Abstract
Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 160,000 Korean children have been adopted to fifteen Western countries. The United States has taken in two thirds, while the rest are spread out in northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. During recent years, overseas adopted Koreans have increasingly turned up in various Korean popular cultural works including musicals, comics, pop songs, television dramas, and feature films. This article looks specifically at representations of female overseas adoptees in four Korean feature films: Chang Kil-su’s Susanne Brink’s Arirang (1991), Park Kwang-su’s Berlin Report (1991), Kim Ki-duk’s Wild Animals (1997), and Lee Jang-soo’s Love (1999). At the end, the adopted Koreans are conceptualized as subaltern bodies, once commodified and disposable and now deprived of their voices and turned into mute artifacts of patriarchal nationalist ideology.
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