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Taking the figure of the “GIs and the Orphans” as the entry point for my investigation into the genealogies of Korean adoption, I use this chapter and the next to explore the material conditions of possibility for such a celluloid composition. What factors made possible the presence of displaced Korean children in the arms of American soldiers? What conditions transformed these casualties of war into trophies to be admired and celebrated? What circumstances brought these disparate groups—American GIs and Korean orphans—together so that by the end of the Korean War, their interaction with each other increases rather than decreases? And why did Korean children hold such importance to the U.S. military? In other words, what factors drove the U.S. armed forces to care so much about Korean children displaced by military combat? The answers to these questions may seem to be located in the Korean War. After all, the still image was taken in 1953, five months after the conflict ended in a cease-fire agreement . Situating Korean adoption within the Korean War, however, elides certain geopolitical and ideological factors that explain why the adoption of Korean children emerged as what was considered the best solution to the postwar orphan crisis. Thus, the answers to these questions do not reside in the Korean War; rather, they can be traced back to 1945, when the U.S. military began its occupation of the southern half of Korea. Rather than a natural consequence of the Korean War, I claim that Korean adoption emerged from the neocolonial relationship that the United States forged with the southern portion of Korea in 1945 when it set up the United States Army Military Government (USAMG).1 This neocolonial relationship created the material conditions of possibility of not only the still image but also Korean adoption in general. This chapter and the next thus examine the material conditions that made the image of the “GIs and 21 1 MILITARIZED HUMANITARIANISM Rethinking the Emergence of Korean Adoption the Orphans” and Korean adoption possible. It does so by relying on U.S. congressional reports and military documents from 1945 to 1950, film reels produced by the U.S. Department of Defense during the 1950s, and newspaper and magazine articles from the 1950s. In this chapter, I begin by tracking the emergence of Korean adoption to U.S. military occupation, providing an abbreviated history of the five years (1945 to 1950) that led up to the Korean War. I do this in order to illustrate how certain geopolitical and economic policies that were implemented by the USAMG provided the conditions that made Korean adoption the primary solution to the postwar orphan crisis. I explain that this five-year period implemented a modus operandi of dependency between the two countries so that South Korea’s political and social problems would be solved by American money in exchange for South Korea’s allegiance to democratic ideals. As a result, I argue that the neocolonial relationship that was set up during this time was an absolute precondition for Korean adoption. After the cease-fire agreement, the South Korean people and the American military encountered a new problem: the exponential rise in the number of displaced Korean children. Rather than naturalizing the logic that more orphans simply required more orphanages, I link the rise of Korean orphanages in the south to the emerging neocolonial relationship between the United States and South Korea. In the second section, I examine how U.S. military forces, along with American missionaries, came to be on the front lines of battling the orphan crisis at the end of the Korean War. They did so by building and sponsoring Korean orphanages. In this way, U.S. militarism militarized not only the geographical landscape and political economy of South Korea but also its social welfare services. Constructing and financing orphanages were acts of militarized humanitarianism that worked to solve not only the war orphan problem but also the eroding image of the United States as anti-imperialist. I conclude this chapter by discussing how the rescue of Korean orphans attempted to rescue the image of the U.S. government by presenting the American soldier as a humanitarian. If the postwar orphan was proof of the consequences of American military domination, then this figure also became the remedy to that image. Indeed, the U.S. military projected images of the U.S. armed forces rescuing, aiding, and taking care of Korean orphans to recover and restore the national...

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