Transnational Adoption in Korean Cinema Partial Citizens and Nationalism on Screen

This article presents one of the first critical historiographies of adoption films in Korean cinema from the Golden Age to New Korean Cinema. Guided by the work of Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Benita Parry, Kyung Hyun Kim and Tobias Hubinette, the authors show how the portrayal of transnational adoption practices and of adoptees in Korean cinema is fraught with cultural antagonisms - between the adoptees' agency and their lost bloodlines, hierarchical relations and lasting bonds, ethnicity and cultural capital - and distorted by a tendency to commodify the theme as a cinematic motif. Discovering these cultural antagonisms across successive decades, this article argues that the narrative in nearly all adoption films remains passive with regard to issues of abandonment. As a result adoptees are misrepresented and the negative effects of transnational adoption practices are never fully resolved, culturally or politically. It is precisely because of this passive strategy that adoptees are conceived, dubiously and tragically, as nothing more than partial citizens' in most Korean cinema.