Biography
Sina Lee is Professor of Practice in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane University. She is a transnational feminist scholar whose research focuses on transnational adoption, Asian diasporic migration, feminist methodology and pedagogy, and decolonial knowledge production. Her work examines how race, gender, family, and global power intersect in intimate and everyday life, with particular attention to adoptee and birth mother narratives. She is the author of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on transnational adoption, feminist pedagogy, and Korean studies, and she is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Other Mother of My Child. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newcomb Institute, and the Tulane Global Humanities Center.
Project Description
The Other Mother of My Child: Transnational Solidarity among Korean Adoptees, Adoptive Mothers, and Birth Mothers examines transnational adoption as a gendered and racialized process shaped by histories of war, colonialism, and migration. Since the Korean War, more than 220,000 Korean children have been adopted overseas, including a large number to the United States, yet existing scholarship has largely centered adoptive parents and metropolitan adoptee communities while marginalizing birth mothers and many adoptees’ lived experiences.
This project documents the evolving relationships among Korean adoptees, their birth mothers, and adoptive mothers after reunion, reframing adoption as an ongoing relational process rather than a discrete event. Drawing on feminist qualitative methods, the research examines how kinship, care, and accountability are negotiated over time across national and cultural boundaries.
Building on prior fieldwork supported by the ACLS and SSRC, the project extends longitudinal research with new interviews in the United States and South Korea. By foregrounding adoptees’ and birth mothers’ narratives, the study challenges static Global South and Global North frameworks and demonstrates how historical conditions of war and displacement continue to structure intimate family relationships decades later. The project will culminate in a single-authored book and peer-reviewed publications.