Feeling It: Understanding Korean Adoptees’ Experiences of Embodied Identity

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which transnational Korean adoptees experience identity as an embodied subjective process that is simultaneously contested and objectified by social perceptions of their bodies in their adoptive countries and South Korea. To analyse these lived experiences, I draw primarily on embodiment theories such as Budgeon's [(2003). Identity as an embodied event. Body and society, 9, 35–55] sociological concept of ‘body as event’ and Csordas’ [(2002). Body/meaning/healing. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan] cultural phenomenological view of the body not as an object but as a ‘subject of culture’. To analyse processes of (re)embodiment, I draw on Ahmed's [(2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist theory, 8, 149–168] concepts of ‘space’ and ‘whiteness’. Based on ethnographic data in South Korea and semi-structured interviews with 22 adult Korean adoptees, this paper demonstrates how Korean adoptees’ embodied identities are lived in relation to racialised experiences of belonging and Otherness.