Adoption Loss and (Birth)[M]otherhood: Disenfranchised Grief and Enfranchised Reunion in Resilience

The disenfranchised grief of a birthmother is one of the most significant themes in Tammy Chu’s Resilience (2009). Disrupting the narrative tradition, this film, unconventionally and most compellingly, centers on a birthmother, Myung-ja Noh, and endows her with narrative mobility to speak about her experience of adoption loss and the unresolved grief resulting from the bereavement. By grafting Kenneth J. Doka’s concept of disenfranchised grief with adoption/trauma theory, which provides a valuable framework for analyzing Resilience in terms of loss and birthmother trauma, this study explores the following issues. First of all, it scrutinizes and deconstructs the commonly misconceived myths about birthmothers, which are, for the most part, generated and contextualized by patriarchal norms. Also, this article reconstructs the story of the birthmother with the truths derived from the voices of Myung-ja, her mother, and her aunt. Last but not least, this paper examines the trajectory of the birthmother’s transformation from a disempowered victim to an empowered subjectivity.