I have been a Sociology student for the last seven years, and the study of kinship remains a slightly difficult terrain. The anthropological explorations of kinship in simple societies and a sociological understanding of what it connotes in the modern urban space are replete with intense scholarly debates.  The question as to what exactly is kinship appears to have no easy answer. With multiple understanding of who exactly is a kin across cultures, the story is complex. However, I did not know that a guilty pleasure watch on Netflix would offer me a show that would address this debate on kinship.

Amidst the popular K-dramas that have bagged the trending positions on Netflix India, what remains lost are the many urban dramas that are passed off as replicas of these chartbusters. One such show that failed to make the top ten charts of Netflix India was Oh My Baby. It premiered on May 13, 2020, in South Korea and was released on Netflix on November 20, 2020. It is the story of 39-year-old Jang Ha-ri, an editor of a magazine that caters to parenting, babies and motherhood. Ironically, she hasn’t been able to take the role of a mother, which she desperately wants to. With her ageing body and inability to find love, she is about to give up on thoughts of marriage and children when three men begin to appear before her.

I am sure if you have watched a k-drama before, you would already be familiar with the range of themes (feminism, politics of everyday life, family conflict, workplace discrimination, class conflict) every 16-episode-long dramas tend to shed light on. Through 16-episodes, these dramas go beyond the focus on the struggles of its protagonist(s) and centre around other minor characters. This show does that too, but what’s unique about it is the themes and struggles it explores through every character in the show. I went into the show expecting a heartwarming, urban romance that explores the everyday struggles of living in a city as an adult. However, the show was anything but what its cheery, light title indicates.

Some of the show’s important themes were the debate on childbearing, motherhood, and conceiving a family. Jang Ha-ri’s disappointment with South Korean culture regarding the conception of a child by an unmarried woman was unveiled when she tried to look for a sperm donor and was reprimanded by her mother and colleagues at work. Kinship and questions of relatedness cannot be thought about without the relevance of substance.

Janet Carsten (2004) argues that substances are not merely transformable, but they also take different forms based on gender to serve particular functions. Kinship relations within the family are based primarily on the aspect of naturalisation that is denoted by substances from the body. However, this discourse of naturalisation through substance acquires new meaning with assisted reproductive technologies. South Korean society continues to believe in the existence of blood relations and heterosexual family settings. There is no law on surrogacy or possibilities for an IVF for an unmarried citizen (Ock-Joo, Byung-Hwa, 2019). In episode three, she says –

Why is it only ethical for a man and woman to get married and then have kids?

There’s no way for a single woman to have kids.

The question and the assertion put forth by her caused discomfort to one of the men who tried explaining to her the impossibility of what she wanted. In fact, her grief was more so embarrassing because of her age and the milestones society sets for age groups. The series highlights and challenges the politics of ageism. In projecting her innermost wish to be a mother through the impediments that lay before her, the series tells us how much this personal experience depends on the wider structure, particularly one that neglects the woman’s side.

The show did not ignore the experience of men in focusing on Ha-ri’s predicament. It made space for exploring the idea of a man taking on the so-called role of mothering, the stigma of male infertility, and the importance of an equal division of labour between a mother and a father from conceiving, gestation, birth to the bringing up of the child. Contemporary debate on what constitutes kinship and the role played by kin informs the difference between kinship-as-being and kinship-as-doing. The former is the popularly used socio-anthropological studies model that emphasises origin, past, ascription and ties of descent.

On the contrary, Carsten (2020) put forth a model of kinship-as-doing, emphasising more on the “processual and performative ways of becoming a kin.” Yoon Jae-young^[i], a paediatrician, who is coming to terms with understanding the ways of being a father, a parent after his divorce, is one of the characters that rightly explores Carsten’s concept of the kinship-as-doing and not simply one through whom descent is traced. His close association with Ha-ri adds to his character and the confusion between being a friend, a prospective lover or an elder brother (not related by blood); that often occurs when we try to understand who is a kin.

Lastly, the spotlight of this show were the babies and the power they unleashed through their presence in each scene! They weren’t used as mere props. Rather, they were actors who were as significant to the show as were the adult actors. I feel this show sends an important message in how we think of children in cinema, especially those who may not have dialogues. As the title suggests, the whole show is centred around the role of babies, the child actors, and how they participate in making the social world what it is.

Childhood Studies have focused amply on the concept of agency among children and their ability to create their social reality (James and Prout, 1997). In terms of performance, Hia Sen (2020) argues how what makes a child actor is tied closely to ‘physiognomic, physiological, cultural and ‘essential’ considerations’. Types of body build, baby-faced or petite, the voice becomes strong determinants in an actor’s choice for performance even among children. Anne Wihstutz (2016) argues that, like adults, children are in a continuous relationship of ‘becoming’ and not ‘being’. Children learn of their role in the family, in relation to other people, and the power of responsibility that makes them aware of their ‘self-positioning’ and ‘self-perception’.

Although I have loved the show for what it was, I only wished they had brought in the angle of same-sex family, homosexual parenting and the like. With changing laws around the globe, homosexual parenting is on the rise. Nonetheless, I told myself that maybe it’s too early to expect representation of queer parenting in Asian societies where same-sex marriages are still illegal in many countries. To sum up, I would say that this is one k-drama that came as a surprise to me, not just with its strong feminist undertones but also its pace, music and the lasting impact it has left on me. It has, indeed, made me think more than what I expected of an urban drama.

References:

1. Carsten, Janet. (2004). After Kinship pp. 163-184. U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

• Carsten, Janet. (2020). ‘Imagining and living new worlds: The dynamics of kinship in contexts of mobility and migration.’ Ethnography, 0 (0), 1-16. Sage Publications.

• James, Allison, and Alan Prout. (1997). eds. ‘A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? : Provenance, Promise and Problems’ In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, (pp. 1-32). London: Falmer Press.

• Kim, O., & Lee, B. (2019). South Korea. In J. Scherpe, C. Fenton-Glynn, & T. Kaan (Eds.), Eastern and Western Perspectives on Surrogacy (pp. 449-466).

• Sen, Hia. (2020). “Producing’ Childhood: The making of Childhood and children in theatre’ Childhood, 00 (0), 1-14.

• Wihstutz, Anne. (2016). ‘Children’s agency: contributions from feminist and ethic of care theories to Sociology of childhood’. In Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood: New Perspective in Childhood Studies, edited by F. Esser, M.S. Baader, T. Betz and B. Hungerland, (pp.95-112). London: Routledge.

^[i] He is a childhood friend of Ha-ri. He turns up to stay with Ha-ri at her mom’s house on Ha-ri’s mom persuasion. He is one of the three men who wishes to marry Ha-ri.

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Rahul Singh is a post-graduate student of Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. He loves reading literary fiction and runs an Instagram handle where he writes short reviews of the books he reads.

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