Adoptionsfrågan i koreansk populärkultur

Att skapa en diskurs om adoptivkoreaner

Abstract

Korea is the country in the world that has sent away the largest number of children for adoption overseas. Since the end of the Korean war, 150,000 children have been adopted to a dozen Western countries. Overseas adoption was for a long time considered a secretive embarrassment by the Korean government, but through media exposure at the end of the 1980s, the problem or issue of Korea's overseas adoption (ibyangmunjê) has almost been institutionalized in political debate.

The phenomenon has also left its mark in popular culture. The subject has figured in TV dramas, musicals, comic, movies and songs. This article examines overseas adoption as a theme in especially movies and pop songs and, in light of John Fiske's theory of popular culture as a way of establishing a discourse, studies the creation of a discourse on adopted Koreans.