Saturday night in Seoul

 

 

 

KoRoot

KoRoot guesthouse has plenty of space for adoptees visiting Seoul. It is $10 a night. That includes Western breakfast and Korean lunch. The staff is very friendly and helpful. They have dorm rooms, a couple room, and a family room. I’m on their adoptee advisory committee and I, uh, advise staying there! It is run by Pastor Kim and his wife, but you don’t have to be Christian to stay there. It is very very low-key about that — no need to worry about proselytization! There’s no curfew, laundry on premises, very clean and home-like. KoRoot does so much for adoptees’ and mothers’ rights in Korea, so please support them by staying there when you visit.

The Daughter’s Exchange by Eun Kyung Min

Great article using LoB in Social Text by Eun Kyung Min, who is one of the smartest, kindest and best people I know.

The Daughter’s Exchange in Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood

Eun Kyung Min

The two most dominant twentieth-century theorizations about the exchange of daughters are Freudian psychoanalysis, which theorizes the psychic, libidinal exchange performed by the daughter of the mother for the father, and Lévi-Straussian anthropology, which theorizes the exchange of the daughter by her brothers and fathers through marriage. In both theories, the daughter’s exchange is a founding moment in the institution of culture. In this essay, I interrogate the relevance of these paradigms of daughter-exchange to the phenomenon of transnational adoption, where the daughter loses her mother even before she can exchange her mother for her father, and where the daughter is exchanged precisely not to extend kinship ties between the biological and adoptive families. Through a reading of Jane Jeong Trenka’s 2003 The Language of Blood, a memoir of growing up as a Korean adoptee in Minnesota, I explore the meaning of the failure of these kinship paradigms in transnational adoption and propose that the psychic and political economies of kinship need to be examined together in light of the growing global diaspora of transnational adoptees.

Planet B-boy: Korea

PLANET B-BOY

Here’s Run DMZ (Director’s Cut) from the upcoming movie Planet B-Boy. Super fun, super cool.

 

Canaries in the Motherland

Interview with Nari Baker for Canaries in the Motherland. Thanks Nari!




To put an end to speculation

Yes, I was married for three years.

I have now been legally/officially divorced for three years.

There you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. Please let everyone in the office know that I AM THAT KIND OF WOMAN.