loss of both their children and their ideals of motherhood.

This Web site for mothers whose babies were sent away to adoption, was created, independently of any social service agency, by a birthmother in 2001, and quickly became a space where such women—usually young and unmarried and seen as transgressing both the social norms of feminine sexuality and middle-class, heterosexual, male-centered ideals of motherhood—can gather, speak out, process the complex and ambivalent feelings surrounding their losses, and organize.

I. History of Korea's International Adoption and the Emerging Figure of the Birthmother

Korea has been known as a key supplier of children for international adoptions since the Korean War (1950-1953). In that time, an estimated 250,000 Korean-born children have been adopted by foreign families, three-quarters of whom have come to the United States, while the rest reside in Western Europe. Initiated as part of a war relief effort by humanitarian groups, the practice of international adoption has continued to the present day as a strategy to solve social problems, such as poverty, which is often identified in adoption discourse as a reason for Korea's participation, and illegitimacy, which rarely is. Yet, Korean social work literature makes clear the connection between economics and women's sexual lives: increasingly throughout the 1970s, children from extremely poor or from single-mother households were given over for international adoption.[1] Since then, the number of Korean children involved in international adoption increased every year through the late 1980s, and constituted, at its peak, almost 30 percent of all children involved in the transnational adoption.[2]

In 1988, during preparations for the Seoul Olympics, the unscrupulousness of Korea's adoption practices was brought to the fore by the US and European media, which accused the Korean government of exporting their babies for foreign currency.[3] In response, the Korean government promptly decreased the number of Korean children placed in foreign adoption by encouraging domestic adoption; nevertheless, the number of foreign adoptions remains at nearly 2,000 per year, still higher than the number of children placed in domestic adoptions.

At the same time that these adoption practices earned international criticism and became a matter of public controversy, the first cohort of Korean children adopted in the 1950s and 1960s were coming of age and returning to Korea. During their visits, many expressed an interest in searching for their Korean families and turned not only to governmental agencies, but also to the popular media to facilitate their search. Consequently, numerous television have featured the stories of adoptees searching for and reuniting with their birth families, particularly their birthmothers. The birthmother has become the ultimate figure to whom the adoptee is expected to return. Thus, the figure of the birthmother, whose historic place in adoption discourse was on the economic and/or moral fringes of society, takes on new (and newly important) significance.

Given this narrative, contemporary Korean adoption discourse is often reduced to the adoptee's search and reunion, with emphasis on the adoptee's success. This "success" relies on a certain portrayal of the birthmother, who typically figures in these shows as someone who was victimized by poverty and misfortune. And while a woman's separation from her husband due to death or divorce is a common trope in these stories, women who had their children out of wedlock are notably absent. Adoption is thus constructed as a sad but necessary event, usually the best option for a child born into unfortunate but unavoidable circumstances. Upon the return of the adoptee, then, the birthmother is portrayed as if she had performed the highest, most selfless act of maternal love by choosing adoption for her baby. The reunion not only resolves the tensions and sufferings of both parties, but also creates an immediate bond between mother and child. They live, or so the story goes, happily ever after.

II. www.café.daum.net/adopteesmam

In the first year of the The Sad Love Stories of Mothers Who Sent Their Babies Away for Adoption site, an estimated 100 birthmothers signed up as members and actively participated on the message boards. More than ten messages were posted daily, and the conversation developed into a variety of on- and off-line activities, such as regular chats and community meetings. The membership incrementally increased over time, reaching 570 by November 2005.[4] This Web site consists of various sections: Introduction; Counseling; Let's Talk; Unsent Letters; Stories at Your Heart; Your Thoughts About Adoption; Adoption Is a Pleasure; and A Picture Display Room. For the purposes of this analysis, I focus primarily on posts found in the following areas: Counseling, which provides an opportunity for women to discuss issues related to their pregnancy and their reasons for deciding upon adoption; Stories at Your Heart, a place to tell untold stories; Unsent Letters, where women can write to their babies; and Let's Talk, which allows members to communicate with one another.

The Web site's appeal to these women is not surprising. Sharing their experience helps to release the sense of loneliness, abandonment, and social ostracization that many of the birthmothers feel. The following post captures a birthmother's response after she discovered and joined in this listserv.

ID: 슬픈맘으로 (With Sad Heart)

Date: 2004.06.26 22:24

Subject: I feel like I have a secret friend here

It has taken me a while to introduce myself . . . I got pregnant, went through pregnancy, gave birth and put my baby up for adoption all alone. All the way through I did not have anyone to turn to and get counseling. Since I started to write here, I have felt much better . . . I feel like I have found a friendship.

Ann Anagnost argues that the "InterNet listserv embodies new forms of sociality and community as technologies of the intimate public sphere," an observation that applies well to "The Sad Love Stories" Web site.[5] Grappling with losses that often cannot (or are not allowed to) be articulated, the young women not only find a venue to express their feelings and their wishes for their babies, but also build a sense of belonging within the same social framework that made them feel excluded.

It is here that a sense of "virtual mothering" emerges, a performance by the birthmothers of adopted children that invites us to consider how traumatized bodies interact with Internet technology, thereby creating a new notion of body and subjectivity. For these women, the bodily experience of motherhood is often a distressing one. First, most contributors to "Sad Love Stories" suffer emotional and/or physical pain around their conception and pregnancy: The majority are young, unmarried women whose relationship with the father of their children has ended before (and many times because of) the child's imminent arrival. Even more traumatic, a few women suggested that their pregnancy was a result of sexual assaults by boyfriends, male friends, or strangers.[6]

Second, mothering is an embodied practice, both physically and emotionally, from the spiked hormonal activity of pregnancy, to the bodily trauma of labor, to the complex corporeal interactions—breastfeeding, caressing, diaper changing, playing—by which a mother and child bond. As a result, mothering creates a physical and social relationship with a child.[7]

The "Sad Love Stories" community, however, is a site where organic maternal bodies do not respond to their children, but instead interface with machines, configuring birthmothers who are, in Gilles Deleuze's terminology, part of "machinic assemblages." Johnston explains that "the assemblage is not opposed to either mechanical machines or organic bodies but encompasses both. Where bodies and machines enter into machinic relationships, that is, become parts of an assemblage."[8] In machinic assemblages, perceptions are freed from human bodies and distributed across "a heterogeneous assembly of brains, bodies, artifacts, and other external structures."[9] The birthmother, then, un/consciously performs her mothering through an interface with Internet technology.

In order to conceive bodies on the Internet, bodies that transcend the human-centered notion of the body, I draw upon Brian Massumi's formulation of bodily affect. According to Massumi, the two important aspects of the body are that it moves and feels. Affect is incipient, never fully realized, and therefore always potentially "embodied in purely automatic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things."[10] His notion of affect treats the body not in terms of a predetermined subjectivity, but rather as an emergent, future-oriented quality of incipience. Massumi's affect and body help to explain movements with no end and the circulation of performing bodies on the Internet. Drawing upon John Johnston and Massumi, I contend that the ways in which a "Sad Love Stories" woman becomes a "mother"—as opposed to merely a birthmother—is a collective process of bodies and machines, a machinic assemblage that has affective qualities.[11] Affects, of course, include emotions and trauma and its bodily residues, but also unrealized, unactivated, incipient energy emerging from the porous skin and distributed into discrete bodies, matters, and artifacts across different times and places. As Argyle and Shields eloquently put it, "memory traces, called up by the body, parts of the body themselves, allow us to experience with our physical selves . . . [in the meantime, we] deposit our physical bits along the pathways of the BBS."[12]

The memory and mourning of birthmothers, their virtual mothering, is always staged in the "here and now" of Internet temporality, where we "bear witness in a live process so that a listener become(s) 'a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event.'"[13] The Internet community, the site of that "shared and participatory act of telling and listening," therefore functions as a venue for "the transmission of traumatic memory."[14]

III. Performing Motherhood

ID: 바다사랑 (love for sea)

Date: 2002.02.15 20:06

Subject: My dear son, Moon Hyunook

Hyunook Ah, How have you been doing? I, a mother, whenever I miss my child, or want to see him, I come here. Because this is where you are. I just finished work and here I am . . . I have to work overtime for the next three days. But I will come and see you here. I love you. You are more precious than my life.

Each woman entering "The Sad Love Story" community is asked to choose her own screen name. Often, she chooses a nickname associated with the baby, such as the baby's date of birth (DOB) or the baby's intended name. Many names[15] embody a woman's sadness, guilt, shame and love towards her baby: 나쁜 엄마 (bad mother); 슬픈엄마 (sad mother); 슬픈 나 (sad self); 민영엄마 (Minyoung's mommy); 부끄러운 엄마 (shameful mommy); 해솔아 미안해 (I am sorry, Haesol); 호석사랑 (love for Hosuk); 진성사랑 (love for Jinsung); 보이지 않는 사랑 (unseen love); 너무 늦어버렸어 (it is too late); 가슴에 풀리지 않는 멍울 (a smoldering knot in her chest).

In "Unsent Letters," women ask their babies about their health; they tell them not to cry too hard, to eat and sleep well. The somewhat banal imaginings about their babies' post-adoption, everyday lives are often flooded with undiluted, excessive feelings of guilt, shame, regret, sadness, pain, loss, anxiety, ambivalence, and restlessness, as well as explosive anger toward: society; the unplanned pregnancy; the birthfather; the mother herself; and the baby.

These postings read as the birthmothers' simultaneous attempts to remember and to forget, to connect with and to disconnect from her baby. Drawing upon Freud's theory of melancholia, one sees how traumas surrounding both the lost child and the loss of a maternal role prevent birthmothers from mourning. Instead, they fall into the melancholic's tendency to impoverish the ego through self-denigration and resentment, as displayed in the following accounts:

ID: BYORI

Date: 2002.07.27 02:45

Subject: My dearest son

I miss you so much. No one would know how much I miss you. I would like to die, but because of you, my son, I can't even contain the thought. I know it is stupid. But I don't think people outside the world welcome me. So . . . I am living with a heavy sense of guilt. Even if I smile, it is not a real smile. No one understands. (SIGH). I wish the wind would blow me away and take me to my son, Byori . . . Then, I could kneel down in front of him and apologize for my wrongdoing. Can we go back in time?

Another posting reads:

ID: 12월09일 (December 9th)

Date: 2005.07.19 23:26

Subject: My baby

My lovely baby
I miss you so much that I might go crazy
My heart feels like exploding
I would rather go crazy; then I wouldn't have any memory of you
I wish I had no thought of you
Tears come along whenever I think of you several times a day
My heart aches

In the first, the birthmother's unfulfilled mothering drives her to thoughts of suicide, yet, it's the very idea that she is a mother that keeps her alive. In the second, the birthmother invites amnesia to overcome her emotional devastation. The women yearn to be free from their children as much as they want to keep (or be reunited with) them.

The child's birthday is, not surprisingly, a day marked by particularly keen ambivalence. The following string of posts—a virtual birthday party for an absent baby, as it were—offers a moving account of how these women are communally consumed by loss and, at the same time, provide each other (perhaps the only) comfort for that grief.

ID: 진짜푸우 (Real Pooh)

Date: 2002.01.29 13:03

Today is the third birthday of my son, SeHoon. Please let's celebrate! Until last year, I was devastated and drank a lot. I have decided not to do that again. My SeHoon, born to a difficult situation. However, I believe, he is living happily with adoptive parents now . . . Please congratulate!

Reply 1.

ID: 재원

Date: 2002.01.30 00:46

I am happy for your son's third birthday. My baby is almost three too. I can't even imagine how much she must have grown by now. I hope to see you at some point in person. Congratulations again!

Reply 2.

ID: 벼리

Date 2002.01.29 18:22

CONGRATULATIONS! I am sure he is growing bright and happy like snow outside. I hope you are doing well. Cheers, someday you will be able to see your son, SeHoon.

Reply 3.

ID: 바다사랑

Date: 2002. 01.30 20:37

Sorry for a belated congratulation. It's been already three years? Dear SeHoon, Happy birthday to you. [three smiley faces] I hope you grow healthy and brave.

Via the Internet, these mothers build a collective sense of mothering. They circulate the social and emotional quality of conventional motherhood: the anxieties and worries, the celebration and pride. Through these flickering distributions, they reclaim the psychic and the corporeal identity of motherhood in the global spacelessness of a virtual community.

IV. The Distributed Unconscious of Performing Mothers

The virtual mothering of Korean birthmothers is embedded in the trauma of adoption. The "repetitive, involuntary, obsessive" accounts of dreams, incorporation, and fantasies of reunion are characteristic of what Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith have described as the convoluted relationship between trauma and memory.[16] The unconscious topography of birthmothers suggests the birthmothers' entangled relationship with loss—loss of the baby, as well as the ideal of motherhood—and thus constitutes a complex, contradictory subjectivity.

Cathy Caruth argues that the traumatic event is an experience that the subject witnesses but cannot easily remember, if at all. Central to this conception of trauma is its unknown, emergent nature: "trauma repeats itself and demands a belated experience."[17] In this instance, the women's unspeakable losses haunt them through various processes, including incorporation, reunion fantasies, and dreams, as in the following account:

ID: 정환맘

Date: 2001.11.11 23:54

How are you all doing? Today, I bought a rainbow rice cake [which a baby is supposed to eat on the 100th day of its life]. As I ate it in order to celebrate, instead of my baby, tears came along.

Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok argue that incorporation occurs when there is "no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming it, after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic secret":

Everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject . . . the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person.[18]

By swallowing a rainbow rice cake, the birthmother "buries" her living baby in her body, effectively turning herself into a "crypt." This act of incorporation brings two incompatible lost love objects—the baby and the ideal of traditional motherhood—into coexistence within her body. Anne Anlin Cheng further focuses on the consequences of "swallowing" on the development of a melancholic subjectivity. She emphasizes that the melancholic subject's ambivalence continues after swallowing the object that inspires not just love, but also profound resentment. This resentment leads to "the multiple layers of denial and exclusion that the melancholic must exercise in order to maintain this elaborate structure of loss but-not-the-loss."[19]

Numerous women on The Sad Love Stories site manage to survive this life-death crisis by entertaining the fantasy of return and reunion with the baby. As Cheng suggests, the birthmothers' losses sometimes are disguised as fictions of possession. In other words, the fantasy relies on a fictionalized narrative of adoption where the baby is studying "abroad at a little bit younger age compared to others" or "traveling right now." Both accounts illustrate the denial of loss by suggesting an inevitable "homecoming" and reunion between mother and child.

The most prevalent fantasy of reunion defers the birthmothers' motherhood until later in her life. Now, the story goes, they are too young, too poor, too unmarried to raise their child:

I am becoming a mother whom my baby will not feel ashamed of. So I should not drink. Until the time we meet again, I will live earnestly. I am going to study hard and enter college.

This young, unmarried, uneducated woman expresses a determination to live up to ideal of womanhood and motherhood. The vast majority of posts that express such hope for a future reunion suggest that the birthmothers' subjectivity is built on "this elaborate structure of loss but-not-the-loss" through the deferral—rather than renunciation—of their motherhood.

The chronicling of the birthmother's dreams further testify to the trauma and ambivalence surrounding her child's adoption. Caruth described the traumatic moment as "an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena."[20] Adoption as experienced by many of these women—itself a series of violent events: the ostracization precipitated by a socially unaccepted pregnancy, the separation from the baby at birth, a second separation at adoption—is never fully experienced, and thus returns in the form of dreams. Consider:

ID: 혀니

Date: 2002.05.18 23:31

I saw you in my dream not long ago. You are really sick. I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep thinking what if my baby is really sick.

ID: 보이지 않는 사랑

Date: 2005.06.10 06:13

I was holding my Haemin and feeling so happy in my dream a few days ago, you know my baby called me "UMMA" there . . . I wish I stayed in my dream . . . I woke up. I saw myself trying to fall asleep once more to stay with my baby, which made me really sad.

Though both dreams repeat the women's traumas by inflicting a sense of guilt and anguish, they constitute the very conditions for the birthmothers' survival by transforming them into virtual but also good—i.e., caring, worrying, attentive—mothers.

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]
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