Susie Woo
Biographic Data
| ID | 3629410 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susie Woo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susie |
| FAMILY NAME | Woo |
| SIGNATURE | WOO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Susie Woo is a graduate student in American Studies at Yale University. Her current research focuses on the politics of memory and racial formation during the Korean War. |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
African American Adoptions and Expanding Visions of Family
Why do transnational adoption accounts depict adopters as white? Kori Graves delves into this question in A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. Centering on the obscured history of African American participation in practices of domestic, transracial, and transnational adoptions, Graves tells the story of Korean black children, the African American families that tried to adopt them, and the welfare professiona…
Part III. Erasing Empire
Part I. Imagined Family Frames
Part II. International Cold War Families
Figures
Framed by War
Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean go…
Managing Korean War Brides
This chapter examines the relationship between Americans and Korean women, both real and imagined. It begins in 1945 in South Korea with US militarized prostitution and its effects on Korean women. From assaults to regularization intended to protect US servicemen (but not Korean women) from sexually transmitted disease to US military efforts to prevent its men from marrying Korean nationals, the first part of the chapter establishes the uneven pa…
Missionary Rescue and the Transnational Making of Family
The war resulted in over three million Korean deaths and an estimated 100,000 children left homeless. The scale of need opened the door wide to nongovernmental US citizens who flooded South Korea to spearhead recovery efforts. American missionaries led the call. They set up over five hundred orphanages by the war’s end and administered care in a country that, unlike the United States, did not have an established national welfare program. The chap…
US Aid Campaigns and the Korean Children’s Choir
This chapter focuses upon US aid efforts spearheaded by nongovernmental agencies in wartime and postwar Korea. It examines the work of the Christian Children’s Fund, the American-Korean Foundation (AKF), and World Vision, among others. The chapter pays special attention to the AKF-sponsored Korean Children’s Choir, which toured fifty American cities in 1954 to raise over $10 million for postwar recovery. While images of war waifs in US media help…
Producing Model Korean Adoptees
This chapter complicates popular visions of the model Korean adoptee. It begins by examining how the Immigration and Naturalization Service monitored which Korean children were fit for entry, and sought to assure that they would not become charges of the state once they arrived. Hiring the International Social Service to manage the placement of Korean children, the INS transferred its responsibility to adoptive parents, a move that laid bare the …
Mixed-Race Children and Their Korean Mothers
This chapter looks at what happened to the Korean women and children who remained in South Korea. It sets the stage by describing how President Rhee’s 1953 directive to remove children with American fathers to the United States heightened the vulnerability of those who stayed. The South Korean government worked closely with Harry Holt and in 1954 established Korea’s first welfare agency, Child Placement Service, expressly to remove mixed-race chi…
GIs and the Kids of Korea
This chapter centers upon the US military in Korea between 1945 and 1953. While Koreans experienced war violence firsthand, American and international audiences grew increasingly aware of and concerned about the devastation wrought by the US military as the war raged on. It was in this context that US military officials actively paired US servicemen with Korean orphans to help narrate the unpopular war. This chapter demonstrates how the American …
The Opinions of Mankind
Imagining Kin
In this essay, I investigate how Korean Children's Choirs that toured the United States in the 1950s and 1960s helped rewrite America's relationship with Korea and Asia more broadly. I situate the choristers within the context of transnational adoption to explore the political stakes of the Korean child during the early Cold War. On the heels of the costly Korean War, the young performers represented the democratic possibilities of Korea, thereby…
Online and Unplugged
In cyberspace identity is no longer necessarily bound by body or location; cyberspace has the democratic potential to render visible markers, such as race and gender, obsolete. With anonymity one of many possibilities, one's identity becomes an open-ended choice that complicates the types of relationship that are formed online. Although the possibilities of a virtual realm seem limitless, in many ways cyberspace remains intrinsically tied to real…
Imagining Kin
In this essay, I investigate how Korean Children's Choirs that toured the United States in the 1950s and 1960s helped rewrite America's relationship with Korea and Asia more broadly. I situate the choristers within the context of transnational adoption to explore the political stakes of the Korean child during the early Cold War. On the heels of the costly Korean War, the young performers represented the democratic possibilities of Korea, thereby…
Online and Unplugged
In cyberspace identity is no longer necessarily bound by body or location; cyberspace has the democratic potential to render visible markers, such as race and gender, obsolete. With anonymity one of many possibilities, one's identity becomes an open-ended choice that complicates the types of relationship that are formed online. Although the possibilities of a virtual realm seem limitless, in many ways cyberspace remains intrinsically tied to real…
Online and Unplugged
In cyberspace identity is no longer necessarily bound by body or location; cyberspace has the democratic potential to render visible markers, such as race and gender, obsolete. With anonymity one of many possibilities, one's identity becomes an open-ended choice that complicates the types of relationship that are formed online. Although the possibilities of a virtual realm seem limitless, in many ways cyberspace remains intrinsically tied to real…
The Opinions of Mankind
Imagining Kin
In this essay, I investigate how Korean Children's Choirs that toured the United States in the 1950s and 1960s helped rewrite America's relationship with Korea and Asia more broadly. I situate the choristers within the context of transnational adoption to explore the political stakes of the Korean child during the early Cold War. On the heels of the costly Korean War, the young performers represented the democratic possibilities of Korea, thereby…
Managing Korean War Brides
This chapter examines the relationship between Americans and Korean women, both real and imagined. It begins in 1945 in South Korea with US militarized prostitution and its effects on Korean women. From assaults to regularization intended to protect US servicemen (but not Korean women) from sexually transmitted disease to US military efforts to prevent its men from marrying Korean nationals, the first part of the chapter establishes the uneven pa…
Missionary Rescue and the Transnational Making of Family
The war resulted in over three million Korean deaths and an estimated 100,000 children left homeless. The scale of need opened the door wide to nongovernmental US citizens who flooded South Korea to spearhead recovery efforts. American missionaries led the call. They set up over five hundred orphanages by the war’s end and administered care in a country that, unlike the United States, did not have an established national welfare program. The chap…
US Aid Campaigns and the Korean Children’s Choir
This chapter focuses upon US aid efforts spearheaded by nongovernmental agencies in wartime and postwar Korea. It examines the work of the Christian Children’s Fund, the American-Korean Foundation (AKF), and World Vision, among others. The chapter pays special attention to the AKF-sponsored Korean Children’s Choir, which toured fifty American cities in 1954 to raise over $10 million for postwar recovery. While images of war waifs in US media help…
Producing Model Korean Adoptees
This chapter complicates popular visions of the model Korean adoptee. It begins by examining how the Immigration and Naturalization Service monitored which Korean children were fit for entry, and sought to assure that they would not become charges of the state once they arrived. Hiring the International Social Service to manage the placement of Korean children, the INS transferred its responsibility to adoptive parents, a move that laid bare the …
Mixed-Race Children and Their Korean Mothers
This chapter looks at what happened to the Korean women and children who remained in South Korea. It sets the stage by describing how President Rhee’s 1953 directive to remove children with American fathers to the United States heightened the vulnerability of those who stayed. The South Korean government worked closely with Harry Holt and in 1954 established Korea’s first welfare agency, Child Placement Service, expressly to remove mixed-race chi…
GIs and the Kids of Korea
This chapter centers upon the US military in Korea between 1945 and 1953. While Koreans experienced war violence firsthand, American and international audiences grew increasingly aware of and concerned about the devastation wrought by the US military as the war raged on. It was in this context that US military officials actively paired US servicemen with Korean orphans to help narrate the unpopular war. This chapter demonstrates how the American …
Part III. Erasing Empire
Part I. Imagined Family Frames
Part II. International Cold War Families
Figures
Framed by War
Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean go…
African American Adoptions and Expanding Visions of Family
Why do transnational adoption accounts depict adopters as white? Kori Graves delves into this question in A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. Centering on the obscured history of African American participation in practices of domestic, transracial, and transnational adoptions, Graves tells the story of Korean black children, the African American families that tried to adopt them, and the welfare professiona…
Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · History (8 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (7 works) · Japanese History and Culture (7 works) · Politics (5 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements (3 works)