South Korean Birthmothers Negotiate Everyday Violence and Child Loss Through Storytelling

Sammanfattning: Adoption scholars have dismantled the story of adoption as a humanitarian effort to save destitute children and framed adoption as a transnational issue underpinned by neo-colonial and patriarchal structures governing the relations between the West and ‘the rest’. This thesis builds on those insights and thus contributes to a growing body of literature within critical adoption studies. South Korea’s long-lived practice of sending children overseas for adoption has created the world's largest population of so-called birthmothers, the women who gave birth to the many children who were adopted by couples in the West. Despite being at the centre of adoption, their voices are rarely heard in and outside of academia. This thesis analyses birthmothers’ stories of separation from their children as a negotiation of the everyday violence that particularly unwed women are subjected to by the state level legislation and within private institutional settings. In doing so it argues that storytelling provides a way for birthmothers to assert themselves as mothers in face of dehumanising conditions.