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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.

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PART I: UNBECOMING MOTHERS: HISTORY OF GENDERED VIOLENCE 1. Secure the Nation; Secure the Family 2. Maternity Homes and the Birthplace of the Virtual Mother PART II: RECONNECTION: VIRTUAL MOTHERING 3. Television Mothers: Birth Mothers Lost and Found in the Search-and-Reunion Narrative 4. Performing Virtual Mothers and Forging Virtual Kinship 5. "I am a Mother but not a Mother": The Paradox of Virtual Mothering

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Hosu Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, with an affiliation in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA.

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