Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea: Intersectionality and Transnationality 1557291837, 9781557291837

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Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea

Gender and Class

in Contemporary South Korea Intersectionality & Transnationality

Choo, Lie, and Nelson

INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES TK 4

TK 4_ FIN.indd 1

Hae Yeon Choo John Lie Laura C. Nelson



INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ● BERKELEY

Edited by

TRANSNATIONAL KOREA 4

2/20/2019 9:57:55 PM

Notes to this edition This is an electronic edition of the printed book. Minor corrections may have been made within the text; new information and any errata appear on the current page only. Transnational Korea Ś Ž—Ž›ȱŠ—ȱ•Šœœȱ’—ȱ˜—Ž–™˜›Š›¢ȱ˜ž‘ȱ ˜›ŽŠDZȱ —Ž›œŽŒ’˜—Š•’¢ȱǭȱ›Š—œ—Š’˜—Š•’¢

ŠŽȱŽ˜—ȱ‘˜˜ǰȱ ˜‘—ȱ’ŽǰȱŠž›ŠȱŽ•œ˜—ǰ edito›œ ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-18ř-ŝ (electronic) ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-18Ř-Ŗ (print) ISBN-10: 1-55729-18Ř-ş (print)

Please visit the IEAS Publications website at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/ for more information and to see our catalogue. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 1995 University Avenue, Suite 510H Berkeley, CA 94704-2318 USA [email protected]

March 2019

Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea

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TRANSNATIONAL KOREA 4

Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea Intersectionality and Transnationality Edited by Hae Yeon Choo, John Lie, and Laura C. Nelson

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A publication of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Although the institute is responsible for the selection and acceptance of manuscripts in this series, responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the accuracy of statements rests with their authors. The Transnational Korea series is one of several publication series sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies in conjunction with its constituent units. The other series include the China Research Monograph series, the Japan Research Monograph series, the Korea Research Monograph series, and the Research Papers and Policy Studies series. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 1995 University Avenue, Suite 510H Berkeley, CA 94720 [email protected] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Choo, Hae Yeon, editor. | Lie, John, editor. | Nelson, Laura C., editor. Title: Gender and class in contemporary South Korea : intersectionality and transnationality / edited by Hae Yeon Choo, John Lie, and Laura C.Nelson. Description: Berkeley : Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, [2019] | Series: Transnational Korea ; 4 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018057410 (print) | LCCN 2019002949 (ebook) | ISBN 9781557291837 (ebook) | ISBN 1557291837 (ebook) | ISBN 9781557291820 (alk. paper) ISBN 1557291829 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sex—Korea (South) | Social classes—Korea (South) | Intersectionality (Sociology)—Korea (South) Classification: LCC HQ18.K6 (ebook) | LCC HQ18.K6 G46 2019 (print) | DDC 306.7095195—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057410 Copyright © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Cover image by David M. Byrne taken in July 2017 at Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea. Image available at davidMbyrne.com and used by permission of David M. Byrne. Cover design by Mindy Chen.

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Contents

Contributors vii Acknowledgments ix 1. Introduction: Gender, Class, and Contemporary South Korea 1 Hae Yeon Choo, John Lie, Laura C. Nelson 2. Changelings and Cinderellas: Class In/equality, Gendered Social Im/mobility, and Post-Developmentalism in Contemporary South Korean Television Dramas 16 Jin-kyung Lee 3. Shrewd Entrepreneurs or Immoral Speculators? Desires, Speculation, and Middle-Class Housewives in South Korea, 1978–1996 37 Myungji Yang 4. “My Skill”: Attachments and Narratives of Garment Workers in South Korea 62 Seo Young Park 5. Leave No Birthing Trace: The Politics of Health and Beauty in the South Korean Postpartum Care Market 83 Yoonjung Kang 6. Gendered Narratives of Transition to Adulthood among Korean Work-Bound Youth 106 Hyejeong Jo 7. Diverging Masculinities and the Politics of Aversion toward Ethnically Mixed Men in the Korean Military 130 Hyun Mee Kim 8. Maternal Guardians: Intimate Labor and the Pursuit of Gendered Citizenship among South Korean Volunteers Helping Migrant Women 149 Hae Yeon Choo

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Contributors

Hae Yeon Choo is associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. Her book, Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea  (Stanford University Press, 2016), reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Hyejeong Jo is a researcher at the Institute for Social Development Studies at Yonsei University. Her research is mainly on social inequality in South Korea. Currently, she is conducting an in-depth interview study of Korean educational elites to explore the ways in which they understand the roles of social class and merit in their pathways to becoming the highest class of Korean society. Yoonjung Kang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Her main research interests are ethical dilemmas and questions provoked by human reproduction in contemporary capitalism. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which ideas of care, health, tradition, and science and technologies are implicated in the meanings and practices of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the (re)making of norms and ideologies of the female reproductive body, gender, class, family/­ kinship, and the state.  Hyun Mee Kim is a professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Yonsei University. Her research interests include the political economy of gender, globalization and migration, and feminist cultural theories. She is the author Cultural Translation in a Global Era (2005), and We Always Leave Home: Becoming Migrants in South Korea (2014), both published in Korean. She also coedited (with Koichi Iwabuchi and Hsiao-Chuan Hsia) Multiculturalism in East Asia: A Transnational Exploration of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

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Contributors

Jin-Kyung Lee is associate professor of Korean and comparative literature at UC San Diego. She is the author of Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), as well as coeditor of Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013). John Lie teaches social theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Laura C. Nelson is an anthropologist interested in relationships between distinctions and inequalities. She has two ongoing research projects in South Korea. One is focused on breast cancer; the other examines the life stories of South Korean elders who did not raise children and the social processes of forgetting them. She teaches in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Seo Young Park is an associate professor of anthropology at Scripps College with research and teaching interests in labor, temporality, and urban politics. She is the author of a forthcoming monograph titled Working in the 24hour City: The Problem of Speed in Seoul’s Dongdaemun Market. Myungji Yang is assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is the author of From Miracle to Mirage: The Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960–2015 (Cornell University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a new project about conservative right-wing mobilization in South Korea during post-democratization eras.

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Acknowledgments

The work of this volume rests on decades of previous scholarship into gender and class in Korea.  The book’s chapters were introduced and then revised during a workshop held in 2015 at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The workshop and the revision and editing of the resulting manuscript were supported by an Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2012-BAA-2102). The editors would also like to thank Katherine Chouta of the Institute of East Asian Studies for guiding the publication process. 

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ONE

Introduction: Gender, Class, and Contemporary South Korea

HAE YEON CHOO, JOHN LIE, AND LAURA C. NELSON Writings about gender and class in Korea are as old and almost as common as writings about Korea. This is hardly surprising; writers have frequently and explicitly invoked both gender and class to make sense of Korean life—a phenomenon obvious to outsiders and Koreans alike for as long as Korean society has been an object of analysis. To take just one example: the British author Isabella Bird Bishop’s record of her travels to Korea in the 1890s is full of comments on Korean status distinctions. As for gender, one of her first observations—immediately following a remark regarding the “Oriental vices”—is the blanket declaration that “women are secluded, and occupy a very inferior position” (Bishop 1897, 14). More contemporary works on Korean history and culture regularly reference both the stark differences in gender roles and the cultural and resource differences associated with traditional, Chosŏn-era (1392–1897) positions as well as current industrial and postindustrial class stratification. Research on social dynamics in Korea cannot, and generally does not, ignore the structures and practices that assume women and men occupy separate yet interdependent positions, and that individuals and families are allocated different positions in Korean society according to their access to financial, cultural, and social resources. Although gender and class have been central concerns in research on Korea for some time, we felt that the topic would benefit from some new scholarship, for two reasons. First, the structures and circumstances of South Korean society have continued their pattern of constant change into the twenty-first century, affecting both gender and class. Second, critical scholars have developed new perspectives on gender, class, and other Authors’ names appear in alphabetical order; all authors contributed equally to this introduction and to the editorial work of the book.

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relations of power, adding more transnational and intersectional concerns than earlier scholars generally brought to their analysis. With these circumstances in mind, we invited a mix of seasoned and emerging scholars of gender and class in Korea to Berkeley for a workshop in the spring of 2014. In convening our workshop, we took inspiration from two previous volumes: Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (1998), and Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall (2002). These two important collections highlight the ways gender had become entangled with politics and the economy in the South Korean experience of modernization. Some of the papers made pathbreaking contributions to the study of hegemonic masculinity, workplace gender practices, gendered domestic labor, gendered labor in class-mobility strategies, and the ambivalent sexualization of South Korean women (Abelmann 2002; Cho 2002; Janelli and Yim 2002; J. J. H. Lee 2002; S.-H. Lee 2002; Moon 2002). Around the same time, several monographs appeared in which gender and class had particular relevance: the militarization of opportunity and belonging (Moon 2005), the history of women’s labor activism (Kim 1997), the binational arrangements organizing Korean women’s sexual services around U.S. military bases in South Korea (Moon 1997), and the ways women constructed meaning in opportunities that demarcated class differences (Nelson 2000). These and other works documented the centrality of gender and class as organizing principles in the transformations of the South Korean social landscape of the second half of the twentieth century. Needless to say, our focus on the present and the interdependence of gender and class is meant neither to ignore earlier contributions to the Anglophone scholarship on Korean women and gender relations (Chung 1986; Gelb 1994; Soh 1993), nor to downplay the relevance of the past (e.g., Kim 2015; Kim and Pettid 2012; Ko, Haboush, and Piggott 2003 [Chosŏn Korea]; and Choi 2009; Kim 2009; Yoo 2008 [colonial period]). We have, however, bypassed cultural representation of gender and class, in literary and other modes (see, e.g., Barraclough 2012), as well as the articulation of their relationships to postcolonial themes, such as the role of “comfort women” (Soh 2009), the pervasive presence of sex work (Cheng 2011; Lie 1995), Christian modernity and other religious formations (e.g., Chong 2009), the profound effects of biosociality and disability (e.g., Kim 2017), and other interesting and important issues. These are important works, capturing the essence of a particular time and place: South Korea in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet the ineluctable passage of time has led to a new millennium, a new world. The tried and true theories and concepts of yesteryear are no longer very relevant to South Korea in the 2010s (Lie 2015a). Think only of the power

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and salience of older concepts and categories such as the developmental state and the notion of minjung (people)—as used, for example, by John Lie (1998) to make sense of post-liberation South Korea and the 1988 Seoul Olympics. In reading this and other writings from the 1980s and 1990s, it is not easy to escape the stench of obsolescence, however interesting and even intriguing these pickled notions remain. Gender relations and feminist analysis were always and already there, but it is difficult to deny the relative bluntness of earlier formulations that sought to make sense of gender independently of other categories or to take the primacy of political economy for granted. Building upon but revising earlier scholarship, we structure the chapters of this volume on the emergent notion of intersectionality: the idea that gender and class, among other social categories, are intimately intertwined and interdependent. In a related fashion, we seek to avoid the pitfalls of methodological nationalism. The previously accepted belief in the ethnic and racial homogeneity of Koreans and the robustness of South Korea as an integral and indivisible entity has ignored the considerable heterogeneity of Koreans and the porousness of Korean boundaries. Put differently, we offer an explicitly intersectional and transnational perspective on contemporary South Korean gender and class relations and structures. Intersectionality and Postnationalism A residual Confucianism well-entrenched in our scholarly formation inclines us to pay tribute to past scholars and duly celebrate their contributions. As noted, however, a large part of the rationale for this volume is that ideas have evolved from those of the past century. Two ideas in particular are vital for this collection of essays: the concept of intersectionality and the criticism of methodological nationalism. Almost all previous research on South Korean gender and class has bypassed the intersectional and dynamic forces that generate intricately connected and co-productive relations and structures of both gender and class in South Korea (cf. Lie 1996; Lie 1997). When the two aforementioned collections came out (1998 and 2002), intersectionality was emerging within the field of gender and sexuality studies as a central way to identify the dynamics of multiple and interconnected aspects of social hierarchies (Collins and Bilge 2016; Hancock 2016). Black feminist scholars proposed the idea of intersectionality to supersede simplistic studies of race, class, or gender, and to capture instead the complexity of social positions, as well as the forces and institutions, that produce differential social status (Collins 1998; Crenshaw 1989). It took some time, however, for the concept to travel beyond the context of North America relations.

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Intersectional approaches transcend analyses that focus on categorical differences as though they were partible; instead, intersectional analysis emphasizes the multiple and overlapping relations and structures of domination and inequality. In an early articulation of the concept, Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote, “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy to address the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating ‘women’s experience’ or the ‘Black experience’ into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast” (1989, 140). An intersectional approach does not ignore the effects of categories such as “gender,” “class,” and “race”; rather, it illuminates the intellectual vacuousness of seeing social categories as distinct bins of simple differences. Inspired by the intersectionality concept, researchers have begun to unveil the enticements and the hazards of categorical reification. Intersectional approaches have focused on the ways hierarchies and powers do not simply create categories, but rather generate relations and interactions among and between categories. Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree (2010), for example, have sought to differentiate systems and feedback loops on several levels of society and culture. Intersectionality has been slow to take hold in the study of gender and class in South Korea because almost everyone regarded South Korea as a racially and culturally homogeneous society. Just as significant, Marxists and non-Marxists alike underscored the centrality of political economy and the place of class in their social analysis well into the twenty-first century. Moreover, the apparent universality of heteronormative families as the units of social life obscured the importance of gender in the experience of class, and class in the experience of gender. In this context, the simple project of understanding how the accumulation of discrete gender and class categories (shifting from “women” to “middle-class women” and “men” to “working-class men,” for example) was deemed adequate to make sense of South Korean stratification. Occasionally, additional factors, such as rural, urban, or regional origin, were considered, but they were deemed to have minor significance. People of foreign origin were considered outsiders even in works that took them into consideration. The only recognized examples of foreigners were European or American missionaries, colonialperiod Japanese nationals, members of the U.S. military from 1945 onward, a small Chinese community, and Japanese male tourists. The studies ignored the legacy of premodern legal enslavement or status hierarchy, such as paekchŏng (the rough equivalent of Japanese Burakumin). Researchers reproduced the prevalent categories or social positions (“middle-class

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housewives,” “factory workers,” or “company men”), but not the interconnections among and between them. Thus, gender and class in South Korea are analyzed as received social categories, but not as processes and interactions of a differentiated (and transnational) social order (Choo 2016). This simplification has become more obviously analytically problematic as the conjoined ideals of secure employment for adult men, and marriage for all adults, no longer set expectations and normativities in South Korea. In the time since the earlier studies of gender and class in South Korea were published, underemployment and employment insecurity for both men and women of all ages, divorce, delayed marriage, and single-parenting have become more common, and LGBTQ individuals are increasingly visible, all revealing the fictions of “universal” established gender and class norms. The competition for status and livelihood now cuts through old alliances and generates new tensions, relationships, and instabilities among and between people in diverse social positions. Understanding this new reality demands complex, intersectional perspectives. Beyond the near-absence of intersectional analysis, methodological nationalism has dominated Korean studies. Like the lack of intersectionality, methodological nationalism came from the widely shared proposition that South Korea has been and remains an ethnically and culturally homogeneous entity. Furthermore, right- and left-wing analysis shared a commitment to anticolonial nationalism that rendered the nation-state (of South Korea) as the natural unit of analysis and action (however inconveniently there were two nation-states that claimed the mantle of Korean nationalism). The increasingly cosmopolitan engagements of South Koreans with the rest of the world through objects, media, travel, and migration have cast doubt on the national homogeneity thesis (Lie 2015b). It is easy to forget that restrictions on imports of foreign media and consumer goods, checks on foreign travel, and strict controls on foreign workers limited the face-to-face contact most South Koreans had with non-Koreans in the postliberation era. Prior to the late 1980s, only a small fraction of South Koreans had experience traveling abroad—for example, to Vietnam as part of the U.S.-led war effort, the Middle East for construction jobs, Japan for various colonial and colonial-legacy reasons, or the United States or Europe to study or work. International tourism in South Korea was underdeveloped until the end of the 1980s—except in the notable example of Japanese sex tourism (Lie 1995)—and there were few resident foreigners apart from the substantial presence of U.S. military personnel. In the early 1990s, however, South Korea began accepting significant numbers of foreign workers on restricted work visas to fill positions South Korean nationals had started to shun because they were “3D jobs” (dirty, difficult, or dangerous), poorly paid, or both. In addition, the declining urgency of marriage for young

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women, and the excess in the population of single men coming of age in the early 2000s (a demographic consequence of son preference and selective abortion of female fetuses in the 1980s and 1990s) led to the establishment of institutions and practices to bring foreign women to the country to marry South Korean men who were burdened with disadvantages such as rural origin, poverty, or disability. The net effect was a rapid rise in foreigners and an increase in the density of material and interpersonal connections and experiences beyond the borders of the nation. These empirical trends occurred in tandem with a massive theoretical reorientation in the Western social sciences. The proliferation of writings on the invention, construction, and making of nations and nation-states revealed not only the rich diversity of the past but also the fragile and ephemeral character of presumed national essence or homogeneity. Here the pioneering writings of Anderson (1983) and those that followed have cast all nationalist presumptions and predilections in grave doubt (Lie 2004). Indeed, if there is any consensus in the social sciences in the 2010s, surely it is that methodological nationalism—either in the past or the present—is unwarranted. The appreciation of internal heterogeneity goes hand in hand with the awareness of transnational and global relations and structures. No longer can we talk about the essential South Korean or engage in facile generalizations about South Koreans and Korean society without also looking at multicultural and transnational realities that engulf the Korean peninsula. The Making of Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea Gender has always been mobilized to bolster and inflect other social differences, particularly class distinctions; class and caste have kept almost everyone’s gender performances in line with powerfully prescribed expectations. The proliferation of types of diversity, and the growth in numbers of people recognized as contributing to social diversity, should only make us all the more curious about the mutual production of positions and practices of class and gender in Korea’s past. In this volume, we begin to examine the ways this diversity produces new configurations in the social relations, institutional structures, and cultural interpretive frameworks of contemporary South Korea. Several of the chapters focus on the processes of continual generation of social differences through the engagement of class and gender, as well as regional and foreign origin. By centering the dynamic of complex differentiation, we illuminate the post hoc interpretations of the different outcomes of social differences as well as the material and cultural resources that make gendered and classed inequalities in South Korea seem natural and necessary social arrangements.

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We seek to provide a rich and nuanced description of the shifting terrain of gender and class in South Korea, including the developmental era of the 1960s through the 1980s and the “post-developmental” period in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, which has brought a solidification of class boundaries along with an increasing migrant flow into South Korea. Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea: Intersectionality and Transnationality explores the transformations in the class structure, gender relations, and terms of belonging and citizenship of South Korea. How do South Korean men and women come to terms with an increasing insecurity and the eroding promise of upward mobility? How does the politics of gender operate in the remaking of class relations, creating different sets of norms of the ideal female body, heterosexual intimacy and family, and the gendered path to citizenship? And finally, how does the partial inclusion of migrants in South Korea redefine Korean nationhood and its class and gender relations? Utilizing diverse methodologies, the chapters herein seek to answer these questions, demonstrating how South Koreans have imagined, narrated, and lived through the past and present. Gender and Class in the Developmental and Post-Developmental Eras

South Korean television has captured the imaginations of many ordinary South Koreans. It has also provided a medium for examining the changing class and gender dynamics in postwar South Korea, which Nancy Abelmann aptly called “the melodrama of mobility” (2003). Extending Abelmann’s insight into the interactions of media and lived reality in the contemporary period, in chapter 2, Jin-kyung Lee uses South Korean TV dramas to view the ideological force of post-developmentalism, in contrast to the cultural production of the developmental era that produced the myth of upward mobility in the context of rapid industrialization and economic development in South Korea, epitomized by the popularity of rags-to-riches stories and the “self-made man” plot. Focusing on the postindustrial transition following the Asian financial crisis and the failed promise of class mobility, Lee points out that the TV dramas not only represent South Korea’s post-developmental condition but also serve to propel the effort to produce post-developmentalism as an ideology. Although state-centered developmentalism is very much active in orchestrating the national economy in pursuit of continued economic development, the state has also perceived an emerging need to produce the myth of a post-class, post-development society in which class polarity is disavowed. Lee’s sharp cultural analysis brings attention to the two plot devices at the heart of post-developmentalism that demonstrate the operation of gender and class: the revival of the Cinderella plot and the

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“switched-at-birth” plot. Both plot devices are based on the reality in which class division has become solidified: two protagonists are portrayed as having clearly different economic standings, one belonging to the poor or the working class, and the other belonging to the extremely rich, often the third-generation owner family of a large conglomerate (chaebol). Through a highly fantastical event, either by heteronormative romance and marriage between a poor woman and an elite male or by finding a long-lost rich parent, the class gap is closed, displacing the issue of class polarity. In chapter 3, Myungji Yang argues that in the shadow of the masculine trope of the developmental era, the role of middle-class housewives and their financial activities of investment and speculation in the informal economy have not received their due attention for shaping the family’s economic standing and accumulation of wealth. These women participated in the informal economy to amass significant incomes and help their families achieve upward mobility. Drawing from interviews with middleclass women, newspaper articles, magazines, and popular representation in South Korean fiction, Yang highlights the gendered moral anxiety that specifically targeted these women as sources of class resentment, in a way that resonates with Laura Nelson’s (2000) analysis of the gendered blame that “excessive” consumption by women has generated. Chapter 4 on women garment workers approaches the common narratives about women’s labor and South Korea’s development from a different angle. From the 1960s to the 1980s, young working-class women in the garment industry cut an iconic figure as contributors to the state-centered development project and became a symbol of oppression and resistance against authoritarian government and capitalism. Seo Young Park challenges the popular representation of garment work as belonging to South Korea’s past and upends the gendered and classed notion that garment workers are temporally obsolete and no longer occupy the current landscape of the South Korean economy. By delving into the narratives of older women who have worked in the garment factories since the 1960s and those of younger women who entered the sector in the 2000s, Park highlights the women’s divergent narratives about the concept of “skill” in garment work. For the women workers who joined forces with university-­educated activists for labor rights and democratization, their skill was something they could easily feel proud of. Although garment making skills have been perceived as less significant than political activity, experienced garment workers, together with young working-class women who today enter garment work as a protective measure against widespread insecurity in the labor market and general life in contemporary South ­Korea, now are able to claim that their skills have inherent value.

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New Forms of Class-Based Masculinity and Femininity

With the myth of upward class mobility dissolving since the mid-1990s (as shown in chapter 2), new forms of classed embodiment and consumption practices are emerging in contemporary South Korea. Along with the solidification of class division and the development of visible class markers, chapters 5 and 6 vividly illustrate the transformation of gender scripts of masculinity and femininity for the middle and working classes in the context of intensifying consumerism, a precarious labor market, and mass higher education. In chapter 5, Yoonjung Kang examines the rise of commercial residential facilities for the postpartum care of South Korean middle-class new mothers as a burgeoning form of what Abelmann called “class work.” With rich ethnographic descriptions, Kang highlights this emerging regimen for cultivating feminine embodiment in middle-class women as a social imperative that conflates health and beauty (“aesthetic health”) and propels women to exercise constant self-management for maintaining a sexually attractive body. Central to this process of self-making is an effort to draw class boundaries using women’s bodies, by which a slender, beautiful body operates as a marker of middle-class distinction and as a moral subject who is in control, in contrast to the overweight, poorly maintained bodies of older, working-class women. In the developmental era, women’s citizenship and virtue were tied to their roles as wives and mothers, and the focus on their bodies after marriage and childbirth declined as a sacrifice of their individuality. By contrast, new mothers in contemporary South Korea are navigating ever-more-intense pressure to perform multiple and contradictory roles as white-collar workers, attractive wives, and mothers who should not look like white-collar workers and wives who have given birth. In chapter 6, Hyejeong Jo shifts the lens onto young, working-class men and women, with a focus on their gendered experiences of entering the labor market after high school graduation and negotiating their transitions to adulthood in contemporary South Korea. The sense of exclusion and inadequacy these youths report reflects two key features of institutional change in South Korea: the rise of mass higher education and the erosion of a stable working class. In industrial South Korean cities like Harbortown, the site of Jo’s fieldwork, working-class men with high school degrees were able to hold secure factory jobs during the developmental era, but this is no longer possible due to the rise of temporary, irregular work and the decline of industrial jobs in general. In the context of the weakening of a traditional path to masculine citizenship via the labor market, Jo examines how in the gendered institution of the military, the system of male conscription offers

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a gender-specific path for young men as an apparent “class equalizer,” at least as a temporary measure. The young people’s stories reveal an intriguing gender differential: for young men, the institution of the military helped to mitigate the stigma of not going to college, whereas young women had no such recourse. Instead, young working-class women found themselves being harshly measured against the middle-class norm of womanhood of being both successful and beautiful, and have become increasingly pessimistic about their life chances in South Korea. Citizenship and National Membership in the Era of Global Migration

Chapters 7 and 8 examine new challenges and opportunities that the recent flow of migration to South Korea has brought to the structures of social inequality and the conception of citizenship based on ethnic nationalism. In South Korea, cross-border marriages developed in the early 1990s as a strategic response to the growth of “rural bachelors” caused by the departure of women to urban centers (Freeman 2011). To address this problem, local governments in rural South Korea sponsored marriages between South Korean men and co-ethnic Chinese (josŏnjok) women. Cross-border marriages among both rural and urban working-class men quickly increased throughout the country, and commercial matchmaking agencies expanded their business to China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Asian countries. The South Korean state has recognized marriage-migrant women as targets of immigrant integration programs, and since 2006 government and corporate funding has flooded into educational projects for these women and their families under the rubric of “multicultural families” (Lee 2008). Although the category of “multicultural families” or that of “marriagemigrant women” is commonly considered a marker of migrant status, ethnicity, and race, these two chapters show how they intersect with gender and class. Specifically, they illustrate how heteronormative ideas of gender and family separated people (and occasionally brought them together) on the basis of their ethnic standing, status, and educational background. Whereas chapter 6 demonstrates that military conscription in contemporary South Korea operates as a central institution for national belonging and normative manhood—which Seungsook Moon (2005) called “militarized citizenship”—in chapter 7, Hyun Mee Kim shows that not only was the military an exclusively male institution, it also has long bolstered the notion of Korean ethnic purity, by prohibiting multiracial (“mixed race”) Koreans from serving. This was yet another case in Korea’s history of expulsion of multiracial citizens—both symbolic and material—by overseas adoption and marginalization in society, since the lack of military service severely disadvantaged men with respect to their lack of access to social and economic benefits in the labor market. In 2009, this exclusion of

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multiracial Korean men was struck down through a constitutional challenge as a case of racial discrimination, following the principle of equality and human rights but also the need for further inclusion in the face of declining birth rates and increased global mobility of South Korean youth during the 1990s. By examining the process and the aftermath of the constitutional challenge, Kim shows that the military holds a persisting significance as a key target of mobilization as an institution defining Korean nationhood and as a path for inclusion of “multicultural” young men. Kim persuasively argues that the inclusion of multicultural youths in the male conscription since 2012 did not lead to full citizenship. After the constitutional change, scholars of the military and the media engaged in competing discourses that questioned the multicultural soldiers’ loyalty, their negative influence on solidarity among soldiers, and the problem of maladjustment on the one hand, and their value and utility in creating and deploying an advanced Korean military of global stature on the other hand. These continued discourses of race and racism about these young men simultaneously obscured and normalized their existence within the military, and even intensified the surveillance of multicultural soldiers. In chapter 8, Hae Yeon Choo further exposes the multicultural family and shows how South Korean women have responded to the new national challenge of cross-border marriages, in a differently gendered way. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, Choo shows how South Korean middle-class women took up the volunteer work in immigrant integration programs for migrant women, forging an opportunity of global self-making and a gendered path to citizenship as mothers of the nation. In these middle-class women’s view, the migrant women required benevolent help and care as part of their assimilation, which was considered integral to the reproduction of the heteronormative family and the South Korean nation. The encounter between these two types of women afforded a chance for the South Korean middle-class women to challenge the gender-based subordination that they had endured earlier in life, by transforming themselves into “maternal guardians” of migrant women. In doing so, they engaged in remaking gender and class boundaries for middle-class women by asserting their moral authority against South Korean men and other groups, including the controlling and ignorant lower class and the formal and distanced upper class. The middle class, then, appears as an interactive accomplishment in the form of gendered embodiment, rather than being predetermined by a set of economic or educational measures. Paradoxically, such boundary work of the middle-class women reified feminine domesticity by confirming it as a site of moral legitimacy, instead of challenging it a site of self-making for migrant women. The volunteers reproduced

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South Korean racial and class hierarchies that confined the migrant women and upheld the heteronormative family as a basis for membership in the Korean nation. Taken together, these chapters examine gender and class in South Korea in their current formulations and through updated analytic methodologies. There are clear continuities and legacies of the past in the present: old normativities may no longer be “normal,” but they haunt the imaginations and expectations of people contending with the contemporary world. In emphasizing South Korea’s intersectional and transnational present, we are arguing not that today’s circumstances are categori­cally different, but that changes on the ground have made plain the need for analysis that can both situate local phenomena in the context of the wider world and handle the complexity of simultaneous and dynamic changes in local social relations. The astonishing resilience and flexibility of gender and class, in fact, demands that we commit to this renewed examination. References Abelmann, Nancy. 2002. “Women, Mobility, and Desire: Narrating Class and Gender in South Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 25–53. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2003. The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Anderson, Benedict O’G. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barraclough, Ruth. 2012. Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bishop, Isabella Bird. 1897. Korea and Her Neighbors: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country. New York: Fleming H. Revell. Cheng, Sealing. 2011. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cho, Haejoang. 2002. “Living with Conflicting Subjectivities: Mother, Motherly Wife, and Sexy Woman in the Transition from ColonialModern to Postmodern Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 165–195. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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Choi, Hyaeweol. 2009. Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chong, Kelly H. 2009. Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea. Harvard East Asian Monograph 309. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Choo, Hae Yeon. 2012. “The Transnational Journey of Intersectionality.” Gender & Society 26, no. 1: 40–45. ———. 2016. Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Choo, Hae Yeon, and Myra Marx Ferree. 2010. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities.” Sociological Theory 28: 129–149. Chung, Sei-wha, ed. 1986. Challenges for Women: Women’s Studies in Korea. Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia 13: 62–82. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167. Freeman, Caren. 2011. Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gelb, Joyce. 1994. Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janelli, Roger L., and Dawnhee Yim. 2002. “Gender Construction in the Offices of a South Korean Conglomerate.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 115–140. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kendall, Laurel, ed. 2002. Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kim, Elaine H., and Chungmoo Choi, eds. 1998. Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism. London: Routledge. Kim, Eunjung. 2017. Curative Violence, Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Kim, H. M. 2005. “The Formation of Subjectivities among Korean Women Workers: A Historical Review.” In Women’s Experiences and Feminist Practices in South Korea, edited by P. Chang and E. S. Kim. Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press. Kim, Janice C. H. 2009. To Live to Work: Factory Women in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kim, Ji Soo M. 2015. The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kim, Seung-kyung. 1997. Class Struggle or Family Struggle? The Lives of Women Factory Workers in South Korea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Youngmin, and Michael J. Pettid, eds. 2012. Women and Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea: New Perspectives. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds. 2003. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, H. K. 2008. “International Marriage and the State in South Korea: Focusing on Governmental Policy.” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 1: 107–123. Lee, Jin-kyung. 2010. Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lee, June J. H. 2002. “Discourses of Illness, Meanings of Modernity: A Gendered Construction of Sŏnginbyŏng.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 55–78. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lee, So-Hee. 2002. “The Concept of Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 141–164. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lie, John. 1995. “The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-Century Korea.” Gender & Society 9: 310–327. ———. 1996. “From Agrarian Patriarchy to Patriarchal Capitalism: Gendered Capitalist Industrialization in Korea.” In Patriarchy and Economic Development: Women’s Positions at the End of the Twentieth Century, edited by Valentine M. Moghadam, 34–55. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1997. “The State as Pimp: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s.” Sociological Quarterly 38 (March): 251–263.

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———. 1998. Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. Modern Peoplehood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2015a. “The Crisis and Transformation of the Social Sciences: Constructivism, Globalization, Reflexivity in Knowledge of the Present.” Kŭkjŏng kwalli yŏn’gu 10: 1–16. ———, ed. 2015b. Multiethnic Korea? Multiculturalism, Migration, and Peoplehood Diversity in Contemporary South Korea. Transnational Korea 1. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Moon, Katharine H. S. 1997. Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Moon, Seungsook. 2002. “The Production and Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity: Reconfiguring Gender Hierarchy in Contemporary South Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 79–114. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2005. Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Politics, History, and Culture Series. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nelson, Laura C. 2000. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. Soh, Chunghee Sarah. 1993. The Chosen Women in Korean Politics: An Anthropological Study. New York: Praeger. ———. 2009. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Song, Jesook. 2014. Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea. Albany: State University of New York Press. Yea, S. 2005. “Labor of Love: Filipina Entertainers’ Narratives of Romance and Relationships with the GIs in the US Military Camp Towns in Korea.” Women’s Studies International Forum 28: 456–472. Yoo, Theodore Jun. 2008. The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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TWO

Changelings and Cinderellas: Class In/equality, Gendered Social Im/mobility, and Post-Developmentalism in Contemporary South Korean Television Dramas

JIN-KYUNG LEE

Many South Koreans have called their country the “Republic of Drama” (Dŭrama konghwaguk) for their enduring and avid love of television dramas. Since the very beginning of the country’s television history in the 1960s, TV dramas have consistently placed two themes at the center of their representations of South Korea: the rich and the poor side by side and changing sexual and romantic mores. However, the substance and content of these intersecting issues of class and gender have evolved vastly, nearly beyond recognition, since the dawning of the age of television dramas (Kim 2012; Kim 2013).1 This chapter explores the interconnections among three issues as formulated by contemporary TV dramas: class inequality, the gendering of social mobility or immobility (hereafter im/mobility), and post-developmentalism as a phantasmagoric and yet tangible ideological impetus and effect in contemporary South Korea. To begin the chapter, I will briefly contextualize the contemporary historical moment by tracing the intimate relations between class equality and 1  The two most popular topics for television dramas in the earlier decades were the class gap and male infidelity. The stories of infidelity eventually became narratives of divorce in the 1990s and later. Kim Han Sang (2013) argues that the work of one of the most successful and popular TV drama authors, Kim Su-hyŏn (who was vastly influential and progressive in terms of gender and sexuality issues), has been excluded from the larger scholarly efforts in rethinking gender, patriarchy, and women because feminist scholars have not taken the genre of television dramas seriously.

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development, first to the beginning of the colonial period (the 1900s and 1910s), and then to the period of accelerated industrialization (the 1970s and 1980s) in South Korea. Then, I will turn to the main topic of this chapter, the ways in which one of the most influential cultural forms, television drama, has engaged with the issue of class in its intersectionality with gender in the last ten years or so, between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s. In the heart of the chapter, I will argue that contemporary South Korean television dramas’ treatment of class-gender in/equality and ­social im/­mobility is implicitly premised upon what I redefine as post-­ developmentalism, as a historically and culturally specific ideological force that has emerged from developmentalism as one of the most naturalized ideologies to have propelled South Korea forward in the last century. I will argue that television dramas not only represent South Korea’s postindustrial and post-developmental condition but also serve to produce post-­ developmentalism as an ideology. By “representation” I mean that television dramas as a mass medium and cultural products go beyond the hard and fast distinction between “reality” and “fiction.” They reflect and refract the very real forces present in South Korean society at all levels, from economic changes, government policies (and the ideologies underpinning them), and cultural elites who produce dramas, to everyday consumers, while simultaneously and conversely (re)shaping the political unconscious and consciousness of the South Korean public. The first two sections of this part of the chapter link the contemporary South Korean versions of two archetypal plots, those of “changelings” and Cinderellas, and the ways in which they deal with the hardening of the class divide and diminishing social mobility in postindustrial contemporary South Korea. Whereas the Cinderella plot (“I will find myself a rich man!”) deals with the issues of class via gender and gender via class, the changeling, or switched-atbirth, plot deals with the issue of class (“I will find myself a rich parent!”) within each respective gender, again with implications for the intersection of gender and class. The last section explores the genre’s representation and use of space in relation to post-developmentalism as a national and global strategy for South Korea. I end the chapter with a conclusion discussing class struggle and the future of South Korean television dramas. Class, Equality, and Developmentalism in the Colonial and Industrializing Eras Through the transition from the Patriotic Enlightenment Period (1905–1910) to the first decade after the annexation of Korea as a Japanese colony (1910– 1919), the most powerful ideologies imported from the West via Japan were liberalism and its attendant concepts of capitalist economy, development,

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and industrialization. They were also necessarily entwined with the prevailing ideologies of imperialism and Social Darwinism, whose logic was implicitly and sometimes explicitly accepted by colonial intellectuals. The largely unquestioned notions of capitalist economy and development were also linked to the more fundamental liberal politico-philosophical notions of the individual and equality. In this period, “yangban-ism” came under attack: yangban-ism is a neologism from the early colonial period, designed to critique the premodern status system (Schmid 2002).2 Socioeconomic equality, somewhat vaguely conceived after the fashion of original European liberal thought, came to be designated as a means to survive as an ethnonational collective in the Social Darwinist world by realizing the potential economic value of each member for capitalization. Socioeconomic equality was considered a prerequisite for economic development yet also for the eventual independence of Korea. In post-liberation South Korea since 1945, when the collective dream of developing economically as an independent nation-state became a reality, political opinions divided as to how to conceive of the relation between class equality on the one hand and development and modernization on the other. Throughout the rapid industrialization from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, the successive authoritarian regimes operated on the premise that economic equality and economic development were mutually exclusive: economic equality had to be sacrificed to achieve modernization for the nation as a whole. However, leftist nationalist dissidents mounted their activism and social movements on the premise that economic equality and justice not only are a possible goal alongside developmental progress but in fact must be mandated by economic development. The leftist nationalist camp did not question developmentalism per se, but rather they promoted the equitable distribution of wealth and class equality through the gains of economic development. Since coming out of the International Monetary Fund crisis of the late 1990s, South Korea, I would argue, has been rapidly moving toward a postindustrial economy under the state’s concerted efforts from the 2000s to the mid-2010s. With rather visible success in such sectors as cellular phone and other information-technology industries, cosmetics, fashion, tourism, and pop culture, in addition to maintaining the market share in heavy industries such as automobile, shipbuilding, and chemicals, the South Korean economy overall is continuing to expand its presence across the globe. Developmentalism, therefore, as a foundational state ideology and an ongoing economic policy that orchestrates the national economy as a whole, is very much alive and well. What I am calling post-developmentalism 2 

Yangban refers to the aristocracy of premodern Chosŏn Korea.

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in contemporary South Korea has two dimensions that may seem somewhat contradictory but are in fact complementary (Rahnema 1997; Esteva 2010). First, being thoroughly and historically rooted in developmentalism, South Korean post-developmentalism is a set of practices, policies, and ideologies that push for further economic growth and domination. In other words, post-developmentalism is an ever-renewing, revitalized, and readjusted version of developmentalism. Second, post-developmentalism, I argue, is a particular set of mentalities and their underlying ideologies, a belief in economic equality as a fait accompli coupled with a disavowal of class polarity. South Korean leftist elites (progressive media, activists, and scholars) agree that the entrenched right-wing governing establishment and its neoliberal capitalism have only deepened the class division rather than “curing” inequality, as some have claimed, in contemporary South Korea. This worsening economic inequality is easily demonstrated with the statistical data that show the contradictions of the ever-growing wealth of the super elites, the shrinking middle class, and the swelling underclass. I situate my argument about the linkage between television dramas and contemporary South Korean post-developmentalism in this specific context, examining the dramas produced from the mid-to-late 2000s, when the conservative government of Lee Myung-bak took over from his predecessor Roh Moo-hyun’s progressive but ineffectual administration, to the present, 2018, one year after the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, a daughter of the military dictator Park Chung Hee, the father of South Korean development. Post-Developmentalism and Contemporary South Korean Television Dramas During the era of authoritarian developmentalism under Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo-hwan, television dramas were a key element in the larger cultural sphere, often supporting and promoting the regimes by entertaining and indoctrinating their audiences wittingly, unwittingly, or begrudgingly. Some of the dramas of the era also, just as often, incited the crowds in their living rooms into progressive and transgressive emotions, of which the state clearly did not approve. State censorship began targeting dramas that featured these story lines, behaviors, and emotions, which exposed marital infidelities, anti-Confucian sexual mores, lack of filial bonds, conspicuous consumption, and other subject matter that “created tensions between classes” (Kim 2012). The master narrative for the authoritarian state, which forged an exclusive relation to the ongoing “success” of economic development, was, naturally, the rags-to-riches story. The myth of

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developmentalism depended, at least partially, on the popular cultural creation of these myths of personal economic rise. Although the television dramas of the authoritarian era were almost exclusively domestically consumed, since the early 2000s South Korea television dramas, along with popular music, have become a major export item. Koreans today widely and proudly accept the fact that South Korea exports cultural products, since it represents another mark of the country’s development. In explaining this phenomenal and completely surprising overseas demand for Korean pop-cultural products, some scholars have theorized that developing countries in Asia and elsewhere have embraced South Korea as a model of successful development, imagining, projecting, and living their futures through South Korean popular culture (Abelmann and Shin 2012). The exportability of television dramas has long been a structuring element of their production in multiple ways such as the casting of actors and the choices of locations, characters, plots, and so forth. The implied overseas audiences in the developing regions and their invisible co-authorship in the production of the genre relationally establishes South Korea as a post-developmental culture, economy, and nation-state. In this way, South Korean TV dramas have become a silent but very powerful crusader for development worldwide.3 In the rest of the chapter, I argue that South Korean popular culture—in particular, television dramas—performs a particular ideological labor in influencing South Koreans to disavow the reality of class polarity while promoting the myth of a post-class, post-development society. This popculture genre operates largely as a national allegory in the postnational and globalized network of production and consumption. TV drama is arguably one of the few forums in which the issue of class difference is squarely faced and constantly addressed. However, this confrontation with class is necessarily and always sublated and overcome, most frequently by means of three mechanisms: (1) the switched-at-birth plot, which phantasmagorically portrays the blood relations of working-class protagonists to plutocratic elite families; (2) the Cinderella plot, which displaces the issue of class polarity onto the heterosexual romance and its attendant nexus of affect, gender/sexuality, and family/kinship relations in cross-class marriages; 3 

In other words, it is the “post-ness” of post-developmentalism that the audiences in the developing world find attractive as their representations of the future. While I am making the specific connection in the South Korean context between this historical shift from developmentalism to post-developmentalism on the one hand and the cultural shift from the production and consumption of the rags-to-riches stories to those of the changelings and Cinderella plots on the other, to some extent the changeling and Cinderella motifs are, of course, universal and enduring archetypes. And as such, they do well abroad, along with many other types of storylines of South Korean TV dramas.

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and (3) the uses and representations of space as an integral and interpellatory part of the narrative and multimedial dimensions of television dramas. In the next two sections I discuss two popular plots, “switched-at-birth” and Cinderella, and how the contemporary South Korean versions of these archetypal stories relate to the country’s post-developmentalism. Aside from star power, plot is probably the most important aspect of the TV drama medium, in contrast to other genres, such as the novel, in which characters and narrators become embodiments of social and ideological discourses, as Bakhtin theorized. In TV dramas, the plot drives the narrative forward and characters become functions of the plot, each playing a relational role in the larger overall scheme of the narrative. In contrast to the novel, a dialogic site of contending ideologies in which fully developed characters embody various conflicting and opposing ideological positions, in TV dramas the plot functions as an exteriorized version of socially constructed desires, wishes, and fantasies: it embodies social relations and ultimately ideology. Unlike the novel, the TV drama genre resolves conflicts, an illustration of the genre’s ideological monologism (Brooks 1992; Bakhtin 1983). Plotting “We-Have-All-Been-Switched-at-Birth”

The unofficial slogan of the drama production team for KBS, South Korea’s government-affiliated and largest TV network, during the industrializing era, was to “tell only success stories, protagonists’ victorious successes” (Kim 2012). Audiences did not tire of these stories of a poor young man’s rise to fortune and power, and the prevalence of the “self-made man” plot continued throughout the 1990s and even up to the mid-2000s, when South Korea was still able to dream together for a more affluent future. The 1990s was an era of gradual transition from a military dictatorship and developing economy into a liberal democracy with a more self-assured sense of its status as a newly industrialized nation. It is not surprising that the 1990s saw an explosion of these narratives of self-made men, because it was only then that audiences could look back on the past with collective nostalgia and pride and look forward to the future with hope (Kim 2012).4 This master plot began to fade away in the mid-to-late 2000s. 4 

The representative TV dramas from the 1980s and the 1990s with the self-made man plot are as follows: Sarang kwa yamang (Love and ambition, 1987); Pulsae (Fire bird, 1987); Yamang ŭi 25-shi (The twenty-fifth hour of ambition, 1983); Asŭp’alt’ŭ Sanai (Men of the asphalt, 1995); Chŏlmŭni ŭi yangji (A young man’s place in the sun, 1995); Ch’ŏt sarang (First love, 1997); Chŏngch’un ŭi tŏt (Snare of young love, 1999); and Seoul ŭi tal (The moon over Seoul, 1994). Some of these dramas are indeed critical of the conglomerates, whereas others are more celebratory of their CEOs, who serve as models for the male protagonists to different degrees. All of them feature working-class boys or brothers who make good, with the subplot of their

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Against the backdrop of the self-made man as the quintessential developmentalist plot, the “changeling” or switched-at-birth plot emerges in the post-developmentalist era. This mythical transposability of babies and birth identities ironically points to the fixity of socioeconomic positions in contemporary South Korea. The proliferation of the switched-at-birth fables in postindustrial, neoliberal South Korea translates the reality of shrinking social mobility into the fantasy of higher-status births, thus exposing the liberal, democratic, capitalist notions of equality of opportunity and social mobility through education, merit, and hard work as officially defunct, if they ever were working premises or realities for South Koreans. The plot surreptitiously brings the audience back to the era of inherited status, ­although, at the same time, the switched-at-birth plot places the quintessential modernity of “class,” that is, socioeconomic changeability, at tension with the primordial and universal accidentalness/fatefulness of birth. The switched-at-birth plot is a contemporary Korean variation of the folktale motif of changelings.5 Perhaps one of the best-known versions of the folk motif is Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper, among innumerable variations of the essentially same core narrative composition. I base my arguments about the switched-at-birth plot on seven TV dramas produced during the last several years. In order of their broadcast, they are Eden ŭi tongjjok (East of Eden, 2008), T’aeyang ŭi yŏja (Women of the sun, 2008), Sindelela maen (Cinderella man, 2009),6 Puja ŭi t’ansaeng (Birth of a rich man, 2010), Panjjak panjjak pitnanŭn (Twinkle, twinkle, 2011), Noran poksuch’o (Ice Adonis, 2012), and Kŭm nawara ttukttak! (I summon you, gold!, 2013). Two of them, East of Eden and Birth of a Rich Man, feature male protagonists. Women of the Sun, Twinkle, Twinkle, Ice Adonis, and I Summon You, Gold! center on female changelings. East of Eden7 and Twinkle, Twinkle tell the stories of two babies literally switched at birth in romantic triangles with rich girls, daughters of industrial families, and working-class sweethearts. These stories gradually dwindle as we move into the 2000s, but they do not disappear completely. The last notable drama featuring this storyline appears as late as 2005, Yŏngung sidae (The age of heroes). This story pits two male protagonists who are modeled after Yi Pyŏng-ch’ŏl, the founder of Samsung, and Chŏng Chu-yŏng, the founder of Hyundai. The real-life stories of these historical industrial giants of South Korea are indeed classic rags-toriches tales. Toward the end of the 1990s, we also begin to see a few female versions of this plot, i.e., stories of self-made women CEOs. 5  I would like to thank Stephanie Jed for informing me about the changeling tales in the European folktale tradition. These changelings stories were often allegories that try to deal with births of disabled babies. 6  Cinderella Man is closer to The Prince and the Pauper than the switched-at-birth plot, but, as I said, they are versions of each other. 7  East of Eden, a throwback to the 1990s, is something of an exception to the contemporary post-developmental pattern of the other six dramas. The contrast between East of Eden and

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the hospital, whereas Women of the Sun and Ice Adonis pit two protagonists who are sisters (adoptive sisters and stepsisters, respectively) against each other. In I Summon You, Gold!, one twin sister is adopted into a very wealthy family, and the other one, into a working-class family. Birth of a Rich Man tells the story of a boy, born out of wedlock, in search of his long-lost chaebol father while contending with his doppelganger, a romantic and business rival, who may or may not be his half brother. There are many more contemporary TV dramas that appropriate, adapt, and draw on the changeling theme either as the main plotline or as one of the subplots. We also encounter various permutations of the more archetypal changeling plot. We may call them “quasi-changeling” plots, and they can be very easily inserted into other kinds of plots in which two male or female doppelganger protagonists are at odds with each other, locked in a struggle for power and love. I chose these seven dramas as the most well-known and popular examples that generally adhere closely to the archetypal version of the switched-at-birth story line. We can summarize the basic issue at stake as a confrontation of two individuals in which one occupies the position of power and privilege while the other does not, due to an unjust usurpation or an accidental transposition of the doppelganger protagonists. As I will discuss, this adversarial relation between the “twin” protagonists most often pivots around their respective assumption of moral good and evil and concludes with the eventual triumph of good over evil. As Abelmann has noted (2003), the melodramatic genre, beyond the notions of the individual, interiority, and psychology, embodies the social coding of the issues of class and gender. In postindustrial South Korea, as the self-made man plot has all but disappeared, leaving no “heroic” male protagonists for male audiences to identify with, the audiences for the genre became even more feminized than before. The only type of TV drama that still draws male audiences is the historical drama set in premodern Korea, which features larger-than-life historical figures, such as kings, generals, and founders of dynasties. The self-made man, functioning as a national allegory, now lives only in the remote mythic premodern past, rather than in the recent mythic modern memory as it did in the 1980s and 1990s. In short, the past notions of class, that is, upwardly mobile working-class men who allegorized the nation—did not survive beyond the developmentalist era in the TV drama genre. In the post-developmentalist era, TV dramas conceptualize men and the male gender only as the (always already) economic elites of the nation, most often as third-generation chaebol men, excluding working-class men from the frame altogether. Therefore, in the the rest speaks to the transition from the 1990s, with its vestiges of the developmental era, to the post-developmental mid-2000s.

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contemporary changeling plot, the class division is conceived largely within the female gender as a matter of female “twins” who have crossed the class border by being “switched” and will have crossed over to the other side again by the end of the story. Put another way, the feminine allegorizes the working class. This particular narrative of social climbing takes place as a Manichaean struggle in which the complex social and economic realities of class division have been translated into a moral dichotomy, and the good “twin” will eventually reclaim her (or less often, his) rightful place of privilege and wealth from the evil “twin.”8 The plot repeatedly places the good twin (born rich but raised poor) in the position of being conspired against or of being falsely accused of wrongdoings, often by the evil twin (born poor but raised rich). And this moral struggle between the poor (good) twin and the rich (evil) twin takes on the semblances of class struggle. The good/poor twin’s ordeal, often taking the form of a “revenge” drama within the plot against those who have maligned him or her, allegorizes the socioeconomic odds that are stacked against the underclass. The good twin’s social climbing as “rebirth” is an ambivalent and problematic allegory of an economically stratified society in which hard work and merit are rewarded and yet simultaneously discounted and disavowed by the very deserving hero’s or heroine’s “return” to his or her family of birth. This class-revenge drama does register and thus politicize the existing class polarity while simultaneously obfuscating it via the fantasy of the working class’s blood ties to the elite class. The “moralization” of political economy and social division and the attendant displacement of politics with ethics is unique to neither this plot nor the TV drama genre, and one might argue that this displacement is in fact the very essence of the popular cultural narrative as a genre. The switched-at-birth plot as a crystallized form of this tendency to simultaneously moralize and depoliticize speaks for its post-developmentalism. Because having the lost protagonist find her birth family of privilege and wealth is a foregone conclusion of the switched-at-birth plot, the narrative necessarily begs the question of “heredity versus environment.” That is, does this archetypal plot associate moral goodness and merit with birth (endorsing biological essentialism) or with environment (favoring social constructivism)? Most often, the poor protagonists (born rich) almost always embody good, whereas the rich protagonists (born poor) embody evil 8 

What constitutes moral “good” combines personality traits and traditional virtues, such as kindness, self-sacrificing altruism, perseverance, work ethic, and filial piety, along with a sense of justice. Most often, despite some narrative twists, this role is given to the “poor twin,” born rich, while the “evil twin,” marked by unkind behavior, selfishness, and a lack of work ethnic and filial piety and/or ruthless greed for money and power, is the one born poor but raised rich.

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or at least the morally problematic. Among the seven dramas I mentioned, six of them (East of Eden, Women of the Sun, Ice Adonis, I Summon You, Gold!, Cinderella Man, Birth of a Rich Man) have this structure. The only exception, Twinkle, Twinkle, is also essentially a version of this formula, since the “bad” twin (born rich but raised poor) has been all along an extremely good twin until she discovers that her position has been usurped. The switched-atbirth narrative necessarily affirms the essentialist linkage between “moral good” and “good blood,” and yet at the same time it also asserts the forces of the environment as positive influences, such as overcoming hardship and poverty, which strengthen the protagonist as a person, and the love and goodness of the adoptive working-class parents who raised her. Even if the plot ends up upholding a version of a status system, “class by heritage,” by restoring the protagonist to her “rightful” origin, thus disavowing the working class as a political collective, the plot must affirm working-class people and “their” work ethic via this narrative formula that combines the contradictory ideas of social im/mobility and inherited birth. This fantasy of the working class’s rich birth parents does acknowledge the working class’s actual existence, their material presence, and their lived reality in contemporary South Korea. Poverty, always paired with work ethic, is defined dynamically and relationally as an ethical good that is deserving. It is a temporary virtue, practiced by the poor changeling, that is not yet recognized as such until the appearance of the rich birth parents. Likewise, the state of poverty is an evil that must be escaped from, just as wealth as the end goal represents a moral good as the upshot of the Manichaean struggle. Poverty as a general state or a class reality in a socioeconomic structure is not to be annihilated, but is a position to be occupied, ultimately, by those who are undeserving, that is, the unethical. Conversely, the changeling plot asserts that wealth, shaped through this narrative movement, is an ethical good. So, the narrative rehearses this “false” and yet “real” movement of the poor twin (born rich) to her “origin,” a position of wealth. It is a false movement because this protagonist is destined to move up the ladder via biological ties and yet it is real social climbing in the sense that she (raised poor) has to work hard to “earn” her inheritance. This narrative at once reflects the reality of impossibility of social climbing in postindustrial, postdevelopmental Korea while giving us the experience of fantastic mobility through the continual narrative reenactment of our unconscious wish that we have all been switched at birth, that is, the fateful contingency, and the contingent fatefulness, of our birth. Post-Developmental Cinderellas

In the South Korean television drama genre, arguably the most common and popular plot is the “Cinderella” plot. It is not an exaggeration to say

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that almost all of the dramas are some version of the Cinderella story or contain elements of it. The Cinderella plot is so popular that it has generated various offshoot versions, such as “Jummarella” stories and male Cinderella narratives.9 The term “Jummarella” combines “Jumma,” from the word ajumma, with its pejorative connotation for middle-aged housewives, and “rella” from “Cinderella.” The Jummarella plot deals with a newly divorced middle-aged heroine who soon finds a career and a new prince. Although the Cinderella plot is truly a universal heterosexual romantic archetypal narrative of gendered social climbing, and South Korean popular culture is no exception in subscribing to it, I would argue that this archetypal plot has mutated into a historically specific narrative-dramatic form in the last decade or so, reflecting, articulating, and being shaped by the recent social and economic changes in contemporary Korea. I base my argument on six examples, all of them mega hits, some more wildly popular than others. In chronological order of their broadcast, they are Nae irŭm ŭn Kim Samsun (My lovely Samsun, 2005), K’ŏp’i p’ŭrinsŭ che 1-ho chŏm (Coffee Prince, 2007), Kkot poda namja (Boys over flowers, 2009), Sik’ŭrit kadŭn (Secret garden, 2010), Sangsokjadŭl (The heirs, 2013), and P’ungmun ŭro tŭrŏtsso (Heard it through the grapevine, 2015). In order to understand the contemporary South Korean Cinderella plot properly, we have to go back to the days of accelerated industrialization made possible by an unholy alliance between the authoritarian regimes and the growing number of chaebols. The growth of chaebols can be traced back to the post–Korean War era under Syngman Rhee’s dictatorship, but most of them came of age during the 1970s and 1980s under the military rule of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo-hwan. It has been decades since South Korean conglomerates claimed the national economy as their very own, and the nation’s economic growth and the expansion of chaebols became inextricably linked. The private lives of their associated families always provided fodder for popular culture, especially for the television drama genre. In more recent years, as their third- and fourth-generation descendants have inherited the ownership and management of these large multinational companies, the further entrenchment of the rule of these economic oligarchical clans has become obvious, sparking ongoing critique and debate about the conglomerates and their relationship to the national economy as well as their role in the larger governing structure of South Korea. 9  To name a few popular Cinderella stories, we have, in the order of their broadcasts, the following dramas: Nae saengae majimak sŭk’andŭl (The last scandal of my life, 2008), Sarang ŭn amuna hana (Love is not for everyone, 2009), Sinderela maen (Cinderella man, 2009), Yŏkjŏnŭi yŏwang (Queen of reversals, 2010), Pulgul ŭi myŏnŭri (Indomitable daughter-in-law, 2011), and Ko Pong-shil ajumma kuhagi (Saving Mrs. Go Bong-shil, 2011).

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In the summer of 2015, the biggest national news of South Korea was that of the power struggle between two brothers for the control of the fifth largest conglomerate of South Korea, the Lotte Group. The progressive media pointed to the anomaly of the family-run South Korean conglomerates’ management style that dispensed with professional CEOs, the consequent managerial ineffectiveness and corruption, and the ill effects of such organization on the economy and the nation’s overall well-being. The media implicitly related this uniquely Korean feature of the economy to the nation’s rising economic inequity. The daily report on the Lotte Group’s succession story reminded the Korean public of the verisimilitude of the Lotte Group’s real-life family struggle to the fictional representations of the conglomerate clans in television dramas. One of the weekly news magazines published a flowchart of the familial relations by marriage among the top fifty South Korean conglomerates and prominent political families, simultaneously validating and refuting the fictional representations of the conglomerate clans and their kinship relations (So 2015). In both the mainstream media and the tabloids, it has been a while since the term chaebol samse (thirdgeneration chaebol) has gained currency.10 Over and beyond the realm of business, finance, and capital, this appellation conveys how entrenched the power of these economic elite clans has become and implies their persistent domination in the foreseeable future of South Korean society and culture. In the Cinderella plot, the third-generation chaebol man is a fixture without whom our heroine could not exist. There are varying types of chaebol samse characters, but the most important distinction of this generation of male protagonists is the fact that they inherited wealth and definitely did not create it, as had the previous generations of male protagonists in the industrializing eras. And as such, in the Cinderella plot these male characters are often portrayed as undergoing the usual kind of personal development. First presented as lacking a work ethic, cynical, heartless, selfish, and insecure, the chaebol samse character is often a womanizing playboy. He is uninterested in business and thus incompetent, and then, through his encounter with and pursuit of the working-class heroine, he becomes hardworking, capable, and even sympathetic to ordinary people. So, the Cinderella plot relies on this particular new elite male character, which speaks to, on the one hand, a certain kind of economic stability 10  A recent film, Bet’erang (Veteran, 2015), directed by Ryoo Seung-wan, one of the highest grossing films in South Korean history, deals with a criminal investigation of a powerful conglomerate and its family owners. The portrayal of a third-generation chaebol male, played by Yoo Ah-in, as infinitely entitled economically and all-but-omnipotent in his collusive connections with the government, seems to have helped to reflect, and find an outlet for (albeit in the cultural sphere), the growing resentment felt by the South Korean public about the oligarchical and plutocratic nature of South Korea’s mode of governance.

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and national pride that is linked to the conglomerates and their success in the global economy, which the character conveys through not only his super-affluent lifestyle but also his confidence and the aura attached to the length of his family’s enterprise and wealth, that is, the aura of the “old” new money of South Korea. On the other hand, this new elite male protagonist and his arrogance, and the ambience of the Cinderella plot (the fabulousness of his wealth and the magical-ness of his existence), reproduced for the audience’s consumption, are precisely the very index of how entrenched the conglomerates’ economic privilege and economic dictatorship have become in South Korea. The more real the TV drama’s portrayal of a third-generation heir to a conglomerate fortune is, the more unreal the Cinderella plot is. Put another way, the more fantastic the Cinderella plot is in contemporary South Korea, the more delicious and precious it is. The more despair in the economic reality, the more seductive is the Cinderella plot. I argue that the “poor girl eventually marries a rich boy” plot advances what I am calling post-developmentalism. This plot begins by posing the class division, with a poor girl meeting a rich boy, and ends with them closing the gap by their marriage. Given this set narrative development, the portrayal of working-class poverty in the genre from the very beginning has always been mythical, as the audience is already firmly and prospectively cognizant and convinced of the eventual overcoming of poverty. In this sense, each drama with such a plot embodies this developmental trajectory and, therefore, the genre embodies post-developmentalism. Post-developmentalism relies singularly on the particular intersecting of gender and class (i.e., working-class women and elite men as protagonists) via their romantic relations. The genre reformulates the class system and socioeconomic mobility exclusively and in mythic perpetuity as a matter of heterosexual marriage-kinship relations. In this scenario of a working-class heroine’s upward mobility, she simultaneously performs the role of a fabulated trans-class subject. The heroine possesses nothing, no capital of any kind, little education, and no family background to speak of, but she has good looks, spunkiness and smarts, an indefatigable attitude, and an unbeatable work ethic. Somehow all of her personal traits, her material privation, and her economic disfranchisement come together as her inexplicable and mysterious charisma to the male protagonist, who is, quite invariably, a third-generation heir to one of South Korea’s unnamed conglomerates. What these working-class heroines represent to female viewers is the sheer power of their romantic and sexual desirability. The generic and mythological trans-class “woman” in this context is an archetype who was once stripped of social status, economic power, and cultural and educational capital and then “regains” all of it and

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more through her class-crossing. It is this magical power of the feminine that these heroines exercise over their male protagonists, rendering the most powerful men completely powerless, left wondering to themselves what came over them. In the popular 2010 drama Secret Garden, the male protagonist is astounded by such a working-class heroine, dumbfounded by his own feelings for her: “Why is it that every moment with this woman is a fairy tale? Who on earth is this woman [Yi yŏjaga nugu igillae]?” The male protagonist’s social status and economic power are pitted against his sexual desire and romantic love for the heroine and against his ability to eventually commit himself to marriage. The purity and absoluteness of his love for her must override and overcome everything else—his family’s objections, her lack of social and economic standing, and, most importantly, her total lack of interest in him. In this emplotment, the heterosexual masculine gender stands in for the socioeconomic power structure and the state of post-development, and the feminine gender allegorizes the working class, who will have undergone development and experienced social mobility by the end of the narrative. The happy ending—the consummation of the romantic relationship through a marriage—embodies multiple resolutions and processes at the same time, that is, fictional class mobility (and yet imagined, thus lived as real), instant development through time travel via the dramatic time, and emotional closure and happiness. During the era of South Korea’s accelerated industrialization, this gender-­class crossing as a representational framework was often reversed: working-class male protagonists would marry elite female characters for money and power, abandoning their working-class sweethearts. In those dramas, the masculine gender allegorized the nation’s subordinate position: the categories of (male) gender, (working) class, and (androcentric) nation coincided. The working-class male protagonist’s economic success through hard work and merit and his social climbing through marriage represented the nation’s developmentalist trajectory. In a contemporary mutation of the genre, in which elite male protagonists are metaphors for South Korea’s post-development and female characters are allegories for the underclass, the (feminine) gender performs the ideological labor of creating the illusion of post-developmental classlessness through the developmentalist narrative embedded in working-class women’s socioeconomic upward mobility. The category of (masculine and feminine) gender, defined narrowly as heterosexual romantic love and marriage, functions to obfuscate class polarization by way of allegorizing class: gender becomes class. Through this allegorizing of the feminine gender as class, the working class necessarily achieves the phantasmagoria of elite privilege. The trans-class and supra-class (compulsorily heterosexual) women’s magical “empowerment” to cause romantic and sexual omnipotence in men

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serves not women, but the causes of the nation defined as elite, male, and post-developmentalist. One of the most recent examples of the Cinderella plot, Heard It through the Grapevine, both very popular and critically acclaimed, is probably the most subversive one to date, an anti-Cinderella narrative. A high school boy, chaebol samse, falls in love with a girl from a lower-middle-class background. He accidentally impregnates her, and she gives birth to a baby boy. Despite her humble background, the chaebol family quickly grasps that her intelligence holds an enormous potential for success. They welcome her and her family and try to interpellate her into their order, the world of South Korea’s governing economic and political elites. The story concludes with the young couple’s rejection of this option: they voluntarily disinherit themselves from the boy’s family’s fortune and power. Clearly this plotline is a throwback to the 1980s student movement in which the ultimate political (and politically correct) act was for those who were privileged to give up their privilege and join the struggle of the masses. Interestingly, South Korean viewers of the mid-2000s seem to have rejected this harkening back to the 1980s as just that: a past irrelevant to the present. A newspaper article reports how the audiences, “netizens,” negatively reacted to, and specifically expressed their “hatred” of, one of the supporting characters with ties to the 1980s student-labor movement (Chŏng 2015).11 While I sympathize with the reporter’s shock at and condemnation of the South Korean viewing public’s inability to recognize themselves in their true image (the proud history of struggle in the 1980s and their persistent working-class status), we could read this “conservative” reaction precisely as their acute assessment of the reality of contemporary South Korea and as an expression of their agency that puts more stock in the reality of the fantasy. We have a more critical look at the all-but-vanished class mobility in a recent film, titled Alice in the Land of Hard Work (Sŏngshilhan nara ŭi aelisŭ, directed by Ahn Gooc-jin), released in 2015. It darkly and comedically portrays the ironclad social and economic strictures that (re)produce poverty, no matter how hard “Alice” works to climb the ladder. The allusion to Alice in Wonderland in the title works in the film to represent the invisible, unknowable yet powerful, palpable forces of the socioeconomic order in the mode of even darker magical realism. The two seemingly opposing perspectives, the “cruel optimism” of the television dramas, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s notion, on the one hand, and the tragic critical pessimism of Alice in the Land of Hard Work, on the other hand, in fact mirror, complement, and dovetail with each other. 11 

I would like to thank Hae Yeon Choo for referring me to this article.

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Dramatic Spaces and Post-Developmentalism

Since the mid-1970s, when South Korea began to feel the effects of industrialization and economic development, TV dramas have become probably the most important public cultural space in which the spectacles of the emergent consumer and leisure culture of the growing middle and upper classes could be showcased and shared with the rest of the population. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the authoritarian government censorship consistently targeted the extravagant lifestyles of the rich being displayed in television dramas as “creating class tensions” (Kim 2012). In the post-authoritarian era, the material manifestations of the lives of the rich and powerful continues to be an essential ingredient of all successful TV dramas. With much less government censorship as well as a much larger percentage of the population feeling confident in their middle-class-ness, I believe, conspicuous consumption and super-wealth causes fewer problems and more enjoyment as a requisite backdrop for the making of an effectual fantasy. In this section, I focus on the representation of spaces, as an overarching and key factor, in the production of post-developmental television dramas. Whereas space, or more broadly mise-en-scène, as an element of storytelling looms large in any theatrical or cinematic context, I argue that space in contemporary South Korean television dramas functions as an instrument of trans-temporality and post-historicity, that is, as a post-­ developmentalist ideological apparatus. I will briefly discuss two types of spaces, private and public, that are central to the genre. The intended effect of the genre’s incorporation of various public spaces, especially those that are spectacular and luxurious, into its narratives are not difficult to imagine. Beautiful natural landscapes and luxury resorts and hotels in such locations as settings of TV dramas have brought significant tourist revenue to the South Korean economy. TV dramas, the vast majority of which are set in the South Korean capital, Seoul, also feature various kinds of public spaces, the usual points of attraction, such as ancient palaces, iconic architecture, monuments old and new, museums, and amusement parks. Another type of public space that appears in all narratives is the commercial space of cafés, restaurants, and department stores. These public spaces of conspicuous consumption are most often, if not always, swanky, posh, and luxurious, suggesting silently, and yet loudly, the super-modern-ness or hyper-modern-ness of contemporary South Korea. These spectacular spaces of luxury and hyper-modernity function as a conscious and subliminal means of attracting viewers, enhancing their pleasure and ultimately having them experience and occupy the stories.

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Another kind of space routinely featured in the genre that is even more wondrously spectacular is the “private” space of the homes of super-rich (often male) protagonists. Among numerous examples of museum-like, hyper-modern interior spaces of male protagonists’ mansions, we could consider, for example, Secret Garden, for our purpose. The “private” domestic space in the genre is of course a “public” space to which viewers have virtual access via television as a mass medium giving them an “illusion” of entry into the world of the nation’s global economic super-elite. And these spaces become consumable, suturable, and thus “wearable” (Hansen 2006), as audiences move through the private, domestic spaces of the homes. In the context of contemporary regional globalization in Asia, the hyper-modernity of these public and private spaces functions as a post-developmentalist ideological apparatus, interpellating South Koreans into the myth of the post-­ development of South Korea, separating South Korea from less-developed parts of Asia and disciplining the yet-to-be-mobilized workforce where the TV dramas are exported, consumed, experienced, and lived. Conclusion Class Struggle as Personal Revenge: Affect, Emotional Porn, and the Structure of Ideological Labor

I have argued that two types of plot in recent television dramas articulate a particular socioeconomic contradiction of South Korea’s post-­developmental status, that is, decreased social mobility and increased emotional need for the fantasy of mobility. The switched-at-birth and Cinderella plots embody this particular contradiction proportionally and correlationally; the more impossible social mobility is in reality, the more extravagant the fantasy has to be. In conclusion, I would like to consider another dimension of the contemporary dramas, which both manifests the post-developmentalism of South Korea and functions to produce post-­developmentalism as an ideology. If we consider both the switched-at-birth and Cinderella plots as narratives of class struggle, the narrative resolution of these plots might be summed up as class-struggle-turned-personal-revenge. The TV drama genre individualizes and personalizes (and does not collectivize and politicize) class conflicts as stories of protagonists’ victory (either by finding their rich birth parents or by marrying a rich man) over their working-class background; simultaneously, these dramas must be read, as Nancy Abelmann argues in The Melodrama of Mobility (2003), as pervading and influential narratives of social codes and ideological engineering. By “class revenge,” I mean the way in which these instances of social mobility within the plots and by extension within the genre itself are

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articulated in terms of personal revenge, and yet this very personal nature of revenge must be read as an expression of a collective class predicament. In every TV drama’s conclusion, the audience is called upon to witness the punishment of evil characters and thus the victory of good over evil. These spectacles of punishment, retribution, and restoration of justice—often accompanied by set phrases such as “If you make someone shed tears, your own eyes will shed bloody tears [Nam ŭi nun esŏ nunmulnage hamyŏon ne nun esŏnŭn p’inunmul nanda]” or “You have underestimated the power of truth [Chinsil ŭi him ŭl yatjaba poda]”—perform their ideological function precisely by emptying out content. The spectacles are what I call a “mechanism of de-ideologization.” If class conflicts are the most urgent issue that contemporary South Korean TV dramas deal with, then the most significant emotion that these narratives manufacture is pleasure derived from revenge. This particular de-ideologized emotion, revenge-derived pleasure, is what I am calling a narrative money shot in the emotional pornography that is the melodramatic genre. The genre panders to the affective-ideological needs of its audiences by offering de-ideologization of the social contexts of emotions. This de-ideologizing dimension of the spectacles of class-struggle-turned-personal revenge works because the affective structures of television dramas are asemantic. By “asemantic,” I mean that the genre’s simplicity of plot, its reductive and superficial character portraits, and its seriality that draws in the audience, enabling long-standing identification, operate together precisely to empty out the social and material meanings and realities. The audience’s identification with the “good” characters is asemantic in the sense that the social and material meanings must be stripped away in order for the audience to achieve emotional identification. The narrative development and various characters function as experiential entry points that audiences can plug themselves into for emotional identification, made possible precisely because the narrative has removed the material conditions of the production of those emotions. The affective effect is the most important part of the narrative, and this affect is pure affect, affect without meaning. This is the ideological labor that television dramas perform for the state and capital in South Korea. This “emplotment of revenge” is also an ideological re-structuring of temporality that further assists in affirming the de-politicized representation of the polarized class reality. Because of the built-in dramatic irony for the audience that comes from the inevitability of righteous revenge to take place at the end of the narrative, we might define “future” in these television dramas as a past revealed and made sense of in the present (of the narrative) or a corrective time to a past time. Therefore, the revenge plot functions as an ideological engineering of temporality first defining

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the future as predetermined through revenge in the popular cultural fictive sphere and, second, permanently and “cruelly” deferring the class mobility in the socioeconomic material sphere. The Future of Television Dramas: Multiethnic and Multicultural?

The continuing labor migration into South Korea from developing countries also testifies to South Korea’s post-developmental status. Marriage migrants and some labor migrants are featured on TV in different kinds of documentary programs, but they are almost completely excluded from TV dramas. If TV drama as a genre necessarily articulates the family-nation continuum, then this particular exclusion is indeed a sign that mainstream Korea is not ready to embrace nonethnic Korean immigrants and biracial Koreans as part of the national community. I do believe that one day—maybe later than sooner, given the nature of entrenched racism—multiethnic Koreans will have to be included in the national narratives of television dramas. It would be interesting to see how this medium and the genre will be revised in order to mediate gender, class, nation, race, and globality. The nuclear family continues to be a fundamental economic unit that in turn constitutes the national economy despite some ongoing shift toward a more individualistic turn. In this nexus of family, class, and nation, the genre of television drama becomes an interpellatory medium through which the emotion of the national populace is disciplined, instilling South Koreans with a cultural imaginary that reproduces this particular ideological narrative arrangement of class, gender, family (romantic love and marriage/kinship), and nation. The enchantment and mythology of romantic love has functioned often in other contexts as a coercive force that disguises and mystifies the relations of power (Sakai 2010). TV dramas thus offer two kinds of truth to their audiences: first, the truth of wish fulfillment and fantasy, and, second, the truth of the impossibility of wish fulfillment, the ironic truth. For either kind of truth, truth is still, nonetheless, always about fairness, reciprocity, distribution, and justice. One of the ideological effects of post-developmentalism, I would argue, is the production of abstract equality, which comes in many forms. For example, there is the equality of culture consumerism on the Internet, as the accessibility of popular culture is quite unlimited (especially in South Korea) and its physical reaches are quite totalitarian. The presumption of homogeneity among the viewing population produces a sense of affective equality among the viewers. The supra-class female audience imagined in the romantic TV melodrama genre would be another example. These equalities, similar to the kind of access offered to the masses through contemporary postmodern architectural styles dominated by the transparency of glass doors, windows, and walls, are falsely and illusorily available to those outside.

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References Abelmann, Nancy. 2003. The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Abelmann, Nancy, and Kathleen McHugh, eds. 2005. South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Abelmann, Nancy, and Jeongsu Shin. 2012. “The New (Korean) Wave: A Global Social Mobility Story—Please Look after Mom.” Korea Observer 43, no. 3: 399–418. Bakhtin, M. M. 1983. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. Brooks, Peter. 1992. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chŏng Yujin. 2015. “Dŭrama sok ‘ŭl’ ŭl kkujitnŭn ŭldŭl” [Those subordinated scold the subordinated characters in TV dramas]. Kyŏnghyang sinmun [Kyŏnghyang daily], May 1. Esteva, Gustavo. 2010. “Development.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, 1–24. London: Zed Books. Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York: Routledge. Cited in “Body,” by Bernadette Wegenstein, in Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 30. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Kim Han Sang. 2013. “Pak Chŏnghŭi chŏnggwŏn’gi kajok sŏsaŭi kyunyŏl kwa chŏhang: Kim Su-hyŏn ŭi melodŭrama rŭl chungsim ŭro” [Fissures and resistance in the family narratives during the Park Chung Hee regime: Kim Su-hyŏn’s melodramatic films]. Taedjung sŏsa yŏn’gu [Popular cultural narrative studies] 22: 283–313. Kim Hwan-p’yo. 2012. Dŭrma, Han’guk ŭl malhada [Television dramas speak Korea]. Seoul: Inmulgwa sasang. Lee, Keehyeung. 2005. “Morae Sigye: ‘Social Melodrama’ and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary South Korea.” In Abelmann and McHugh, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama, 229–245. Lee, Sung-Ae. 2015. “Lost in Liminal Space: Amnesiac and Incognizant Ghosts in Korean Drama.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 48, no. 3 (September): 125–140. Mitchell, W. J. T., and Mark B. N. Mitchell, eds. 2010. Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Rahnema, Majid. 1997. “Towards Post-Development: Searching for Signposts, a New Language and New Paradigms.” In The PostDevelopment Reader, edited by Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree, 377–403. London: Zed Books. Sachs, Wolfgang, ed. 2010. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Sakai, Naoki. 2010. “On Romantic Love and Military Violence: Transpacific Imperialism and U.S.-Japan Complicity.” In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, 205–222. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schmid, Andre. 2002. Korea between Empires, 1895–1919. New York: Columbia University Press. So Chong-sŏp. 2015. “Taehanminguk ŭn ‘kkiri kkiri’ honmaek i chumurŭnda” [Cliquish marriage relations control Republic of Korea]. Sisa jŏnŏl [Journal of current events] (July 28): 54–57. Wegenstein, Bernadette. 2010. “Body.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 30. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yang, Fang-chih Irene. 2012. “From Korean Wave to Korean Living: Meteor Garden and the Politics of Love Fantasies in Taiwan.” Korea Observer 43, no. 3 (Autumn): 419–445.

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THREE

Shrewd Entrepreneurs or Immoral Speculators? Desires, Speculation, and Middle-Class Housewives in South Korea, 1978–1996

MYUNGJI YANG

Ms. Ahn, a sixty-four-year-old retired elementary school teacher, owns an old, 45-p’yŏng apartment in the Gangnam district.1 As a solid member of the middle class, her life is quite stable and comfortable: about three million won (about 2,265 US dollars) of pension and allowance from her daughters every month ensure her financial security.2 Above all, her apartment, her only major asset, is now valued at almost two billion won. The prime location and the possibility of reconstruction in two years have made her apartment more valuable, and she believes that the price will go up to 2.3 billion won right before the reconstruction project begins.3 Although she often feels behind economically compared with her rich neighbors, who own multiple apartments or other properties, many of her friends and former colleagues are jealous of her. She is the only one of her group of college friends who has settled in Gangnam. Those who own homes elsewhere 1  P’yŏng is a unit of measurement commonly used in Korea. One p’yŏng is about 3.3 square meters and 35.58 square feet. Apartments in Korea are the same as condominiums in the United States. But in Korea, the term “condominium” generally is used to refer to properties at resorts. Thus, I use the term “apartments.” 2  Won is the currency of South Korea. One U.S. dollar equals about 1,100 won (as of 2017). 3  Since the mid-1990s, reconstruction has become common. Reconstruction (chaegŏnch’uk) is often differentiated from redevelopment of substandard buildings (chaegaebal). Targeting previously constructed mid- or high-rise apartment complexes, reconstruction projects transform them into higher-density complexes (Shin and Kim 2016). Major conglomerates with construction businesses such as Hyundai, Samsung, and LG often take over the reconstruction firms, and these high-profile brand names keep up the property values.

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have property values less than half that of Ms. Ahn’s. When she moved to Gangnam in the mid-1980s, she did not expect that she would one day own such an expensive property. Her first, small (17-p’yŏng) apartment cost only forty million won at that time. Benefiting from the real estate boom in Gangnam, she moved several times, each time to a bigger unit, before settling in her current, expensive apartment. Her friends, whose family income and educational degrees are similar to hers, face a very different financial situation. Her sharp decision to purchase a home in Gangnam thirty-five years ago has placed her in a much better position than her contemporaries who made different decisions. Through the lens of middle-class housewives’ investment strategies in the real estate market, this chapter explores how they strove to enhance their class standing in South Korea (hereafter Korea) in the era of rapid economic growth. The conventional story of social mobility in Korea goes like this: a son of a poor peasant family works hard, goes to a college in Seoul, gets a decent white-collar job in the public sector or in a large conglomerate, and enjoys the stable and rapidly increasing income and extensive benefits provided by his employer, which allow him to experience upward mobility. In this story, merit (derived from hard work and good education) is the key to moving up the social ladder. Many scholars argue that, with explosive economic growth and an expansive job market, Koreans benefited from almost lifetime job security and real wage increases that allowed many families to enjoy improved living standards and comfortable middle-class lifestyles (Amsden 1989; Clifford 1998; Koo 2001; Lie 1998). While this approach is effective in explaining the effect of rapid economic development on people’s livelihoods in Korea, it obscures some important points. First, this breadwinner model ignores the contributions of women to household finances through informal economic activities. Whereas Ms. Ahn was a full-time school teacher who brought a stable income of her own to her household, stay-at-home wives were not merely responsible for household chores and childcare at home. Many of them actively participated in economic activities, such as real estate investment, through various connections and networks. Second, the conventional wisdom that focuses on wage income or salaries in the household economy overlooks the importance of property values as a vehicle of increasing family wealth. Property values—in particular, apartment prices—have drastically increased in Korea over the last five decades. Whereas real income has increased only by fifteen times and consumer prices by forty-three times between 1963 and 2007, land prices in Seoul have risen by 1,176 times (Son 2008, 25). Those who bought their homes or otherwise invested in real estate in the right place at the right time were able to increase their wealth quickly and dramatically.

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In this chapter, I illustrate how self-enterprising middle-class housewives enriched family wealth through real estate speculation. A real estate boom and subsequent skyrocketing housing prices beginning in the mid-1970s made homes and lands essential financial assets and investment objects to bring windfall incomes. Many housewives engaged in real estate investment and pursued material improvement for their families. They managed household finances, collected and exchanged information about promising areas for investment, and mobilized resources through their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Their financial savvy and investment acumen played a key role in social mobility and family fortunes. Guided by a strong desire to advance their families’ social and economic positions, middle-class housewives acted as astute entrepreneurs—yet their aggressive investment activities and competitive spirits kept them from being accepted as “respectable” women in Korean society, and indeed subjected them to much public criticism. Through an analysis of middle-class housewives’ economic activities and the public discourse on them, this chapter reveals how class and social mobility have been gendered in Korea. Further, I shed light on the reality behind social mobility and the formation of the middle class—especially the rampant contradictions and difficulties of becoming an economic winner in the housing market. I draw from in-depth interviews and archival sources, including newspapers, magazines, and works of fiction. The data used in this chapter come from the research that I conducted for my book on the historical trajectory of Korean middle-class formation during 2008 and 2009 and in the summers from 2006 to 2015. This chapter focuses on the era of high economic growth from 1978 to 1996, during which many families benefited from widely available economic opportunities and experienced upward mobility before the economic crisis hit in 1997. In what follows, I will first describe my theoretical framework, building on gender, class, and urbanism. Then, I will discuss how rapid urbanization led to the real estate boom that divided economic winners from losers depending on the status of their home and land ownership. Next, I will analyze how middle-class housewives strived to accumulate wealth and enhance their families’ class standing through real estate investment. Last, I will examine the mainstream public discourse on speculative housewives and analyze the gendered understanding of capital accumulation and social mobility. The Intersection of Gender, Class, and Urban Space By documenting middle-class housewives’ economic strategies in the housing market and their pathways to social mobility, this chapter tries to fill the gap between two different literatures: that on gender and social class,

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and that on the political economy of urban development and restructuring. While the former literature highlights the gendering of class formation and social mobility, the latter focuses on macro processes of urbanization and their differential influences on various segments of the population. Linking these two approaches helps to explicate how homeownership and increases in property values became an important source of class position and social inequality, and how critical decision-making about home purchase—what to buy and when to sell—was a gendered process. Existing scholarship on gender, labor, and development in Asia addresses two divergent, separate areas—the paid work of female factory workers versus the domestic work of housewives. In critical response to genderblind studies of the political economy of development, the first group of studies, focusing on female workers on the shop floor and their role in economic transformation, looks at gendered processes of industrialization and economic development (Brinton 1993; Kim 1997; Lee 1998; Ong 1987; Pun 2005; Rofel 1999). Illuminating the patriarchal nature of industrial development in East Asian economic “miracles,” feminist scholars show that a repressive state as well as a male-centric, Confucian culture controlled female bodies on East Asian shop floors, yet female workers did not always accept the patriarchal order and sometimes resisted it. While these studies mostly focus on the productive labor of young, single, female workers, and gendered wage gaps and inequality in the labor market, less attention has been paid to housewives. The role of housewives has been considered secondary to that of their male breadwinner counterparts who participate in the productive sphere and earn family incomes. The second line of research on housewives usually studies the unpaid domestic labor of homemakers—household chores, childcare, and service to family members (M. H. Kim 1992; Moon 1990). In addition to emotional and reproductive labor, housewives are responsible for maintaining and enhancing family status by engaging in gift exchanges, organizing social gatherings, and managing household finances—what Papanek calls “status-production” work (1979). While acknowledging housewives’ important roles, these studies usually treat their work as non-material. Some scholars point out that though housewives’ “invisible” or “hidden” work in the domestic sphere is not directly translated into numerical material values, it is an integral contribution to the household economy. For example, Janet Finch (1983) argues that women’s labor is in fact incorporated into men’s work. Women do not simply perform domestic labor and give “moral support”—they are also involved in a wide range of work that directly contributes to their husbands’ jobs: entertaining and socializing with work friends, acting as proxy when husbands are not available, receiving messages, and so forth. Finch notes, “By the capital she brings to

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a marriage, by making direct and indirect contributions, and by her performance of domestic labour, a wife facilitates her husband’s performance as a worker, thus enhancing his present performance and future potential” (1983, 117). Similarly, Cho and Koo (1983) argue that, for women, it is difficult to draw a clear boundary between “work” and “non-work,” or between the “workplace” and the “household.” Although many scholars point out the seemingly intangible nature of women’s work, whether as contributions to their husbands’ work or as family work that cannot easily be quantified, others attend to the economic activities of “non-working” housewives in the informal economy and their contributions to household finances (Abelmann 2003; Cho 2002; Lett 1998; Moon 1990; Nelson 2000). Since these informal economic activities are not captured as numerical values in labor statistics, the critical role of women’s work is often underestimated or ignored. Moreover, supposedly non-working housewives are not merely household managers and consumers who budget their husbands’ salaries. Rather, they are active economic actors who themselves participate in making money. Scholars tend to limit their consideration of these informal economic activities to lower-class women who work to supplement their husbands’ meager incomes (e.g., Agarwala 2013; Hart 1973; Portes and Hoffman 2003). Denied by the formal opportunity structure, the urban poor generally seek informal means of earning money, which encompass a wide range of activities, such as domestic work, street vending, collecting garbage, and piecework at home. For example, Ŭn Cho (2012), who studied poor urban neighborhoods in Seoul in the 1980s, describes many housewives involved in informal labor, such as selling goods on the street, making dolls and sweaters, and preparing vegetables and dried fish. Nonetheless, it was not only poor women who engaged in informal economic activities. Existing ethnographic studies note that middle-class families in Korea, especially in Seoul, did not solely rely on husbands’ salaries, and show that middleclass housewives were often actively involved in diverse money-making endeavors, including personal moneylending, stock and real estate investments, and renting out properties (Abelmann 2003; Lee 1971; Lett 1998). As some scholars have pointed out, it would be inaccurate to characterize non-working middle-class women as “stay-at-home housewives” (M. H. Kim 1995, 82). Given the lack of formal employment opportunities, these women sought an alternative avenue of making money and contributing to family resources. Women’s informal economic activities and extrawage contributions were critical to the expansion of their households’ class horizons. In explaining social inequality and class differentiation, urban scholars pay attention to the spatial dimensions of class power (Caldeira 2000;

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Castells 1996; Davis 1990; Harvey 1985). The process of class-making is closely intertwined with “spatial production,” which reconfigures urban space and creates cultural norms among particular class subjects (Zhang 2010). Lifestyles and the locations of residences become class markers. The market and the state are important drivers of urban development that shape spatial stratification processes. The demolition of deteriorating low-income housing, the promotion of luxurious housing projects, the construction of high-rise skyscrapers and cutting-edge buildings for global spectacle, and the development of new towns and suburban areas are common aspects of urban development, through which political elites and businesspeople seek capital accumulation. In this process, low-income and socially marginalized people are usually displaced to the outskirts of cities in favor of the more affluent. The unequal distribution of economic, cultural, and social capital affects the ability of residents to profit from real estate booms, thereby complicating existing social differentiation and class relations (Levien 2018; Tomba 2004). The real estate boom and rapidly appreciating property values in the 1970s and 1980s profoundly reshaped the lives of urban residents and produced arbitrary but longstanding inequalities in Korea. By bringing women’s experiences and aspirations into my discussion of the real estate market, this chapter will demonstrate how wives’ investment strategies and entrepreneurial spirit shaped families’ class standing and social status. Speculative Urbanism and the Real Estate Boom in Korea In the era of industrialization, Korean society experienced a great transformation: state-driven, export-oriented industrialization expanded the economy rapidly, and unprecedented urban growth followed. In search of better job opportunities, many people left their rural hometowns and migrated to big cities. By 1960, only 28% of the population resided in urban areas, but the urban population became 50% by 1975 (Jung 1998, 133). Between 1960 and 1970, the population of Seoul doubled from 2.45 million to 5.5 million, and by 1988 the population had doubled again, reaching 10 million.4 Seoul’s existing urban infrastructure did not keep pace with this explosive population increase, creating problems in the areas of transportation, environment, and housing. Due to the limited amount of urban housing stock, the housing shortage was particularly serious. In 1960, 51.1% of households in Seoul lived in single-room dwellings,5 and only 30% of the 4  See http://stat.seoul.go.kr/octagonweb/jsp/WWS7/WWSDS7100.jsp. Accessed on July 18, 2017. 5  See https://www.si.re.kr/node/52564. Accessed on July 18, 2017.

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city’s population lived in dwellings that met the government’s standards for “proper housing” (Park 1998, 274). It was quite common for multiple families to share a house, and many poor families lived in illegal substandard settlements—mostly, wooden shacks built haphazardly on hills. By 1966, there were 136,650 illegal dwellings in Seoul—more than one-third of the total housing stock in the city (Shin and Kim 2016, 545). In the face of severe housing shortages in Korea, the provision of housing for citizens became an urgent task for the authoritarian state because it was directly related to social and political stability. The development of large-scale housing stock was a crucial part of the economic development plans implemented by the Park Chung Hee regime (1961–1979). In 1972, the Ministry of Construction set the ambitious goal of building more than one million housing units between 1972 and 1981 (Gelézeau 2007, 91). To achieve that goal, the Korean government implemented massive housing construction projects, particularly large-scale apartment complexes. Given Korea’s relatively small geographical size, policy makers regarded the construction of apartments as the most viable way to provide more housing (Korean Housing Corporation 1992, 493). The Korean Housing Corporation (Taehan chut’aek kongsa), a public enterprise, undertook massive projects to build apartment complexes in Seoul and other cities. Given the lack of public funds and the precedence of other government priorities such as heavy industrialization, however, the KHC alone could not satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for housing. Instead of investing more government finances in providing public housing, the Korean government chose to bring private developers into housing construction (Son 2008). By providing many incentives, including offering cheap land prices to construction companies and granting tax exemptions, the government attracted private businesses to the apartment construction business (Lim and Kim 2015, 158). Yet, the biggest advantage of the apartment construction business lay in the unique system that forced home buyers to pay first, before the apartments were even built. As private developers were able to use money that had already been paid by buyers for construction, they did not have to incur any debts. The rising demand for apartments guaranteed lucrative profits. The selling prices for apartment units were usually twice as high as production costs (Hyun 1978, 142). Since building large, high-end complexes was more profitable and brought higher return rates, private developers took that route, targeting the middle and upper middle classes. Thus, housing construction led by private developers favored more affluent social groups and failed to provide affordable housing for the majority of the population. The continued economic boom and large-scale urban development stimulated the real estate market, and Korean society witnessed a series of real estate booms beginning in the late 1960s (Son 2008, 25). Ongoing

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infrastructure and development projects—the Han River bridges, the SeoulPusan Highway, the development of the Gangnam district, and the ubiquitous construction of apartments—and a huge influx of money earned from overseas projects heated the real estate market. The construction boom, and subsequently appreciating property values, produced widespread faith in a perpetually rising real estate market, which fueled the inflationary spiral of speculation. Betting on profitable future gains, corporations and individuals alike joined in the game of Korean real estate. Exploiting the loans subsidized by the government, most big corporations (chaebol) purchased unnecessary land for speculative purposes. Major newspapers pointed out that chaebol owned an enormous amount of real estate, and that fully 70 percent of the land they owned had nothing to do with their core businesses (“Taegiŏptŭl ŭi ch’aegim kwa pansŏng” 1978). When purchasing land, chaebol often reported to the authorities that it was for the construction of factories, whether it was or not. Even when they did intend to build factories, they bought much more land than needed for that purpose, expecting to profit from dramatically increasing land prices. They then took out more loans using the already purchased land as security. With this money, they acquired even more land. Even if the companies did nothing and let the land sit idle, in time the property’s value rose, often quite steeply (T. Chung 1978, 137). It was a very easy and common road to profit for large Korean firms. The lucrative real estate market also provided individuals with a golden opportunity to make fortunes and accumulate wealth. Those who bought apartments, land, or both in newly developing areas experienced a rapid upsurge in their property values. Many strongly believed that real estate would never decrease in value and that real estate investment was an unfailing way of making money. Some went into debt to finance their real estate ventures, as they believed it was justified by potential gains. Developers, chaebol, and individuals moved capital into real estate, which in turn encouraged more speculation and pushed real estate values even higher. A prevalent speculation frenzy transformed Korean land into a tradeable investment asset, a source (it was widely assumed) of windfall profits. Lands and houses in Korea became a site of speculative gambles. As a result, land prices increased by four times between 1975 and 1979 (Son 2008, 26). In 1978, average land prices increased by 49% in a single year; six major cities saw an increase of 79%, and Seoul’s land prices shot up 136% (Chang 2004, 58; Son 2008, 26). Between 1980 and 1987, the average annual land price increase rate was 10.5%; then, land prices went up by 27.5% in 1988 and 32.0% in 1989. As table 3.1 demonstrates, real estate prices increased by large margins almost every year, with only a few exceptions. For the two decades from 1974 to 1996, land prices in the nation

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Table 3.1. Land Prices Change Rates (percent)

Year

South Korea

Big Cities (including Seoul)

Seoul

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

26.99 26.60 33.55 48.98 16.63 11.68 7.51 5.4 18.5 13.2 7.0 7.3 14.67 27.47 31.97 20.58 12.78 −1.27 −7.38 −0.57 0.55 0.95

21.87 21.04 46.67 79.08 21.96 17.02 7.11 5.6 31.7 21.6 7.8 6.4 13.91 29.47 31.95 26.97 13.46 −2.59 −8.05 −0.83 0.34 0.84

31.63 16.06 31.70 135.70 6.40 13.42 3.56 8.7 57.7 23.3 8.1 3.7 6.29 28.06 33.54 31.18 11.15 −2.78 −8.72 −1.36 0.18 0.94

Source: Korean Land and Housing Corporation 1975–1996, Land Price Change Rates, reconstructed from Chang (2004, 59).

increased by 17.6 times, in the six largest cities by 28.9 times, and in Seoul by 32.9 times (Jung 1998, 136). Despite widespread real estate speculation and skyrocketing property values, policies intended to inhibit speculation and stabilize housing prices were neither effective nor seriously enforced. Some claim that the Korean government and politicians were motivated to sustain the real estate boom (Son 2003). The real estate boom and appreciating property values not only formed important grounds on which parties and candidates could solicit political support, they also enabled corporations to funnel their gains from real estate speculation into campaign or public coffers (Son 2003, 130). The interdependent relationship between the Korean state and large business

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firms, and the benefits the state itself gained from the real estate boom, kept the government from moving very strongly to restrict speculative activities. The real estate speculation craze and the state’s failure to regulate it brought about an extremely unequal distribution of land. As of 2006, only 5.5% of the total population owned 74% of privately owned land, and the top 2.7% owned 59% (Son 2008, 54). Moreover, an uninterrupted rise in property values for five decades made buying or renting housing unaffordable for those who rely solely on their own salaries with no family wealth. Those who do not own homes face frequent moves in the quest for more affordable housing and must constantly worry about the instability of the housing and rental markets. “My Home” Aspirations and Gaming in the Real Estate Market Massive urban development projects rapidly transformed the cityscape with skyscrapers, modern buildings, and high-rise apartment complexes. As new apartments were equipped with modern, Western-style amenities, living in an apartment symbolized a modern and civilized lifestyle. Compared with traditional Korean houses and their outdoor kitchens and toilets, apartment living introduced the conveniences of hot water, electricity, and gas, and ensured privacy for each family member. Furthermore, apartments were less vulnerable to break-ins due to security guards and security systems. As both the government and intellectuals such as professors, architects, and journalists celebrated the new mode of apartment living, apartments came to be considered the epitome of middle-class culture. Thus, as Laura Neitzel argued in her study (2016, 26) of the postwar danchi (large cluster of apartment buildings) housing in Japan, new housing provided not only a new physical built environment, but also a novel ideological environment, a powerful vision and social imaginary of an attainable, affluent lifestyle. As new apartment complexes spread images of urbanity and affluence that were widely viewed as superior to the traditional Korean lifestyle, more and more people aspired to modern apartment living. Young, educated housewives of nuclear families were particularly eager to live in apartments because they were not only easier to keep clean, but they also liberated housewives from unnecessary labor. Housewives living in apartments did not need hired help, they did not have to worry about changing coal briquettes in winter, and they felt able to go out at any time without concern about burglaries. By facilitating the opportunity for salaried whitecollar families to purchase modern homes in new neighborhoods, the apartment lottery system attempted to meet the aspirations of young families for Westernized convenience.

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However, in an era of inflation and real estate booms, owning a home— especially a new apartment in a newly developed area, such as Gangnam or Yeouido—did not simply mean achieving the dream of “my home” and enjoying a modernized lifestyle; more importantly, it also meant seizing an investment opportunity to accumulate wealth quickly. Housing prices rose more quickly than wages, and windfall profits from the real estate market often dwarfed any other kinds of income, including a regular salary. Thus, investing in real estate was a rational decision for those interested in earning good money. While the apartment lottery was ostensibly intended to provide new apartments on a large scale for non-homeowners, many who saw potential money-making opportunities applied for the apartment lottery—and the lottery system soon became a site of speculation. Whenever construction of new apartments was announced, the lotteries attracted huge numbers of applicants. The chance of drawing successfully was low: popular Gangnam apartments, in particular, sparked intense competition. It was not uncommon for Gangnam lotteries to reach odds of more than 50 to 1, or even as high as 100 to 1 (Chang 1978, 108). Many people borrowed the names of extended family members or relatives in order to enter multiple times, which made the odds even higher.6 The apartment lotteries did not only encourage competition—they also invited irregular activities, which became rampant. Buying and selling apartments quickly was a common practice intended to take advantage of escalating housing prices. Many people applied for apartment lotteries simply to gain substantial profits by selling the winning ticket. Without ever buying or moving into an apartment, the lottery winner could sell his or her right to it to anybody willing to pay a high “premium.” With no strict regulation, the winners, if they wanted, could sell their ticket immediately, thereby transferring their occupancy rights to somebody else. Given that apartment lotteries were extremely difficult to win and apartments were the most profitable properties, many people were willing to acquire occupancy rights by paying very high prices to the lottery winners, often between 2.2 million and 17 million won per unit for apartments in Gangnam (T. Chung 1978, 129). Considering that the average monthly income for urban households was only 144,510 won in 1978 (Korean National Statistics Office 1998, 111), it is easy to see how lucrative such “gambling” could be. In 1982, the National Tax Service uncovered that out of 4,691 Gangnam lotteries, 33 percent of the original winners (1,549 people) flipped their apartments (“Kangnam dasŏkkae in’gi ap’atŭ chonmae” 1982). From these statistics, it 6  During this time before the Kim Young Sam administration (1993–1998) implemented the real-name financial system in 1993, it was possible to use someone else’s names in financial transactions, which provided an avenue for the underground economy and corruption.

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is apparent that flipping apartments was a widespread economic strategy. Before anyone actually moved into a given “hot” apartment, occupancy rights might have changed hands several times—and, in extreme cases, as many as thirty or forty times. Every time occupancy rights changed hands, the apartment price increased. As these dealings were done mostly without official registration or proper paperwork, it was extremely difficult for the government to crack down on them (“Hyŏndaep’an pulgasari” 1978). Buying and selling apartments came to be perceived as the easiest and most profitable way of accumulating wealth. The apartment lottery became a vehicle through which high-margin profits could be made virtually overnight. It is important to talk about just what was involved in real estate speculation. In order to buy an apartment through the lottery system, it was usually necessary to put up a cash deposit along with a few installments in advance. Since one had to produce a significant amount of money up front, the target constituency of the apartment lottery was mostly whitecollar workers, teachers, civil servants, or professionals who made stable incomes—in other words, the middle class (Gelézeau 2007). Low-income families were completely excluded from the apartment lottery system. Hence, those who benefited from speculation and flipping apartments tended to be members of the middle class or above. It was the task of housewives to gather information, attend apartment lotteries, and participate in real estate dealings. The real estate boom afforded economically savvy housewives a new opportunity to become entrepreneurs through real estate investment. The clear gender roles in the household made this possible: the husband would earn money as the breadwinner, and the wife would take care of domestic work, including household chores, child-rearing, and managing the household finances. As it became more common for women to take control over the household income, with husbands receiving allowances from them, housewives exercised more authority over big decisions like selling and buying homes (“Kajŏng kwalli” 1984). Learning of new opportunities to make extra money from their friends or classmates, many housewives joined the game of real estate speculation. The role of housewives’ economic decisions and activities was critical in shaping their families’ class horizons, even when their husbands made large incomes. Wansŏ Park’s novel Seoulites (Sŏul saramdŭl) vividly depicts how women’s choices shaped different class trajectories for two families with comparable incomes and backgrounds. Two close neighbors and friends, Myunghee and Hyejin, live on the outskirts of Seoul, and their husbands are office workers holding the same position in similar companies. The husbands make the same amount of money, and the families are the same size. The incomes and spending of the two families are almost the

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same. But, purely by chance, Hyejin’s family moves into a new apartment in the eastern part of Seoul. Myunghee notices that Hyejin is spending more, and wearing more expensive clothes. As the value of Hyejin’s new apartment increases quickly, the two families’ economic conditions diverge. New apartments provided a new avenue for making money: “People are nagging to ask me to sell my apartment for six thousand [sixty million won].” “What? Six thousand? Didn’t you buy it for three thousand last year? Wasn’t the apartment [complex] so unpopular that buyers could freely choose which floor they would live on? Why did the price rise so quickly? It doesn’t make sense. No sense.” “Well, I thought it didn’t make sense, either. But even that price seems good if they keep asking me to sell…” “Then you made three thousand for doing nothing?” “Do you think three thousand is a lot of money? Those who have bigger ones can make one hundred million won.” “If you make three thousand, how much do you make a month? Two hundred fifty [two and half million won] a month! You say you earned two hundred fifty without doing anything?” “Well, not really. When this neighborhood was hotter, [the apartment price] used to rise by five hundred a month. It is not as popular as in the past, so these days maybe one hundred a month.” (Park 1989, 175)

In the midst of the real estate boom, whether, when, and where to buy a home, and, more importantly, when to sell, were critical decisions. Whether one bought and sold an apartment within a short time, or just gained a few million won from premiums, investing in real estate properties brought in a far greater amount of money than husbands’ hard-won, meager salaries. Indeed, women’s non-wage earning often far exceeded even the salaries of high-earning husbands (Abelmann 2003, 148–149). One of my informants, Ms. Chang (born 1949), was a housewife married to an engineer working in a big construction company. She recalled that she could earn as much as her husband’s annual income just by selling one apartment: Speculation [in land or apartments] was not unusual at all. It was very rare to find people who did not speculate in real estate. It was very common to buy and sell apartments for this purpose. While my husband earned relatively good money, we could become better off with this [real estate investment]. But [what we did] was nothing compared with others

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Myungji Yang who became much richer. At that time, there was no heavy tax burden. I earned some money by buying an apartment and selling it. By doing this a few times, I could earn a fair amount of money. Six months after buying the apartment, I could sell it. For example, I could buy an apartment for eight million—and then sell it for sixteen million. It was double! I made the same amount of money as my husband earned abroad for a year. It was amazing and fun. (Emphasis added; interview conducted in Yongin City, Kyeonggi Province, in September 2008.)

Ordinary stay-at-home wives, as Ms. Chang indicated, significantly contributed to increasing household incomes. In addition, making as much money as their well-paid husbands was an exciting and even empowering experience. These women, who otherwise spent most of their time on household chores and childcare, were exposed to new opportunities. As they participated in the productive sphere and made money, they experienced a sort of self-realization after long years of child-rearing and domestic duties. The very nature of apartment spaces encouraged housewives to engage in economic activity, as they were suited to the sharing of information by networks of neighbors. Where residents had similar socioeconomic backgrounds—mainly young, educated white-collar families—housewives built social capital and exchanged opinions about investment. Ms. Chang noted that housewives in Gangnam were particularly educated and quickwitted. They kept up with the latest news on development projects, studied the real estate business, and met with real estate brokers. When a group of them got together, they always talked about new apartments being built, and discussed which would be the most valuable investments. They also proactively utilized their own social networks and connections, collecting valuable information from their friends or neighbors whose husbands were state officials or worked in real estate. Housewives made trips together to check out apartments or plots of land as potential investments. By doing so, they got the hang of the real estate market. If necessary, they acted together to protect their property values. When there was a sign of stagnating or declining real estate prices, housewives would hold a neighborhood meeting and agree to fix apartment prices. Forming exclusionary networks devoted to knowledge-sharing and cooperative action, young housewives in apartment complexes worked to advance their family interests. Their strong desire to enhance their social status and increase family wealth, along with widely available investment opportunities, transformed these housewives into entrepreneurs—always searching for profit-making opportunities and pursuing capital accumulation by riding the wave of the high-growth era.

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Many families took advantage of enterprising housewives’ successful investments. If the wife made the right decision on when to sell the apartment, and repeated this a few times, her family could move into progressively bigger and more expensive apartments. Frequent moves became the norm among apartment owners. According to a 1982 survey of a thousand apartment residents in seven major cities in Korea, 36.9% of households had moved three or four times before they landed in the apartments they currently inhabited; among these people, 54.9% were planning to move again within four years (C. Kim 1982). Even apartment owners who did not consider themselves speculators jumped on the bandwagon and tried to profit from a cycle of selling and buying apartments units. More enterprising, adventurous housewives did not limit their activities to buying and selling apartments. If they were willing to take risks, they borrowed money from their relatives or friends and bought multiple homes. Because of a unique rental system (chŏnse) in Korea, acquiring a second home was easy. Under this scheme, renters paid a large lump sum in advance to the owner (usually between 40 and 60 percent of the property’s value). A deposit of sorts was returned at the end of the lease, usually after two years, when the renters moved out. Because owners got chŏnse money from their renters, they did not need the full amount of money to purchase a second home. If they could get a short-term loan for about half an apartment’s price (to match what they got from their tenants in the original apartment), they could buy an extra home without difficulty. Since real estate values kept rising, this sort of investment was virtually foolproof. With income from real estate speculation, housewives were able to invest in stocks or bonds, purchase more real estate properties, or simply deposit the money in savings accounts that offered stable, double-digit returns. Some housewives used their profits to set themselves up as personal moneylenders (Lett 1998, 70). Because individual families and smallbusiness owners had difficulty borrowing money from financial institutions, personal loans were in high demand and the interest rates were very high. Though illegal, the underground market brought moneylenders hefty profits. Housewives’ informal economic activities and the extra money they earned gave them financial leverage and paved the way to more avenues to make even more money. Middle-class housewives adopted diverse financial strategies and tried to make money rather than rely on their husbands’ salaries. Using networks of friends and neighbors, these women collected and shared information about how to make valuable investments. Many of them amassed profits by frequently moving into and out of apartments in booming areas. With the extra money they earned from changing apartments, they were able to

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invest in other ventures. Those who adopted more aggressive and adventurous strategies were willing to become indebted to friends and relatives or take the risk of buying multiple apartment units at the same time—a strategy that, if successful, could bring windfall profits. In the relatively unstructured early phase of industrialization, those housewives who possessed keen foresight (sŏn’gyŏnjimyŏng or hyean) and some extra money seized the opportunity to amass wealth quickly and climb the social ladder. The Social Gaze toward Pokpuin: Shrewd Entrepreneurs or Wicked Speculators? While many families took advantage of the real estate boom, celebrated their fortunes, and enjoyed affluent lifestyles, others felt they had missed out or had been left behind. Observing their neighbors or friends with similar qualifications who had somehow gotten much richer, those who had not engaged in real estate speculation felt outraged about what they regarded as an illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. Also, the less affluent found the dream of having their own homes vanishing, as housing prices surged out of their reach. The public discourse on pokpuin reflected the widespread sense of frustration, resentment, and relative deprivation among those who did not benefit from escalating housing prices. A new term that appeared in the mass media at the end of the 1970s, pokpuin, literally, “Mrs. Speculator,”7 usually referred, in a derogatory manner, to housewives involved in real estate speculation. With the money they made easily and quickly, they were regarded as engaging in conspicuous consumption. The typical images of pokpuin were of women with several checkbooks in their purses, driving their luxurious cars to apartment lotteries (E. Chung 1978). The mass media harshly condemned these women, accusing them of ruining the morale of society and pursuing illegitimate means of making money. They were represented as vain and materialistic, and stigmatized as “deviant” (t’alsŏn) women who abandoned their duties as housewives. Major newspapers reported on the “abnormal” behaviors and values of pokpuin, portraying them as obsessed with making money and lacking in conscience: Let’s follow pokpuin Park (36), who has made a lot of money through real estate speculation and drives a fancy car, which would have been out of reach with only her husband’s salary. Mrs. Park was on her way to restaurant H in Myeongdong. Several of her high-school classmates 7 

The word pok is derived from poktŏkpang (real estate agencies), and puin means “housewife.” Thus, pokpuin refers to married women who engage in real estate speculation.

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were meeting there to chat. They briefly talked about their children’s education and their husbands’ work, before turning quickly to real estate speculation. Mrs. K bragged about making two million won by buying an apartment in Yeouido and selling it again only a week later. Mrs. Y made one million won in just two days by buying an old house in Gangbuk and selling it for ten million won. . . . One group of about fifteen pokpuin, who are the most important customers of the K real estate office in Jamsil, has such widespread connections that it can mobilize five hundred million won within half a day. All these pokpuin think about is money: materialism and get-rich-quick ideas dominate their heads. They are no longer the “innocent housewives” who got involved in real estate speculation to supplement their husbands’ salaries; they have become ferocious, unscrupulous pokpuin with no conscience. (“Hyŏndaep’an pulgasari” 1978)

This passage may sum up the most common criticism of pokpuin in newspapers and magazines. In contrast to the ideal images of frugal housewives who manage husbands’ salaries wisely and save money, female speculators were portrayed as avaricious, greedy, dissatisfied with their husbands’ salaries, and capable of doing whatever got them money. Their selfish yearnings and aggressive pursuit of material ends did not correspond to the ideal of the good wife and wise mother (hyŏnmo yangch’ŏ). It was not considered feminine to have a competitive spirit, a desire to ascend the social ladder, or an ability to earn more money than one’s husband. The women’s “unruly” desires were “dangerous” and had to be tamed because they threatened masculinity and disrupted “normal” family life. Pokpuin were not merely criticized for their materialist values and extravagant consumption. The danger lay in married women who resisted becoming traditional housewives and who tried to fulfill their dreams outside the domestic sphere. As they opened their eyes and engaged in activities beyond their traditional domestic duties, they neglected their children and husbands, and their pleasure-seeking behaviors outside the home could lead them to a more disastrous ending—such as having an affair and destroying their family. Many news articles pointed out the inappropriateness of housewives associating with young male real estate brokers. One newspaper claimed that real estate agencies in Gangnam hired young, good-looking men to attract middle-aged housewives. The young men were required to dress up nicely and otherwise care for their appearance for the sake of their female customers (“Hyŏndaep’an pulgasari” 1978). Hitherto naive housewives who had not known any men except for their husbands and relatives suddenly enjoyed the freedom of getting out into the world and meeting others. Many commentators were concerned that

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the pokpuin’s “deviant and abnormal” behaviors of associating with men could lead to destructive and tragic outcomes, such as adultery, divorce, debt, and even crime. Women’s unbounded desires were considered a threat to public morals. Stories about pokpuin became the topic of social critiques in the popular media. For instance, Director Kwon-Taek Im’s film Pokpuin, released in 1980, reflects the typically hostile view of pokpuin. In the film Mrs. Han, an ordinary housewife, makes five million won overnight by winning an apartment lottery—the same amount of money her husband had earned from working in the Middle East for a few years. This leads Mrs. Han to become a pokpuin, as she jumps into the real estate market and begins speculating in apartments and land with a group of other pokpuin. Lured by easy money, Mrs. Han works with land swindlers and indulges in money and pleasure—drinking, gambling, dancing at clubs. Yet her dissipated life contains the seeds of a tragic ending. She becomes entangled with swindlers, loses all her money, and gets arrested for fraud. Too late, she regrets what she has done. The film delivers a straightforward moral message: The woman who chases money and pleasure and neglects her family will be punished and lose everything in the end. Similarly, many newspapers eagerly reported on “deviant” pokpuin who frequented dance clubs and bars, and an increasing number of adultery cases (“Hyŏndaep’an pulgasari” 1978). The media also reported on money-related crimes committed by pokpuin, such as fraud and gambling. Moralistic narratives alerting the public to the dangers of married women indulging in money and pleasure were widely disseminated. The popular discourse on pokpuin was completely negative and unsympathetic, and the mass media often focused on extreme cases. The generally critical view of pokpuin, some might argue, can be also related to traditional Confucian condemnations of materialism. Yet given that real estate speculation was widespread and that wives’ facility in it could mean a higher standard of living for the family, husbands did not necessarily object to their wives’ economic activities, viewing them with a certain ambivalence. On the surface, they seemed distant or critical of the wives’ material pursuits, and some were uneasy about especially ambitious and adventurous wives. But at the same time, husbands were happy to enjoy the extra income. Wansŏ Park, in her novel, satirizes a husband’s hypocrisy about his wife’s unscrupulous endeavors: Chan-guk giggled over the phrase “wife bringing good fortune” (pokch’ŏ) endlessly. He just realized why he felt empty and hollow all day. He pretended not to know his wife was involved in apartment speculation. Though he harshly blamed her for doing pokpuin, in truth he hoped she

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would succeed at it. Although she would be stigmatized as pokpuin if it went wrong, she would be a precious “good-fortuned wife” (pokch’ŏ) if everything went well. (Park 1989, 204)

While emphasizing aggressive women’s speculative activities and condemning them, the popular pokpuin discourse ignored the systematic and much more massive speculation engaged in by big corporations in collusion with the state and political elites. As discussed earlier, taking advantage of cheap loans provided by the state, many chaebol bought unnecessarily huge amounts of land in potentially booming areas and profited from skyrocketing land prices. Several big corporations formed special real estate teams that reported directly to the heads of the firms (Lee 1991). Their main tasks were collecting information about areas that were targeted by the government for development projects and making recommendations for real estate buys on this basis. Often this confidential information was obtained through connections with state officials. Chaebol actually invested more in real estate than in industry: In the first half of 1988, the thirty largest chaebol invested US$911 million in real estate, but only US$730 million in industry (Park 1998, 280). By 1989, the thirty largest chaebol owned lands amounting to 140 million p’yŏng (larger than three-fourths of Seoul); real estate owned by the three largest chaebol (Hyundai, Samsung, and LG) was valued at around 5.5 trillion won (Park 2013, 37–38).8 As seen in these numbers, real estate speculation was an extensive money-making practice among power elites. My point here is not to acquit speculative housewives who tried to accumulate wealth and to advance their family interests by any means necessary. In fact, their practices of flipping apartments contributed to skyrocketing housing prices, and their ruthless pursuit of material well-being indeed demoralized non-homeowners who could not afford to buy their own homes. However, I want to emphasize how easily middle-class housewives became targets of public criticism in a patriarchal society. Bypassing the chaebol that engaged in more systematic real estate speculation and the government that allowed rampant speculation to occur, the popular discourse accused only housewives of unsettling public morals and corrupting Korean society. By reducing the problem to individual “unethical” or “selfish” housewives who were concerned only with their own and their families’ well-being, the popular discourse on the pokpuin passed over the bigger problems of political governance and state policies that failed to regulate speculative practices and provide affordable housing for the 8 

The average exchange rate of USD and KRW was 674 won for 1 US dollar in 1989; 5.5 trillion won was valued at 8.1 billion dollars in 1989.

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majority of the population. Ignoring the corruption and bribes that took place in the masculine world of government, banks, and big corporations, the popular discourse depicted housewives as the source of social ills such as excessive consumption and dubious real estate transactions. As Laurel Kendall rightly points out, housewives easily became scapegoats for the zeitgeist when the public mood turned against the perceived excesses of middle-class life (2002, 11). In 1970s and 1980s Korean society—where rapid economic growth and material well-being were the overarching goals—pokpuin were, in a sense, the perfect embodiment of Korean modernity. As they had lived through the years of postwar poverty followed by the dizzying economic boom, survival had become the byword of a hyper-competitive society. In the midst of the sea changes of industrialization and urbanization, people struggled to familiarize themselves with the new rules of the game and to seize the moments that could bring them good economic fortune. Given the lack of a social safety net and the absence of political will to control corruption and irregularities, however, individuals internalized the competitive spirit and tried to maximize the interests of their families (D. Kim 1990). Pokpuin personified this zeitgeist. As Abelmann (2003) highlights, these women’s fervent yearnings for material gain shaped the formation of the new middle class. Yet, their stories also reveal their conflicted position in a patriarchal society: while their aspirations for social mobility led them to challenge traditional norms of the “wise mother and good wife,” their aggressive, “un-feminine” material pursuits encountered ruthless public criticism. Conclusion Through the case of middle-class housewives’ real estate investment endeavors in the developmentalist period, this chapter has examined women’s desires for financial gain and social mobility. Fully utilizing the opportunities that were opened up by the housing market and the real estate boom, these women acted as astute entrepreneurs and amassed nonsalary income. By emphasizing the role of housewives in making decisions on home purchases—especially the timing and location of future homes—this chapter has highlighted the gendered process of class (re)production in Korea. Women’s actions as investors and entrepreneurs were perceived as transgressive and met with harsh criticisms. The pokpuin discourse in mass media portrayed middle-class housewives who were involved in real estate investment as avaricious, mercenary, and sometimes morally deviant. Not only were these housewives represented as obsessed with money, they were also described as debauched women who often went out

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with younger male brokers to dance clubs and bars. Indulging in pleasure seeking and excessive consumption, they were seen as ruining the public morale as well as familial life. Often compared unfavorably with “normal” frugal housewives who remained within the domestic sphere and took care of household chores, these women were viewed as subversive, undesirable, and even dangerous rebels who challenged social norms. At the same time, chaebol and state elites that also engaged in real estate speculation escaped such harsh criticism. Thus employing a double standard that is all too common in gender relations, the public discourse vilified the housewives and largely ignored their ingenuity and economic contributions. Housewives, whose opportunities for formal employment were extremely limited, had to find new ways of making money through informal channels to sustain their family life. Scrambling to avoid falling behind in a rapidly changing society, these housewives pursued upward mobility and tried to make use of every opportunity. They struggled to improve the outlook for their families within existing patriarchal structures. By making money and advancing family interests, they fulfilled their dreams as stay-at-home housewives. References Abelmann, Nancy. 2003. The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Agarwala, Rina. 2013. Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amsden, Alice. 1989. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. New York: Oxford University Press. Brinton, Mary. 1993. Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castells, Manuel. 1996. Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture 1. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Chang Jiwoong. 1978. “Pudongsant’ugiŭi anp’ak” [Everything about real estate speculation]. Sindonga [New Donga] (April): 104–112. Chang Sang-Hwan. 2004. “Haebang hu Han’gukjabonjuŭi paljŏn kwa pudongsan t’ugi” [The development of Korean capitalism and real estate speculation since liberation]. Yŏksa pipyŏng [Critical review of history] (Spring): 55–78. Cho, Haejoang. 2002. “Living with Conflicting Subjectivities: Mother, Motherly Wife, and Sexy Woman in the Transition from ColonialModern to Postmodern Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering

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“Kajŏng kwalli—Chubugajang sidae” [Managing the household: The age of housewives as household heads]. 1984. Dong-A ilbo [Dong-A daily], November 29, 9. “Kangnam dasŏkkae in’gi ap’atŭ chŏnmae” [Flipping apartments among the five popular apartment complexes in Gangnam]. 1982. Dong-A ilbo [Dong-A daily], November 12, 11. Kendall, Laurel, ed. 2002. Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Kim Choongsik. 1982. “Ap’at’ŭ miljipchugŏ sidae: Chajŭn isa, ‘3nyŏn china p’almyŏn pabo’” [The age of dense-living apartments: Frequent moving, “if one lives in an apartment for three years before selling, one is an idiot”]. Dong-A ilbo [Dong-A daily], December 15, 3. Kim, Dongno. 1990. “The Transformation of Familism in Modern Korean Society: From Cooperation to Competition.” International Sociology 5, no. 4 (December): 409–425. Kim, Myung-hye. 1992. “Late Industrialization and Women’s Work in Urban South Korea: An Ethnographic Study of Upper-Middle-Class Families.” City and Society 6, no. 2 (December): 156–173. ———. 1995. “Gender, Class, and Family in Late-Industrializing South Korea.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 1, no. 1: 58–86. Kim, Seung-kyung. 1997. Class Struggle or Family Struggle? The Lives of Women Factory Workers in South Korea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koo, Hagen. 2001. Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Korean Housing Corporation. 1992. Taehan chut’aek kongsa 30-yŏnsa [Thirty years of history of the Korean Housing Corporation]. Seoul: Korean Housing Corporation. Korean National Statistics Office. 1998. T’onggyero pon Taehan min’guk 50nyŏn ŭi kyŏngjesahoesang pyŏnhwa [The socioeconomic changes during fifty years in Korea through statistical numbers]. Daejon: Korean National Statistics Office. Lee, Ching Kwan. 1998. Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee Donggwan. 1991. “Ttang 3: Chaeboldŭl ŭi much’abyŏl t’oji sanyang” [Land 3: Chaebol’s reckless land speculation]. Dong-A ilbo [Dong-A daily], April 15, 9. Lee, Hyo-jae. 1971. Life in Urban Korea. Transactions 46 [Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch]. Seoul: Taewon Publishing.

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Lett, Denise Potrzeba. 1998. In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Levien, Michael. 2018. Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. New York: Oxford University Press. Lie, John. 1998. Han Unbounded: The Political Economy of South Korea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lim Dong-Geun and Kim Jong-Bae. 2015. Met’ŭrop’olisŭ Sŏul ŭi t’ansaeng [The birth of metropolis Seoul]. Seoul: Panbi. Moon, Okpyo. 1990. “Urban Middle Class Wives in Contemporary Korea: Their Roles, Responsibilities and Dilemmas.” Korea Journal 30, no. 11 (November-December): 30–43. Neitzel, Laura. 2016. The Life We Longed For: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan. Portland, ME: Merwinasia. Nelson, Laura C. 2000. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Papanek, Hanna. 1979. “Family Status Production: The ‘Work’ and ‘NonWork’ of Women.” Signs 4, no. 4 (Summer): 775–781. Park, Bae Gyoon. 1998. “Where Do Tigers Sleep at Night? The State’s Role in Housing Policy in South Korea and Singapore.” Economic Geography 74, no. 3: 272–288. Park Hae-Chun. 2013. Ap’at’ŭ keim: Kŭdŭl i chungsanch’ŭngi toel su issŏddŏn iyu [Apartment game: The reason they could be middle class]. Seoul: Humanist. Park Wansŏ. 1989. “Sŏul saramdŭl” [Seoulites]. In Kŭdae ajikto kkumkkugo innŭn’ga [Are you still dreaming?], 169–264. Seoul: Samjin. Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. 2003. “Latin American Class Structure: Their Composition and Change During the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1: 41–82. Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shin, Hyun Bang, and Soo-Hyun Kim. 2016. “The Developmental State, Speculative Urbanisation and the Politics of Displacement in Gentrifying Seoul.” Urban Studies 53, no. 3 (February): 540–559. Son Jung Mok. 2003. Sŏul tosigyehoek iyagi: Sŏul kyŏktong ŭi 50nyŏn kwa naŭi chŭngŏn [Stories about urban planning in Seoul: Fifty years of turbulence and my recollection]. Vol. 3. Seoul: Hanul.

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Son Nak-Gu. 2008. Pudongsan kyegŭp sahoe [Real estate class society]. Seoul: Humanitas. “Taegiŏptŭl ŭi ch’aegim kwa pansŏng” [Responsibilities and reflections of big-business firms]. 1978. Dong-A ilbo [Dong-A daily]. October 4, 4. Tomba, Luigi. 2004. “Creating an Urban Middle Class: Social Engineering in Beijing.” The China Journal 51 (January): 1–26. Zhang, Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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FOUR

“My Skill”: Attachments and Narratives of Garment Workers in South Korea

SEO YOUNG PARK

“I have denied my skill for my entire life,” said Oksun,1 a former labor union activist and highly experienced seamstress in Seoul’s Dongdaemun Market, a massive cluster of garment manufacturing, wholesale, and retail sites in downtown Seoul. I met Oksun in a beginning-level garmentmaking class offered by a non-profit organization in the neighborhood of Changsin-dong. Oksun taught several classes while I was conducting fieldwork there in 2009. “I have always been ready to leave this job even though I have never had the chance,” she confided in me. Initially, I interpreted her words as testifying to the undesirable working conditions and negative representations of garment work in Dongdaemun. Oksun added a popular saying: “One who has good skills will end up with a lifetime of hard labor [Kisul choŭmyŏn kosaengman handa].” Yet, after several interviews and casual conversations, Oksun told me that her feelings about her own sewing ability, which she referred to as “my skill” (kisul), were beginning to change. “I don’t turn away from it anymore—it is what I have and what I do. I can say that, and there is nothing wrong with it.” Gradually, I learned that Oksun’s denial and later acceptance of her skill involved her own articulation of her lifetime of work within the historical context of women’s garment labor and the labor movement. I also learned that Oksun’s current attachment to her “skill” was not unique. This perspective had a significant place in the conversations I had with established and aspiring seamstresses during my fieldwork. While many of the women with whom I spoke were angered by what they saw as the devaluation of manual skills in South Korean society (kisul kyŏngsi 1  The names of persons and organizations in this chapter are all pseudonyms, except for well-known figures such as the former president Jeon Doohwan and famous groups such as the Cheonggye Labor Union.

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p’ungjo), at the same time I encountered a persistent passion and engagement with the work of sewing, despite its marginalization and the alienation of those who perform it. I met even younger women, those in their late twenties, who were starting to learn stitching work. Although small in number, these women were attracted to the idea that they could gain a sort of independence in work and life by acquiring mastery over garment making. Dohee, a twenty-nineyear-old apprentice at a stitching factory, said, “I always wanted to able to make something substantial. Not just working, but acquiring a skill of my own [nae kisul].” Dohee was well aware of the widespread perception and the poor conditions of stitching work, as well as the lack of young people’s interest in garment manufacturing. Dohee’s somewhat anachronistic inclination for stitching work was not the same kind as that showed by members of the older generation, such as Oksun. Yet, Oksun’s accounts were similarly charged with a sense of the value of work in the context of widespread unemployment and job disparity across these groups with different ages and educational backgrounds. By engaging with the narratives of two different generations of garment workers, this chapter illustrates how they talk about their feelings and experiences of acquiring and using sewing skills. “Skill” will be used as the main analytic device for understanding these two groups of women and their relationship to work. I argue that the women’s narratives invoke their affective, material, and physical attachments to work and their aspiration for an immanent and enduring ability that will help them to situate themselves in the insecure and precarious economic landscape of the present. These narratives constantly reflect, react to, and resist the dominant framings of garment work in popular and scholarly discourse, rather than being dictated by them, as my interlocutors rearticulate the relevance of sewing skills and their own capacity to work. Garment stitching has been a marginalized profession typically performed by working-class women in South Korea (hereafter Korea) and in sweatshops around the world. Sewing on a machine, despite the long and complicated training one must undergo to master it, is seen as simple and repetitive work on which the fast-paced clothing industry relies for mass production (Bonacich 1996; Green 1996). The strong contrast between the “unskilled and simplistic repetition” of stitching and the “complex, skilled work” of pattern making or fabric cutting is highly gendered in that the former is commonly associated with women’s naturalized traits and the latter with traits thought innate to men. As feminist scholars have taught us, social constructs and gender and race ideologies devalue certain types of labor as “unskilled” (see, e.g., Collins 2002; Fraser 1989; Green 1996). When something is considered women’s work, the knowledge, practice, aptitude,

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or abilities required to complete it are typically seen as low level. It was precisely through this logic that the export-centered garment-­manufacturing industry mobilized a major sector of young, working-class, underprivileged women and justified the undervaluing of their labor from the 1960s to the 1980s (Kim 1997). More specifically, in the Korean case, these women were also subservient to the state and the family due to a paternalistic, Confucian cultural ideology (Kim 1999). It was at that time as well that organized labor and social movements focused on clothing manufacturing as a symbol of oppression in their heated protestations against the authoritarian government and state-led capitalism. The general perception of a trained garment-stitching worker was that she was a source of cheap, “unskilled” labor and performed repetitive, mind-numbing work for long hours in exploitative conditions. Workers like Oksun began organizing alongside intellectuals and students to raise awareness and improve these perceptions and conditions. But as garment manufacturing chased lower labor costs to Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Guangzhou, union activism in Dongdaemun also started to diminish due to labor-market flexibility, privatization, and neoliberal economic restructuring (Chun 2011). I focus here on the notion of skill not just to reiterate its ideological operation and contrast it with the “skilled” garment workers with whom I worked, but also to highlight the discursive construction of skill as a referent to my informants’ engagement with their work. The narratives of skill that I discuss in this chapter show the dissident relations that women have with historical manufacturing processes (Kendall 2002), as well as the widespread and individually experienced insecurity of work and life in the 2000s. That Oksun began to feel positively about her own skill illustrates the disjuncture she experienced around her work throughout her life, including her past involvement with labor activists, the way society remembers and frames the garment industry in the present, and her simultaneous worries and hopes around her career as a seamstress. Young women entering the garment scene struggle to navigate their own and society’s assumptions about work, and with their inability to imagine let alone find a stable work life. Both the insecurity they feel and the promise they find in their sewing work resonate with the precariousness of life in the neoliberal economy. Anne Allison (2013) argues that precariousness, although a widespread phenomenon for informal workers around the world, registers as a sense of being out of place in everyday life. There is a loss of ibasho (a place to be, or a sense of security and belonging) in current-day Japan, where employment is flexible and irregular, government services are privatized, and the enduring and safe social connections that used to develop around work, family, and national community are disappearing.

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In the present moment, looking back on unresolved past memories and forward to an uncertain future, the women whose experiences I illustrate here feel that there is no suitable place for them. Lauren Berlant (2011) argues that in such a situation, people pursue affective ties and attachments to something, such as fundamentally bad and insecure jobs, as these options seem to make sense at that moment, and make them feel like the present is bearable and sustainable. The analysis of skill as a narrative device shifts the focus from the external valoration of what the skill is worth to the shifting ideas of people who aspire to make sense of what they do and what they can do. I begin by discussing the cultural logic that furthers the already gendered and classed notion of garment work as being temporally obsolete in state planning and the popular media, which makes garment workers feel as though they no longer have a proper place in the landscape of the Korean economy. I will challenge this evolutionary scenario by presenting the narratives of two distinct groups of women: one tries to make a new entry into the garment industry, and the other has been participating in it consistently for more than thirty-five years. The stories convey my interlocutors’ subjective engagement with and interpretation of garment-sewing work, adding depth to the simple framing of it as “work of the past.” From Sewing Warriors to Copyrighted Designers In the issues running from September 2009 to January 2010, the magazine Han’gyŏrye 21 featured a special series titled “Labor OTL,” offering a close look into the backbreaking conditions of low-class labor in South Korea. “While the [major figures of] factory labor for the period 1970–1980 was the yŏkong (woman factory worker) and mising (sewing machine) and shifted to be the electric screwdriver, its labor condition has not changed at all,” commented Sumi Eun (2009). Garment labor indeed symbolizes the arduous labor of “industry warriors” of the 1970s and 1980s as a central focus of the state-led developmental economic plans that drove the rapid industrialization and economic growth of South Korea. The labor of sewing, however, did not remain merely symbolic, but persisted for many in the cities of South Korea. The particularities of local context have become increasingly relevant for the historical and ideological construction of “garment skills” in recent years,2 adding dimensions to the structural positions of gender and class and to the global division of labor explicated by scholars of women’s 2  Particularly, power relations have been affected by race and ethnicity (Chin 2005; Louie 2001), decentralized through the intricate networks of outsourcing and supply chains (Tsing 2009), and intimately intertwined with the designing and manufacturing sectors (Tu 2011).

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manufacturing work in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e., Ong 1991). The interviews in this chapter come from ethnographic research that I conducted among garment workers in Seoul’s Dongdaemun Market area from 2008 to 2012. The history of Dongdaemun Market represents the ways in which garment labor is deployed in state-led economic planning. While increasing labor costs drove large-scale global and Korean apparel corporations to relocate their mass manufacturing offshore during the late 1980s and 1990s, small-scale factories remained around the marketplace and the city and sustained the flexible, just-in-time production for diverse designers amid the fast turnaround of fashion trends in the 1990s (Park 2012). It was in the mid 2000s that the Ministry of Knowledge Economy envisioned fashion design as a strategic target of the creative industry and appointed Dongdaemun a site for nurturing fashion designers. This change was situated in the broader context of East Asia, where the state has played an active role in leading economic planning. In the 2000s, the “creative economy” and the knowledge of workers were increasing in importance for boosting the national economy and fueling urban revitalization (e.g., Pang 2012; Tu 2011). Whereas the dominant figures in the export-centered manufacturing industry of the 1980s were factory women (yŏkong), including sewing workers, in the knowledge-economy plan of 2008, college-educated designers were deemed most capable of producing proper designs with copyrighted brand names. The plan included a training studio and formal offices for these designers in the Seoul Business Association in the middle of Dongdaemun. To attract more young designers, in subsequent years, the state funded fashion shows, events, and competitions in the shopping malls and in Dongdaemun Design Plaza. As Suzanne Bergeron (2004) argues, the modernist and positivist orientation of economic planning created a particular national imagination by using the figure of a woman to represent both modernization and tradition at the same time. In the vision of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, the presumably young designers could produce a moral, legitimate, and controlled form of knowledge, which the project needed to nurture and institute. The ministry intended for the image of a young, vibrant, white-collar worker to provide a sharp contrast to that of an aging blue-collar manufacturing worker, making South Korea’s historical transition legible and tangible in the next phase of the economy. Therefore, the marginalization of garment work is not only classed and gendered, but also temporal and spatial, positioning current garmentstitching workers at the margins of the present economy (Fabian 1983). The lower-class “industrial women warriors” have become a symbol of Korea’s past developmental growth and also imagined as women from a place remote from South Korea, such as Vietnam or Cambodia. In this

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positioning, the major “skill set” of the South Korean workforce would be abstract reasoning, innovative technology, and creative design. In the case of South Korea, the marginalization of manual skills within the rigid frame of class has not been exclusive to garment manufacturing. Popular and scholarly accounts criticizing the economic structure of South Korea relied heavily on the complicit partnership of the state and chaebols (large-scale business conglomerates) to ensure rapid growth. The chaebols often employed established and standardized sets of skills and techniques from developed countries to expedite the expansion of the manufacturing sector. The structure was able to mobilize vast numbers of manufacturing laborers but neglected to continue vocational training and skill enhancement for workers and failed to form a local infrastructure in which individuals and small businesses with techniques and skills could grow (Koo 2001). This structure is often said to have reproduced the traditional Confucian hierarchy of sa, nong, kong, sang (scholar-official, farmer, craftsman, merchants/tradesman) that placed manual-labor occupations at a lower social status (see, e.g., Mason 1980), and prevented occupations with various capacities from being valued and respected as “successful.” The government’s vocational promotion programs and its certificate system for professional skills have not had substantial and long-term effects. Compared with other cases, such as German or Japanese state programs, South Korean policies tended to neglect basic and foundational skills for the manufacturing industry (Shin and Chang 2004). Further, they often took a patronizing form of a one-time reward based on competition and put excessive emphasis on achievement in international competitions such as Skills International, which did not result in transforming the social or material valorization of skills in general (Sanggonghoeŭiso 2006; Yun et al. 2007). Garment stitching, even among the light industries and “soft” skills, is an acknowledged skill neither for the emerging service sector of the future—such as fashion designing, make-up, or skin aesthetics—nor for the older, traditional craftsmanship such as costume making, metalworking, or wood crafting.3 The global structure of the garment industry not only estranged the site of manufacturing from that of consumption, but also divided “skilled” garment stitching into two types of work: one that is constantly marginalized and another that is framed as high-quality craftsmanship. This division itself is manufactured. For example, Andrew Ross (2004) suggests that “craft’’ is used as a key term in the promotional rhetoric of virtually every Italian manufacturer, invoking an unbroken tradition of the old artisanal 3 

The Korean Committee for World Skills (Kukche kinŭng ollimp’ik taehoe Han’guk wiwŏnhoe) certifies certain degrees of skillfulness in these categories.

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workshop, even though the actual manufacturing practices cannot be exclusively described as such. Recent apparel brands in the United States also underscore a rhetoric of “workshop” emphasizing that design and manufacturing occur in the same place, connoting high-quality skillfulness of the sewing workers and businesses’ ethical values in trade and labor (Bagli 2009). This kind of active framing has not applied to former manufacturing sites such as South Korea. While there have been changes in recent years, including the public initiative in 2015 supporting “sogongin” (microenterprise person) as a new attempt to suggest the more respectful term kongin (craftsman/ skilled person) and provide a substantial means of support for their microenterprises,4 garment stitching as a profession and as manual skill remained the work not only of the poor, but also of the past. Lacking “Skill”: Youths in a Precarious Workforce and Their Uncertain Future On the day I met with Dohee for the first time, her employer, Namho Cha, the owner of a stitching factory specializing in women’s pants, was very much excited. Namho rushed into the office of the sewing classes to deliver the exciting news that a new apprentice, Dohee, would be coming to the factory. I was volunteering at the non-profit organization that organized the sewing classes, as a way to meet various individuals in the garment factories in Changsin-dong. “She is Korean. Born in ‘79!” he proudly declared. It was indeed rare to hear about someone with this particular profile entering a garment factory in Changsin-dong in 2010. In general, the manufacturing worker population has seen an increase in the median age, which is presently about forty-five (Kwak 2015). Although there are younger women, most are migrant workers from Vietnam, China, North Korea, and Nepal.5 Over the fifteen months of my fieldwork in Changsindong, the youngest person, besides Dohee, whom I met in any of the seven factories that I entered was a thirty-seven-year-old Nepalese woman. As the workday frequently stretches to twelve to fourteen hours during a busy week, garment-stitching factories are not popular places to work, even with marginalized migrants. Although garment making used to be a desirable skill, it quickly lost its attraction in the 2000s due, in part, to the fact that the low wages and long working hours were incommensurate with the level of skill it required. In contrast to an unprecedentedly high unemployment 4  Act on Special Measures for the Development of Small and Micro Enterprises (Sogiŏp mit sosan’gongin chiwon ŭl wihan t’ ŭkbyŏl choch’i bŏp). 5  This is more the case for downtown garment-stitching factories in Seoul. In the larger garment-finishing and washing factories in satellite cities, the portion of migrant workers is larger and their ethnic backgrounds are more diverse.

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rate for young people, the garment center was understaffed as of 2010 due to culturally constructed hierarchies in which young people are paid less.6 As one of my informants mentioned, “Young people would rather work at McDonalds, even for half of what they could actually make doing stitching work.” In this context, the news of Dohee’s appearance was indeed notable enough that people talked about her for weeks and jokingly suggested that I should be glad to finally meet a person of the same age; we were both thirty-one at the time. Dohee was from a small city in Kyeongsangnamdo where she had worked in a large-scale franchise store that sold office supplies and stationery. Although that company provided few opportunities for young people, it gave Dohee a stable part-time job in which she could make enough money to cover her expenses. Dohee knew that she would want something more “substantial” that could support her throughout her life. Introduced by her uncle, she came to work at the factory of Changnam-sa. When I asked permission to interview her, she suggested that we go to a café that was full of young people visiting the shopping malls of Dongdaemun. As we talked, I sensed that Dohee seemed a bit overwhelmed by other people’s interest in her. They were constantly trying to figure out what her “real” motivation was for coming to Changsin-dong, and Namho, her employer, showed an overzealous enthusiasm in training her to be a good seamstress. When I told Dohee that I appreciated her coming with me to the café, she asked, “Why wouldn’t I want to hang out after working at the hoesa [company]?” It was very unusual for Changnam-sa to be referred to as a “company” because everybody—including seamstresses, pattern makers, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists—called it a kongchang (factory). Technically, there was nothing wrong with calling Changnam-sa a company. It was registered as a formal saŏpchang (business establishment) with seven salaried full-time employees, unlike many other factories, which were often run informally with workers classified as self-employed contractors and paid by the piece. However, the physical building itself was far from what people would colloquially refer to as a hoesa. It was tucked between residential establishments on a shabby street and had no sign identifying it. Inside, it was just one room full of cloth dust, fabric pieces, and old sewing machines. So when Dohee used this term, I gathered that for her a proper workplace is one in which there is enough space for people to operate in stable conditions. Despite the wild guesses of people in the Changsin-dong neighborhood about why she was there—including rumors 6 

On the unemployment crisis of Korean young adults in a broader context, see Song 2014.

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of mysterious bodily injuries, love affairs, or some kind of mental disability—her reason for wanting to learn garment work was quite simple: “For somebody like me who is not quick to smile and does not like to work with many people, it is important to have a manual skill. My friends said I should look good or at least try to be charming in the job market. But let’s suppose that I smile, act pretty, and socialize well; that would still not give me long-term work.” Dohee’s statement illustrated the limited jobs available to women without cultural capital or competitive college degrees. Service-sector jobs in sales, waitressing, or customer service required intense emotional labor and a “feminine” attitude that Dohee found extremely challenging and “unfitting” of her. As Jesook Song (2014) notes, part of the younger generation (called the “new poor”) was affected by the collapsing national economy and the resurgent conservative gender regime that endorsed gender discrimination in the job market. Many were suffering from the high rate of youth unemployment and a rapid rise in the cost of public goods and services, such as tuition at public universities. Moreover, acquiring other professional skills or credentials required paying money for training programs or vocational schools. Dohee said that she did not partake in the training programs as they are only “certificate markets” (cha’gyŏkchŭng changsa) that merely buy time for a job seeker. Therefore, to Dohee, doing an apprenticeship and learning step-by-step tangible sewing skills and stitching techniques, and understanding the materials and structures of fabrics and assembled clothes that she could feel with her fingertips, seemed more “real.” That same year, I also met Minyoung, who joined the beginning-level sewing class. The same age as Dohee, Minyoung had a college degree, which made joining the garment industry a more complicated decision for her. Minyoung was born and raised in Changsin-dong and used to dislike her shabby, dark neighborhood. Rather than spend time in her own west-side community, she preferred to take the eastern routes along Lotte Castle, a high-rise condominium, where she could see fashionable people coming in and out of the parking lot. Since Minyoung loved clothes and shopping, it was fascinating for her to see people who designed clothes and ran their own shops in Dongdaemun. She could spot them by their fashion sense and the back seats of their cars, which were always piled high with packages of clothes. She could sometimes even see famous people who appeared in popular media. Whereas Minyoung always avoided her west-side community, which was visibly inhabited by small garment factories spewing dust and noise, the time she spent in the United States made her see the street differently. Minyoung had majored in information science at a two-year college in

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Seoul, but she was unsuccessful in finding a job after graduation. After a couple of short-term contracts with small garment-trading companies in Dongdaemun, she decided to take all of her savings and go to the United States to learn English. She quickly ran out of money there and worked in a Korean-owned dry cleaning store for income. She wanted to stay longer in the United States because she felt like she was gaining the kind of substantial work experience that she could apply to various contexts of life: Don’t old people always say, “One should have at least one specific skill to survive”? I realized the saying is actually true when I was away from home and finally saw the reality. I always knew that I might not succeed in the expectation to make enough money at a desk job, save money to buy a house, and so on. It is almost a fantasy for many people. But I was still not able to let go of that picture [of life] even though I knew it was untenable. . . . I wish I had been able to use the sewing machine and make clothes. There is a demand for people who can do alterations in the dry cleaning stores; with sewing skills, I could have survived there much longer. Or I could have even tried taking the skill to northern Europe or some other country.

The experience of being in a minority position as a foreign woman of color without a proper visa and sufficient money made her see more clearly her own precarious socioeconomic position in Korea. Once Minyoung returned to Korea, she started exploring her options for learning garmentmaking skills. Minyoung was one of several types of participants: fashion designers in Dongdaemun who needed sewing skills to do advanced design work, foreign women married to Korean men and introduced to the NGO by local shelters for migrant women, housewives who had formerly worked in the garment and textile industry and were trying to reenter the field, and several young people who had other reasons for learning to sew. Although Minyoung was one of the most motivated students in the class and was introduced to a factory that was open to hiring beginners, when I met with her a year later, she was struggling to decide between transferring to a four-year college and pursuing a career in garment work. “I heard horrible stories about kongsuni [factory girls] of the 1970s, and my mother asked, ‘What generation do you think you are, trying to become a kongsuni in the 2000s?’ But there is something appealing about having one solid skill that you can take with you in any context, however old you are. The mastery of this skill is totally different from my shallow reading and writing at graduate school.” Minyoung mentioned a sixty-five-year-old seamstress working in a factory in Nokpŏn, a neighborhood in northwest Seoul. We had both heard about the woman from another classmate in the beginner’s sewing class. The ability to make clothing on a long-term basis,

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like the aging seamstress had, seemed stable and substantial, compared with Minyoung’s previous stints as a clerical intern, a novice merchandiser at a Dongdaemun trading company, and a low-level staff member at a library. The narrative of “skill” emerges among these young women in a way that reveals the insecurity and the failed promises of class mobility. Gabriella Lukacs, in her work on youth labor in Japan (2013), argues that the more that young people become part of a precarious workforce, the more they seek self-fulfilling work. Whereas Lukacs observed that young people tended to be attracted to the newly emerging field of immaterial and creative labor (such as writing and selling novels through cell phones), the young women I met were inclined to making material garments. These women’s responses to economic insecurity distinguish them from the w ­ idely discussed “spec generation” in Korea, who have tremendous pressure to overeducate themselves and constantly self-manage to maintain a perfectly packaged, high-caliber résumé (e.g., Abelmann, Park, and Kim 2009; Cho 2015; Levine 2014). The mainstream narrative about the highly educated youths emphasizes their struggle to beat out the competition to obtain white-collar jobs, as well as their cosmopolitan aspirations and strategies instilled at an early age. Although the cases of Dohee and Minyoung may be unusual, they were just two of many young women who lacked social and cultural capital and found it difficult to fit in and to motivate themselves to land the few available jobs in service industries or corporate offices. Minyoung and Dohee are part of the generation of contemporary South Korea who, from their own marginal position, show a growing pessimism toward what they could develop, achieve, and be compensated for through their working life. The sense of insecurity in the context of the aftermath of the financial crises in 1997 and 2008 has meant that young people do not depend on nor believe in job security as a means to earn a certain quality of life in Korea. The discourse of the “dirt-spoon” class (hŭksujŏ) represents the cynicism among young people that assumes, unless you are born with the inherited asset of a wealthy family, there is nothing that you can achieve through your own effort in current Korean society. A similar idea is evident in the growing interest of skilled people in migrating to Australia, western and northern Europe, and Canada, which is often termed as “exiting Korea” (t’al Chosŏn). These countries and regions offer benefits and access to those who have particular skills but are typically not well respected in South Korea. The media often cover stories of young people, even those with higher education or proper office jobs in large companies, starting to train themselves in automobile mechanics or metal welding (Hwang 2016; Kim et al. 2016).

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Regarding this context, it would be be hard to say that Minyoung and Dohee expected to achieve economic stability through garment skills, as many factory women aspired to do in the past, or entirely identify with the marginalized factory women of earlier times. Yet, they saw the possibility in this seemingly anachronistic sewing skill as something they could feel close to and that would endure for a longer time than the normative span of productive working life, under conditions in which it was extremely difficult to imagine this option. “Having Skill” as a Problem: The Unresolved Past of Long-Term Garment Workers The garment workers with whom I spoke are well aware of the aging garment-­manufacturing scene and are living through the contradictions of the so-called rapid transformation of the South Korean economy in their work lives. Many have worked for thirty to forty years. Although there has been a big shift from the time when the garment industry was one of the most significant areas of economic planning and labor activism to the current scattering of factories and activists, this shift has taken place during the career of many of my informants. Stories about training and mastering garment work, therefore, are often saturated with the collective memories of the 1960s through 1980s, the so-called developmental period when garment making was one of the limited options available to marginalized workers. Like many other garment workers, Oksun started working in a factory when she was a teenager. Her work and labor-activism trajectories are entangled with the processes through which she trained herself in sewing, sought further education, and entered political life. At first she was very excited about taking a bus to work every morning, as she had always been envious of other girls who were “going somewhere to learn something every day,” heading to school with their bags and lunch boxes. For the first few years, Oksun quickly learned sewing skills. Then, just like many other women in the industry, she started contributing significantly to the family’s income. Oksun planned to pursue a certificate of high school equivalency once she became comfortable and confident about her performance. She joined a study group (kongbu moim) in a Christian church to prepare for the test. There, Oksun and her classmates were introduced to the concepts of labor, solidarity, and social justice. For Oksun, who had always been eager to learn, the interactions with older college students and activists was an eye-opening experience, and she started participating in organized meetings right away. However, at the same time, she started to feel the gap between her and the student activists.

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The alliance between laborers and intellectual activists (nohak yŏndae) characterized the 1980s (Kim 2001; Lee 2005). This partnership was particularly important in the context of garment labor in Dongdaemun as the participants tried to continue the work of the Cheonggye union after its forced dismissal in 1981.7 The presence of college-student activists, who ran night classes for garment workers, most of whom were women in their teens eager to learn, facilitated the entry of women like Oksun into activism. However, conceptual and actual divisions between the intellectual and the worker, as well as the hierarchies of gender, age, and class, persisted and resulted in many women workers being marginalized within the movement (Kim 1997; Kim 2005; Lee 2005). Here I want to focus not so much on the dynamics between laborer and intellectual activist, but on their influence on the female laborers’ understanding of their own work. Oksun recalls that she and her friends constantly felt a gap between themselves and the intellectuals. She talked about the discrepancy in terms of her work and the conceptual foundation for solidarity and resistance: The terms were very abstract for us. I really understood how to view myself as a laborer, and for the first time I thought about my job and myself from a broader perspective. But it was hard for us to connect these terms with our everyday work and practices. Sometimes we were called to participate in other fields of protest. I respected the bigger goal and everything, but it was hard to convince myself in a very mundane sense, especially when I had an inevitable reason not to leave my own work.

Attending union rallies with others was a necessary component for building “solidarity,” and one of the first steps was to identify oneself as a laborer (nodongja), not just as a skilled worker (kisulja). They realized that the term kisulja could easily be appropriated to objectify individual workers as tools of manufacturing and to dismiss the dignity of their labor. At one point, they even stopped talking about their skills and work experiences. The wide applicability and concept of “labor consciousness” was a powerful tool for broader alliances, but it frequently required workers to attend strikes, sit-ins, and protests for other unions and student movements. For workers who were maintaining multiple roles, building solidarity was a 7  The military regime of Jeon Doohwan changed the labor union law by authorizing just one union per business entity, which eventually disabled the organizing efforts at small-scale manufacturers as in Dongdaemun. It was only on March 17, 2015, that the Supreme Court declared that Jeon’s dismissal of the Cheonggye union and the charges against its leaders were unlawful. On the legal debates and framing of the union, see Min 2015.

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burden, and the concept itself did not account for the work they actually had to perform on a daily basis. Oksun’s “skill,” however, was the very thing that allowed her and her colleagues to sustain the union. However, Oksun was never able to “enjoy the luxury” of working as a full-time activist, since her family needed her income. Moreover, the union mostly depended on the core members’ wages for miscellaneous expenses like supplies, food, transportation, and management, because it was not authorized to procure a stable budget source in the form of member dues.8 As a core member, Oksun had a daily schedule that became busier because she had to perform union activities and work extra hours to cover miscellaneous costs, in addition to the daily workload required to support her family. With the increased hours and pressure to work, Oksun had to be competitive and efficient. She was afraid that other workers in her factory would think she was slacking off or leaving the burden of the regular workload to them, which would endanger her job and discourage her colleagues to join the union. As such, without any moral or political support, Oksun had to demonstrate a good work ethic and competence, which were instrumental in sustaining her family, work, and activism. Having to work harder and better for her own labor rights while simultaneously dismissing her own work represents the contradictory position that prevented Oksun from having a demarcated “work” that she could enter and exit as she pleased. Oksun’s engagement with the specificities of everyday practices and the potential pleasure or pride in gaining efficiency and skill in her work did not have a place in a framework that focused on solidarity and measures of working hours and wages in dispute with employers. The work of keeping up a critical perspective on the exploitative nature of her work, therefore, was part of the challenging task. This task required her deliberate effort to be good at suppressing any emotional disposition toward or animation of her own performance of the work while staying good at it—a skill in and of itself. In the late 1980s, the intellectual activists started to leave the factories for a variety of reasons: for personal reasons, because the industry itself had declined, because they had different sites to devote themselves to, or because certain agendas had been met. The fragmentation of manufacturing sites into outsourced units also contributed to the decrease in union organizing. For the workers, too, Oksun said, “The best scenario for us here was to leave,” whether to marry up, take a different job, or even migrate to a foreign country. However, for many workers, contrary to their fellow 8 

The stipends for full-time union staffs depended on the contribution and support of other members (Min 2015).

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activists, their only option was to continue working in the garment factories, whether or not they had managed to transform the working conditions. Oksun made the following contrast between the stitching workers and intellectual activists: “Working here, we never had any moment when something came to a grand conclusion or had a successful outcome. The 1987 struggle might have been really important, but that did not mean that all of a sudden the field disappeared or improved. There are people like me still working here and some are in a worse situation.” As time passed, the differences between Oksun and the intellectual leaders became clearer. Those who moved on could look back, produce knowledge from it, and treat the labor field as one of the past. As Hyun Mee Kim (2001) argues, working women’s contributions to the 1987 labor movement and what happened afterward have been almost invisible in the popular discourse; these women are mostly treated as “victims,” if anything, in contrast to the well-publicized image of the male workers and activists. Namhee Lee (2005) asserts that the popular media held a hasty celebration of the intellectuals’ historical role in the labor movement of the 1980s, which has even fed the feeling of nostalgia for it. Oksun and other workers were reluctant to comment on others’ recollections in which their former activist colleagues talk about how the goals of their activism had been achieved. Whereas their collaborators felt that they had reached a kind of closure, for Oksun and other workers, their garment labor has been an ongoing reality that they continue to experience in the present. While the activism gave them a frame to awaken their consciousness about labor exploitation and make sense of their political-economic position in the past, it did not give them a positive way to think about their continued work in the factories, despite the lack of change in their living conditions. They have had closure neither through the glorification of their activism, freezing and objectifying their own labor in the past, nor in mourning the failure to break free from the permanent shackles of labor exploitation. In contrast, Oksun found that her own sewing skill is the one thing that is self-evident and solid in the present. A few years after the financial crisis hit in 1997, Oksun started seeing many of her former colleagues come back to work in the factories after the economic recession led to large-scale layoffs in other industries.9 First they were surprised to find that the factories still existed; even those who had worked there thought they were all gone. Then, they started talking about one another’s sewing skills. Oksun gradually started engaging with her own capacities, prac9 

For further context and for the process of this persistent manufacturing work in the urban center, see Park 2012.

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tices, and knowledge as she communicated them to former colleagues and new students like Minyoung in the sewing classes. Oksun has considered several different futures, including cultivating and using her own skills to teach sewing or work at a small store in Dongdaemun Market. I asked Oksun to detail how she changed her thoughts about having good sewing skills. Oksun described the moment when she first sits down in front of the sewing machine: Every time you shift to a new factory, the owner asks you how much you have been paid per piece and gives you new kinds and styles of clothes depending on the factory’s specialty. I feel my heart pounding out of nervousness and a bit of excitement at the same time. Then I see the sample clothes, sit at the sewing machine, and start to sew without any direction or consultation. Sitting at the machine, whatever kind it is, I feel comfortable and confident when my fingers move the fabric pieces without hesitation, making the stitches even and smooth.

At this moment, she realizes that “this is what I do and I do it well.” With no formal system to acknowledge and account for a seamstress’s career and abilities, Oksun’s confidence at the sewing machine underscores her competency, making her a desirable, flexible worker. Yet, at the same time, the sense of “skillfulness” as she works at the machine physically and affectively ties her to the present moment. In this narrative, Oksun’s persistence shows most clearly at the moment when she is seamlessly attuned to the rhythms and pace of her fingertips and stays connected to her own motivation for her work. The moment pauses, if not alters, the immediate application of existing frames of labor that define garment-sewing workers as an alienated part of the manufacturing machine, or the state-led narratives of the vanishing and replaceable garment worker as a figure of the past. As Berlant suggests, the present is “not always a sense of something fleeting or a metaphysical experience of loss; nor is it mainly a dumping ground of anachronistic historical forces” (2011:199). The affective turn to Oksun’s skill, the smooth orchestration of her body, material, and machine, stretches out the current moment and delays the demand to assess what has happened before and what will happen in the future. Conclusion Garment-making skills have a very particular place in the postwar history of South Korea. The manufacturing industry emphasized the need for underprivileged people to acquire special skills for a better life and upward mobility, and it rapidly mobilized a vast population based on a particularly gendered construction of what skills were suitable and valuable. This

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population has become a symbol of the country’s past to be left behind, and its disappearance and replacement with new figures with desirable skill sets would justify the state’s economic planning projects, such as the revitalization of Dungdaemon Market. The stories I have presented here illustrate persistence and continuity in the development of garment-making skills, and they complicate the master narratives about the garment industry and the national economy. Garment skill emerges in these narratives as a capacity with different temporal qualities in different labor regimes. Young women looking for a substantial kind of self-potentiality for the future are not easily swayed by the disparities of the flexible postindustrial industry—buzzwords and false promises of the new generation and the problems of unemployment and insecure labor. Experienced older women are seeking an enduring place for their own accumulated memories and experiences in the current economic landscape, which increasingly does not recognize their presence or active participation. Their continued existence strays from the linear progress assumed in both the state’s economic development narrative and the masculinist resistance movement and faces a crisis around work and their inability to find an adequate place as aged, gendered, and classed subjects in the present. As revealed by these stories, the ideological underpinnings that define garment work as unskilled, repetitive, or a “working-class woman’s job” operate in multiple and complex ways, often resulting in activists themselves failing to account for and value their own experiences and investments in their work. Whereas many analysts have focused on how people move along or reproduce class and gender stratifications as a result of their labor, I highlight the present space people carve out through their understanding and aspirations to attain a skill as one way to account for their affective and material engagements with work (Weeks 2011). Through ethnographic inquiry, this chapter situates the analyses of meanings and politics of skill in a longer span of time than that of a job’s particular wage, condition, and status. The gender and class constructions of skill exist not only as a structural position that determines one’s subjective experiences and motivation to work, but also as one whose meanings are recognized and produced over time within one’s work life, which is always longer than the duration of employment. Workers’ “skill” functions differently from a developmentalist pursuit of upward mobility or a nostalgic reaction to the hardships of garment workers. Rather, “skill” is a vantage point and a narrative device through which people convey a sense of attachment to their own work despite their keen awareness of its historical constructions and marginality.

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Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yun Jodŏk, Kim Hyŏnsu, Lim Seyŏng, Ko Hyewon, Ch’oe Tongsŏn, Kim Sangho, and Sŏ Ch’anggyo. 2007. Kukkagyŏngjaengnyŏk chegorŭl wihan kinŭngjangnyŏsaŏbŭi hwalsŏnghwa pangan [Korea’s international competence and advancing the skill development project]. Korea Labor Institute. https://www.kli.re.kr/kli/rsrchReprtView.do?key=​ 16&pblctListNo=6414&schRsrchRealmNo=4 (retrieved July 17, 2017).

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FIVE

Leave No Birthing Trace: The Politics of Health and Beauty in the South Korean Postpartum Care Market

YOONJUNG KANG

“My goal is in three months [emphasis original] to lose the entire baby weight and get my pre-baby body back with these postpartum care plans. I won’t regret the money spent for that. A top priority for me now is to make my body regain enough strength and slimness by the time I return to work,” said Mee-kyung,1 a thirty-four-year-old mother who gave birth to her first child in September 2012, when I interviewed her right after she completed her two-week stay at a residential facility for postpartum care (sanhujoriwŏn) in Seoul’s Gangnam district. When her pregnancy was confirmed, Mee-kyung had immediately laid out her postpartum care scheme, conferring with her husband and her mother. As a result, her three-month maternity leave was filled with a series of postpartum care arrangements: the first two weeks in the postpartum care facility, another two weeks with a postpartum home-care helper (sanhudoumi) at her home, and two months of additional convalescence in her mother’s house located two hours’ drive from Seoul. At the postpartum care facility, one of the top-notch facilities in Seoul, Mee-kyung received very enviable postpartum care services, consisting of a variety of skin and body massages, yoga and Pilates classes, and a strict postpartum diet developed by a self-styled postpartum nutritionist. Even after being discharged, she occasionally visited the facility to use their highly reputed postpartum massage services. Entering her seventh week postpartum, Mee-kyung began to work out with a personal fitness trainer, expecting to accelerate her weight loss. Mee-kyung spent roughly the equivalent of seven thousand U.S. dollars for her postpartum physical 1 

All participant names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.

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recovery, including the professional postpartum care she received during the first four weeks.2 But, as she stressed in my interview with her, she did not regret the money spent for her postpartum restoration. Rather, she believed that it was a “worthwhile investment” to handle many perceived aftereffects of birth and pregnancy, such as bodily pain, swelling, and, most importantly, weight increase. Although Mee-kyung and her family often doubted the commercial and “modernized” methods of postpartum body treatment, Mee-kyung still felt “lucky,” for she was able to enjoy plenty of options, many of which she considered more “rational” and “effective” postpartum care measures, compared with what her mother had received after giving birth several decades ago. In addition to the “quality” postpartum maternity care, the facility also provided “quality” neonatal care, such as a high-tech nursery operated by experienced nurses with high-end baby items, and meal services for her husband, who often commuted from the facility to work during her stay there. All the services touting high-quality professionalism made Mee-kyung feel comfortable with her choice. Mee-kyung’s postpartum experience is typical of many Korean mothers who use private postpartum care services today. Albeit with some variation, new mothers, mostly urban middle-class mothers like Mee-kyung, completely suspend work and daily life and enter a postpartum care facility for two weeks immediately after giving birth at a hospital. In those facilities, which are usually run by maternity clinics or individual nurses, mothers get postpartum rest and meticulous postpartum body care as well as learn essential newborn-care skills, such as breastfeeding. Even as babies’ well-being is the highest priority during the two-week postpartum itinerary there, everyday routines in the facilities are coordinated in order to facilitate mothers’ restorative rest and sleep and various care sessions. Following the two weeks’ stay at residential facilities, mothers hire postpartum home-care helpers having relevant professional qualifications for another two to four weeks. The live-out (rarely live-in) postpartum helpers provide any needed assistance, such as housework, infant care, and postpartum massages, while their clients recover strength and grow into their new role as a mother. The philosophy behind such an intensive care regime lies in the traditional Korean postpartum custom called three/seven (samch’il). As a critical part of traditional Korean childbirth customs (sansok), three/seven stipulates rituals and care practices that should be performed by a postpartum woman and her family during the first twenty-one days of motherhood. Specifically, sequestered in the high-temperature birth room with 2 

The dollar amounts in this chapter were calculated at the rate of 1,100 Korean won to one U.S. dollar, though the average exchange rate fluctuated over the course of my research.

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her newborn baby, a new mother is expected to focus on recovering health, strength, and mental vigor, while her close kinswomen—usually including her mother or mother-in-law—attend to postpartum and newborn care duties, such as serving the Samsin (or, the Samsin Grandmother), the Korean goddess believed to oversee conception, birth, lactation, and the health of infants in the immediate postpartum period. Even though most postpartum folk rituals have been gradually disregarded with societal modernization, critical maternal health behaviors, such as taking prolonged bed rest, avoiding any coldness, and consuming seaweed soup during the postpartum period, have survived in the name of “traditional postpartum care” (chŏnt’ong sanhujori; Han 1999; Kendall 1977; Kendall 1987; Sich 1981). Believing that inadequate postpartum care causes new mothers to contract many chronic, intractable health problems—commonly called “postpartum wind” (sanhup’ung)—Korean mothers have performed traditional postpartum care even in the context of the increasing medicalization of childbirth in contemporary South Korea. Korean women’s persistence in following traditional Korean postpartum health behaviors eventually paid off, when the first postpartum care facility opened in Seoul in the mid-1990s. As a glimpse of Mee-kyung’s postpartum care arrangement reveals, the new postpartum care service industry transformed many of the core principles and practices of traditional Korean postpartum care. The new service providers, promoting themselves as professionals providing “systematic, medically justified” care, have acquired legitimacy while effectively wresting the postpartum care custom from the family. Resonating with the larger social circumstances, such as the privileged position of biomedicine, the increasing presence of globally circulating healthcare technologies and products, and the pervasive tendency toward commodification of everyday life, the rhetoric of scientific professionalism of postpartum care quickly captivated the urban middle-class. Incorporating various nontraditional care techniques and rationales that are often contradictory to the conventional postpartum dictates, the new postpartum care industry has created a whole new array of caring methods and orientations, which I frame as a new biopolitical script by which the health and beauty of the female reproductive body are both encoded and enacted. Acknowledging the residential postpartum care service industry as a new middle-class convenience, in this chapter I examine politics of postpartum care practices of South Korean urban middle-class mothers. I ask what specific caring services are proffered in the commercialized postpartum care sites and how the new care regimes (re)fashion cultural norms and practices of middle-class women’s propriety. Drawing insights from studies on gender, class, aesthetic health, and body politics, this ethnography addresses two related arguments: first, the current commercialized

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postpartum care practices represent a South Korean version of the maternal beauty/health care imperative, which Alexander Edmonds conceptualizes as “aesthetic health” (2008); second, the marketized reproductive health care services not only offer South Korean women the potential for emancipation and autonomy from conventional oppressive social relations, but also confine them in a new cultural frame of middle-class femininity. As I will discuss in more detail later, the fascinating fusion of health and beauty care practices that has accounted for much of the postpartum care industry’s success powerfully communicates with young mothers’ desires and anxieties over their bodies and selfhood. As a practical solution for the management of feminine beauty and health, the commercial postpartum care services continuously evoke ideals, imaginations, and experiences of middle-class women’s bodies, intimacy, sexuality, and personhood. And those interactions, I understand, correspond with the affective social ethos of cultivating life, which many critics view as a core ideology of capitalism and modernity (Foucault 1978; Hardt and Negri 2000; Rose and Novas 2005). Let’s return to Mee-kyung’s case. For many reasons, she badly wanted to restore her pre-pregnancy weight and body shape in three months. Keenly calibrated to the social norms of the female body—that is, it should procreate and nurture offspring, and simultaneously exude feminine sexuality even after giving birth multiple times—Mee-kyung optimized her postpartum care plan by mobilizing a variety of personal resources. As an ordinary middle-class working mother desiring the highest possible standard of material living and various forms of capital that would substantiate her class standing,3 she believed that a healthy beautiful body is a key to securing her present class location and multiple identities as mother, wife, and white-collar worker. Restoring her pre-pregnancy body is not just concerned with her bodily state, but with her own worth and value. Putting it in her own words, any common trace of pregnancy and childbirth—that is, weight increase, dull skin, or deformation of reproductive organs—only proves a woman’s “lack of will” (ŭichibakyak) to live up to today’s standards of proper womanhood. A well-managed post-pregnancy body, which she called “a body like that of a twentysomething” (isipdae mommae), is a sort of measuring stick for a woman’s will or determination to manage her selfworth and life. Indeed, many of my informants, including new mothers, their husbands, and even postpartum care practitioners, laid out a similar reckoning that weaves together women’s bodily health and beauty with values and ethics as a human being. 3 

Refer to Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1987) on the different types of capital, such as economic, cultural, and symbolic, in the making of social class.

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This chapter delves into these complex relations of commercialized postpartum care, social imaginations of women’s health and beauty, and evolving ideas about middle-class femininity and selfhood. I begin by reviewing my ethnographic research, the limitations and strengths of it, and characteristics of my informants. Next, I identify the nature of the commercial postpartum care services, drawing on the concept of aesthetic health, and demonstrate how the new postpartum service industry interacts with the changing meanings of health and beauty of the female body. And finally, I portray vivid stories of my informants in the residential postpartum care facilities. By doing so, I further discuss how commercial postpartum care experiences affect South Korean women’s perceptions about their bodies, selves, and lives, particularly with respect to gender and class relations. Studying New Mothers in South Korea Partly predictable and partly fortuitous, my collection of ethnographic material on maternal healthcare behaviors in one of the world’s largest and busiest metropolitan areas kept me musing over a number of methodological questions: who my interlocutors are; how I can observe their very private lives; and how I should situate myself in the field. Wedded to my “native anthropologist” position, the conditions of my field, and my research questions precluded me from performing conventional anthropology; that is, immersing in a strange culture and recording every minutia of others’ lives through long-term participant observation. Instead, my research asked me to creatively combine multiple techniques of fieldwork, similar to what Hugh Gusterson has called “polymorphous engagement” (1997), and maintain the “halfie” stance that feminist anthropologists have suggested, highlighting some shared problematics of positioning themselves in ethnographic research today in which the distinction between insider/outsider or informant/anthropologist has become more vexed and fluid (Abu-Lughod 1995; Behar 1996; Hurston [1935] 1990; Narayan 1993). Beginning with a pilot study in the summer of 2010, my research in the metropolitan area of Seoul mainly occurred between August 2012 and July 2013.4 During this yearlong fieldwork period, I carried out the central interviews and, albeit limited, the participant observations across a number of dispersed sites, such as informants’ homes, hospitals, postpartum care facilities, cafés, workplaces, and shopping malls. In addition to both 4  The metropolitan area of Seoul, Sudokwŏn in Korean, refers to the capital area located in northwest South Korea. It contains three administrative districts: Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi-do, and occupies 11.7% (about 4,535 square miles) of the entire country. According to the 2010 national census, 49.1% (about 24 million residents) of the total population of South Korea lives in the metropolitan area of Seoul (Statistics Korea, 2010 National Census).

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structured and unstructured conversations with various people, including young mothers, new fathers, their parents, postpartum care service providers, government officers, and medical professionals, I engaged in several virtual spaces for mothers. I collected online reviews of postpartum care facilities, analyzed “must-watch/read” materials of expectant mothers, and attended multiple government-sponsored or private pregnancy/childbirth classes and baby fair events. My research collaborators consist of thirty-five women in various stages of pregnancy and child-rearing and ten men, including the husbands of five women. Between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-seven, they lived in middle-class enclaves in Seoul and its suburban areas. I met my five key informants during the pilot study. During the following yearlong research period, I recruited other participants through a snowball-sampling method by which the key informants introduced me to their families and friends who fit the sample criteria. Most of the interviews were in-depth sessions two-to-three hours long. I followed some of these women’s pregnancy and postpartum care practices by observing and interviewing them multiple times. By all accounts, my informants are from the middle class; they are college educated, own or rent apartments, and own family cars. With the exception of five women, all continued working after giving birth. As such, they are part of dual-income households. According to the Korean Statistics Bureau, middle class is defined as households that own 50 to 150 percent of the median net household income of the country; that is, any household with a monthly income between 1,700 and 5,200 U.S. dollars falls within the middle class.5 But, I found these numbers did not necessarily reflect how my informants were actually perceiving their class locations. Indeed, a variety of (im)material criteria besides income was at work in determining one’s class status. For instance, one couple made an income of US$9,000 pretax, but their available monthly budget for their living was much less than that, because about half of their income had to be cut off for mortgage payment and their parents’ living expenses. Even as objective criteria identified them as upper-middle class, they felt insecure about their class. Whereas, another couple earned only about US$3,500 per month from their day jobs, but their wealthy parents provided significant financial support to them, including buying them an apartment in Gangnam, which made them stable middle class. Thus, to estimate my informants’ class locations, I needed to take a close look at their actual living standards and be sensitive to local variations of middle-class trappings, drawing not only on 5 

For more details about measuring the South Korean middle class, see the research report in Park, Ahn, and Chung 2013.

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my analytic gaze acquired through academic training but also embodied knowledge—or “native hunch”—learned from lived experience. Intimate and strategic interactions with my informants across a number of dispersed sites taught me that purchasing postpartum care services was a definite classed activity. As vibrant middle class, all my informants who identified themselves with the middle class were clearly aware of the stratified postpartum care market and its implications. They often insisted that they could estimate a woman’s (or her family’s) class status from where she received postpartum care. Many government documents and media reports also asserted that someone’s ability to afford a private (i.e., nongovernment-sponsored) postpartum care facility, a private postpartum home-care helper, or both should be viewed as a new class mark for urban middle-class families. Indeed, multiple reports released by government agencies announced that, in 2013, almost half of South Korean birthing women used private postpartum care facility services, paying between US$1,500 and US$14,000 for two weeks, and the vast majority of these women are part of the middle class.6 Following a woman’s postpartum care practices paved my way for learning about other parts of her private life, such as conjugal relations, in-law relationships, personal networks, physical and mental health status, and, most of all, her inner desires and anxieties as a person living through the early 2000s in South Korea. The inevitable potentiality to expose one’s private life, indeed, was the biggest hurdle for me to recruit informants in the early stages of my fieldwork. For that very reason, however, once rapport was established, the depth of our conversations often reached farther than I expected, which enabled me to explore the sociopolitical meanings of postpartum care in contemporary South Korea. In the following, I will discuss further how the market-oriented postpartum care dictates influence the ways that today’s young mothers (re)produce ethics and imaginations about the female body and selfhood, and how the gendered cultural script to govern women’s reproductive bodies resonates with “some of the coordinates of their senses and sensibility of class” (Abelmann 2003, 3). Postpartum Care as Aesthetic Health When I first planned my ethnographic study in 2010, South Korea had approximately 430 postpartum care facilities. But by the time I completed my fieldwork in 2013, that number had reached higher than 550.7 This is a 6 

This number increased to two-thirds in 2016. For more information, refer to national statistics released on the online Korean Statistical Information Service (KOSIS). 7  Statistics released on the website of Ministry of Health and Welfare (Pogŏnpokchibu), http://www.mohw.go.kr/front_new/jb/sjb030301vw.jsp.

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significant increase, considering there was no substantial change in birth rates over those three years. Furthermore, there had been strong signs that childbirth-related industries, including clinics delivering ob-gyn services, were declining, since South Korea’s birth rate had been one of the lowest in the world over the past decades. In this case, how could the residential postpartum care industry grow exponentially? Why did South Korean mothers quickly embrace the new postpartum care services? To answer these questions, here I try to identify the characteristics of the industry and unfold how they interact with changing ideas of health and beauty of the female reproductive body in contemporary South Korea. Analyzing medical procedures that promote the aesthetics of women’s appearance or specifically reproductive organs in Brazil, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds introduces the concept of “aesthetic health.” According to his explication, aesthetic health refers to “the use of a variety of medical and other body practices that merge a concern for aesthetics, psychological and sexual well-being, and self-improvement” (Edmonds 2008, 153). Aesthetic health, he continues, “is generally not a state that can be ‘on’ or ‘off,’ but rather a process in which continuous improvement becomes desirable and possible” (153). Surveying various medical practices and technologies of the self in which aspirations for aesthetics and physiological health simultaneously—and often seamlessly—­coexist, he lays out two intriguing arguments: first, aesthetic health has been always an implicit orientation of modern medicine; and health and beauty secured with the help of medicine have enabled individuals to establish themselves as modern selves (Edmonds 2008; Edmonds 2013).8 Unlike Foucauldian thinkers who view medicine as a disciplinary tool (Brown 2003; Featherstone 1991; Feher 1987; Giddens 1993; Rose and Novas 2005; Shilling 1993; Turner 1984), Edmonds views medicine as a constructive modern convenience—albeit disproportionately distributed—that brings individuals health and beauty through which they experience modernity and even challenge existing hierarchies. Edmonds’s understanding of medicine, health, and beauty in modern life, however, does not necessarily mean that he advocates today’s everintensifying health and beauty norms, methods, and practices. Rather, in line with rich feminist scholarship that has criticized beauty practices as a means for the social control of the female body within patriarchal capitalism (Bordo 1993; Butler 1993; Davis 1995; Grosz 1994; Haiken 1997; Lock 8 

This kind of interpretation, namely, that alteration to the body represents the human desire to improve the self, is shared by many studies about cosmetic surgery and dieting. For more discussion, see Kathy Davis (1995), Laura Miller (2006), Sang Un Park (2007), Margrit Shildrick (2008), and Keong Ja Woo (2004).

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and Farquhar 2007; Lock and Kaufert 1998; Martin 2001; Miller 2006; Ngu­ yen 2011; Reed and Saukko 2010; Urla and Swedlund 1995; Weiss 2002), Edmonds delves into how the female body, more specifically its health and beauty, are fetishized as goods within the increasingly stratified health and beauty care market today. By doing so, he demonstrates that we cannot avoid social realities in which there is constant appraisal of the values of our bodies, and that many people are trapped in the vicious circle of body projects that promise health and beauty through a variety of aesthetic health prescriptions. Yet, the most interesting real-life scenes, he points out, are the ways people navigate the complex social and individual situations in very different, and often, noble ways, while engaging in the architecture of the self. In many respects, the present commercialized postpartum care approaches partake of the concept of aesthetic health. First, they depend on medical professionals and ever-diversifying health care technologies to elevate bodily health and aesthetics. The postpartum care market relies on the premise that any deviance from the postpartum body—which is often expressed as “ugly” or “unhealthy” in reality—should or can be corrected with the help of experts. Second, the current postpartum care approach, like many other aesthetic health treatments, such as cosmetic surgery and dieting, builds on the very gendered therapeutic culture that endorses the psychological efficacy of beauty enhancements. That is, a beautiful body created by proper postpartum care lifts up the mother’s self-confidence or self-efficacy, which is indeed beneficial to her baby and her partner, and eventually to society. A third attribute in common is the unclear distinction between health and aesthetics, or between healing and enhancement, in the actual care practices. Edmonds, in his 2013 study, pays particular attention to the blurring of boundaries between health and beauty in aesthetic health treatments, arguing that this blurring is indeed produced by multiple actors—service providers, their clients, and the state—with different interests in controlling the female body. Likewise, many practices provided by the postpartum care industry strategically obscure health and beauty rationales, which eventually contributes to attracting more clients. I was told about and observed many occasions in which a certain beauty care technique was rationalized in the name of health benefits or vice versa during my field research. For instance, a meridian massage technician asserted that her massage therapy, as an ancient healing method, was very effective in resolving blood stasis after delivery and in losing weight. A breast massage technician explained that, through her massage therapy, mothers could reduce breast pain during the first few days of nursing and keep the skin supple and retain breast elasticity even after stopping breastfeeding.

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This kind of blurring, I understand, closely associates with changing meanings of health and beauty of the maternal body. If the traditional Korean postpartum health behaviors had more interest in producing milk to feed the baby and boosting women’s fertility in order to have as many children as possible, the current postpartum care methods are explicitly focusing on the mother’s body itself, restoring its strength and beauty. This tendency, I believe, reflects larger social changes that continuously redefine women’s roles and activities in both the family and society. As the county’s birth rate indicates, for the majority of South Korean women, childbirth is a once-in-a-lifetime event, meaning that they have little interest in increasing their fertility. Rather, they have more interest in generating an additional family income by joining the labor market, whether full-time or part-time. Indeed, news media outlets and policy reports have long confirmed that most households in South Korea need a double income to maintain their class standing and there has been an increasing trend that women, particularly middle-class women, prioritize work over having children.9 The worth and value of the female body has become more appreciated by its economic role, rather than its reproductive capacity. Another change in understanding the maternal body is related to the larger social atmosphere in which beauty generates more affective and biopolitical power in everyday social practices and self-perception. My informants replied that they had learned from their own or others’ experiences that beauty actually brings women social recognition and self-esteem, and ultimately secures upward class mobility. Like the Brazilian women illustrated in Edmonds’s ethnography, South Korean women were well versed in standards of feminine beauty and the social consequences of it. Some of my informants unabashedly claimed that beauty is an exceptional asset through which a woman can win human dignity, affluence, and happiness in such a youth-and-beauty-oriented society as South Korea. Indeed, multiple studies have already demonstrated how many South Korean women across ages engage in a variety of beauty practices insomuch that dieting and plastic surgery are now part of everyday conversation (Cho 2002; Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012; Park 2007; Woo 2004). Sensational headlines, such as “Plastic Surgery Nation” and “Tyranny of Slenderness,” are little short of exact portrayals of reality. The potent beauty regime expected of South Korean women of course does not rule out those who are pregnant. As revealed at the outset of the chapter with the case of Mee-kyung, expecting mothers are even more sensitive to the “biopolitical injunction to be beautiful” (Jarrin 2017, 7), since 9 

For more details, see Lee (2016).

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pregnancy and childbirth are considered as particularly detrimental to feminine beauty. Readily responding to and capitalizing on South Korean women’s concerns about their beauty and health, commercial postpartum care services have evolved to purvey aesthetic health for them. In the following section, I will further discuss how the beauty-oriented postpartum care measures arranged by residential postpartum care facilities complicate the ideas of maternal health and beauty, and how women make sense of those changes in articulating their various intersecting identities. Invested Bodies and the Quest for Self- or Personhood I first met Su-jin in the visitor’s room of a postpartum care facility on the seventh day after she gave birth, in the fall of 2012. Ji-young, another informant of mine, had quickly arranged the meeting when I asked, during an interview with her in the previous week, if she would introduce me to any potential interviewees among her acquaintances. As high school friends, Su-jin and Ji-young, both thirty-two years old, had been undergoing stages in their life trajectory, such as marriage and first childbirth, at the same time. The tiny visitor’s room decorated with colorful flowery wallpaper held a washbasin, a large mirror, an electric fan, and simple living room furniture. While Ji-young and I were sitting on the couch, complaining about the mid-September heat of the day, Su-jin entered the room with a bright smile. I would hardly have recognized her as a postpartum woman but for the pink, loose-fitting postpartum-facility gown she was wearing. She looked very comfortable and vital. “Oh my goodness, you don’t look at all like a woman who has just given birth!” shouted Ji-young, cordially greeting Su-jin. “Don’t tease me. See this ugly pooch belly. Can you see this? It’s a real bummer that I still have this big fat belly even though the baby has come out,” said Su-jin, while looking at herself in the mirror with a grimace. When I saw them talking about the localized fat around Su-jin’s belly, I did not know how many times I would hear that exclamation repeatedly throughout my fieldwork, the same conversational custom: flattering a postpartum woman on her slim figure and glowing face. Indeed, whenever I met postpartum mothers along with their families or friends, their conversation almost always began with comments about the new mother’s body and appearance. Among many expressions, the phrase, “You don’t look at all like a woman who has just given birth,” was considered the greatest compliment for postpartum mothers, as it implied that the mother had successfully managed to keep a slim, thus “beautiful” body despite the rigors of pregnancy and childbirth. In contrast, if a mother appeared to put

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on more weight than the average pregnancy weight gain or showed any signs of fatigue or pain, it was perceived as a “problem” needing prompt attention. Not surprisingly, in postpartum care facilities, women face these overt, controlling gazes over their bodies for the first time after giving birth. Su-jin clearly recalled her first day in the postpartum care facility: On the first day when I checked into the choriwŏn [shortened form of sanhujoriwŏn, residential postpartum care facility], the wŏnjang-nim [facility director] asked me about my weight before pregnancy. After weighing me, she told me that I needed to get rid of about ten kilograms from my body in order to return to my normal weight. Wow, ten kilograms! Can you believe it? You know how hard it is to lose even one kilogram. I was in shock for a couple of seconds and felt upset. Because, during pregnancy, I had really strived not to put on too much weight. But sadly, despite all the effort, I had ten kilograms to reduce. I told the wŏnjang-nim like “I am absolutely desperate to get the weight off as much as possible. Please help me.” And she replied, “Sure I will. But it’s up to you to make it in the end.”

As illustrated by Su-jin’s recollection, weight is often a primary concern, once a mother enters a postpartum care facility. Usually, if there is no critical health problem, a new mother receives several suggestions to promote her weight loss, such as physical training, massages, and herbal tonics. In tandem with various weight loss measures, breastfeeding is recommended as the best activity for weight reduction. Because business owners fully understand that postpartum mothers are nervously concerned about weight change, they arrange a variety of strategies and services to satisfy their clients. Some facilities use advanced body composition analyzers to trace their client’s body fat and torso volume; others provide diet and exercise programs designed by famous health trainers. Yet, in most cases, it seemed that simply following everyday routines in the facilities was enough for weight reduction. Su-jin continues: You know what? In the choriwŏn, I hardly had any time to lie down and relax during the day. My daily schedule was packed with a lot of activities, such as yoga, Pilates, massages, sitz baths, and baby care trainings. They really made me keep busy all day. I also had to nurse my baby every two to three hours during the day, and pump extra breast milk for night feedings. It is like this: I wake up to the call from the nursery at 7 in the morning, and nurse my baby, and then have my breakfast. Then the massage therapist visits me. Followed by massage, I nurse again, then it’s already time for lunch. These three things, eating, nursing, and doing an activity, repeat all day long. In the choriwŏn, twenty-four hours passes like a split second.

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Many of my informants, indeed, agreed that, due to their tight schedules in the facilities, they were able to lose weight without engaging in any particular weight-loss activities in the first few days.10 After a certain point, however, their weight loss considerably slowed down, upon which they began to apply more aggressive methods. For example, both Su-jin and Jiyoung got so jittery in their second week in the postpartum facilities that Su-jin purchased additional massage services following the wŏnjang-nim’s advice, while Ji-young began to attend Pilates classes more frequently. Clearly, these activities veer far from traditional postpartum care principles. More precisely, they contradict traditional postpartum health beliefs and behaviors that advised rest and seclusion. How, then, do South Koreans justify the change? Why does weight loss matter so much to these mothers? I could not but raise these questions, and Mee-kyung replied to me like this: I perform postpartum care because I want to be healthy and pretty again. Isn’t this the reason why many women engage in postpartum care? [laugh] . . . You know, I have to return to work in three months. I don’t want to show up to my office with a fat, dumb body like an ajumma. . . . The reason that I chose this choriwŏn, despite its expense, is because of the famous weight-loss massage programs. Their high-end spa zone is very popular among mothers in the Gangnam area. . . . I also love their meal program. It is developed by postpartum nutritionists and prepared by a skilled chef. Weekly menus with a detailed list of facts about their nutrition and calories are posted on the bulletin board so that we can keep track of how many calories we take in. . . . I know that many of them [care practices she received in the facility] are different from traditional customs. My mother-in-law also pointed that out. But I think, with the change of time, our bodies have changed too. Compared to before, we eat better and live more comfortable lives. So I think our bodies have become much stronger. And people constantly develop new technologies available for health care. . . . Our definition of health also changed. We do not consider a fat or even chubby body as healthy or beautiful. . . . Luckily, I lost about six kilograms in the choriwŏn in two weeks, so now I have only five kilograms left. But I need to tone my muscles and tighten the loose skin especially around my belly. . . . My husband is really supportive of my postpartum care. He always says, “Honey, it’s okay. I will love you even if you become a pig.” In reality, however, he made fun of my body as it got bigger during the last stretch of my pregnancy. He even got scared of my explosive appetite and growing baby bump and sent me links to 10  Medical practitioners explain that postpartum women naturally experience continuous weight loss after delivery, because they gradually eliminate blood and body fluid that had increased during pregnancy.

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Yoonjung Kang sites with various diet and fitness tips, like “Ten Painless Ways to Lose Weight after Childbirth.” [laugh]

Mee-kyung’s experience is representative of the more privileged mothers— culturally and economically, she belongs to the upper-middle class—and her desire for a thin, beautiful body is rather extreme. Nonetheless, I found many points in her dialogue were congruent with behaviors and rationales of other informants from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Like Meekyung, most mothers who purchased these expensive postpartum care services had a strong desire to improve their bodily aesthetics. “If I just wanted health restoration, it would be enough to eat well and rest at home with the help of my mother and a postpartum home-care helper,” said Su-jin. Like Mee-kyung, Su-jin had a clear goal when she purchased commercial postpartum care services. “The real reason that I chose this choriwŏn is because of its famous massage program. I had maintained a pretty thin and fit body before I was pregnant. I want to keep that body even after childbirth. I am sure our generation of mothers perform postpartum care by the same token,” continued Su-jin. Massage is indeed a core service attracting consumers. Most postpartum care facilities proudly provide diverse body and facial massage services in the name of “postpartum massage,” such as meridian, aroma-oil, stone, or aqua massage, that are all asserted to be effective in easing bodily discomfort, tightening the bone structure, soothing tense and tired muscles, and reducing swelling. Aesthetic skin massage, meanwhile, is among the most expensive optional services. Some facilities thus provide specialized options, such as facial, collarbone, back, or full-body massages.11 All these massages, coming from a variety of beauty care principles, have the same apparent goal of (re)making a slim body and fair, youthful face. Slimness, fairness, and youthfulness are the most coveted bodily attributes, and the extent to which beauty ideals privilege the three is further disclosed by the term ajumma. In the Korean language, ajumma is a neutral noun designating a married or middle-aged woman, and this meaning sometimes extends into colloquial use. But in many contexts, the word ajumma is used as a derogatory term to indicate women without any feminine, sexual attractiveness. The negative connotations of ajumma are especially conspicuous when paired with the word p’ŏjida (being flaccid). P’ŏjida has multiple connotations with respect to the body and mind of a woman: a flaccid body means a fat body, 11  Another important massage that almost all postpartum care facilities provide is breast massage, which is believed to help hormonal circulation, reduce breast pain, and promote lactation.

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and a flaccid mind means an inert attitude. The phrase p’ŏjin ajumma (flaccid middle-aged woman) thus conjures up the image of a fat, coarse, and even loathsome woman who does not invest any time or money in herself. It is common to describe a woman who gains weight after childbirth as “being flaccid like an ajumma” (agi naŭn hu ajumma ta twaetta). Another word commonly paired with ajumma is ch’onsŭrŏun (unfashionable or outdated). Thus, if a woman is called ajumma, especially when she is in her twenties or thirties, it is often considered an insult. As Mee-kyung discloses, not looking like an ajumma is an especially important project for middle-class working women.12 They invest a lot of time and money in grooming products and services, such as work-out programs, hair and makeup services, and luxury clothes and accessories, in order to keep their appearance not-like-an-ajumma. And these efforts are socially appreciated as proper acts of self-cultivation. Interestingly enough, a woman’s paranoid fear of being ajumma-like in appearance extends to their male counterparts. My male informants spoke their minds that they wanted their wives not to change into ajumma, even though technically, by virtue of being married, they already were. Young fathers, like Mee-kyung’s husband, were sensitive to their wives’ bodily changes during pregnancy. Openly asserting that they would feel ashamed or embarrassed if their wives remained “fat” or “ugly” long after giving birth, those young fathers gladly supported their wives’ postpartum recovery. I understand that these responses of men reveal changing understandings about marriage and conjugal intimacy today. As several Korean anthropologists have already noticed, romance, rather than obligations and responsibilities, has expanded its share in South Korean marital life.13 Unlike previous generations who believed marriage was a permanent contract between two families, today’s young couples view marriage as a romantic union between two individuals with constant love and sexual tension. In this marriage ideal, it is believed that a woman’s attractiveness, namely, her feminine and sexual body, plays an important role in maintaining a healthy intimate relationship between husband and wife. I think that these changing expectations about the conjugal relationship naturally enforce men to engage in their wives’ postpartum care. Meanwhile, the restless struggles of middle-class mothers for beautiful bodies remind me of the term “class work” that Nancy Abelmann coined 12  For more discussion of ajumma and middle-class womanhood, see the chapters of Haejoang Cho and So-Hee Lee in Kendall (2002), and the article by Ruth Holliday and Joanna Elfving-Hwang (2012) about aesthetic surgery in South Korea. 13  For more discussion on changing ideals of marriage and conjugality, see Kendall (1996), Cho (2002), and Kang (2014).

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in order to explicate various forms of “work people do to ensure class reproduction or mobility” (2003, 100). Exploring the complexity of South Korean class and class mobility in the 1990s, Abelmann demonstrated that many activities essential for class reproduction or mobility were indeed assigned exclusively to women. By performing various given tasks that often bid for considerable attention, energy, and moral reasoning, she argues, South Korean women entrench their class locations and identifications.14 Belonging to the next generation of women after Abelmann’s study, my informants maneuvered through similar constraints with tactics that their mothers had utilized for class reproduction, mobility, or both. Nonetheless, considerable differences can be found between these two generations in their class work. One notable difference is the way the contemporary generation of women appropriate their bodies to plot the contours of their classed lives and self- or personhood. As Abelmann elaborates, mothers from the previous generation tended to realize and carry out their identities and selves through their husbands or children, willingly sacrificing their individualities. Because their existence or success was recognized only through their reproductive or nurturing activities, their bodies were socially invisible at large. In the context that the female body was bound purely to maternal and domestic realms, that generation tended to view any investment in women’s bodies or appearances as a prodigal waste of money. The mothers—and fathers—in my study, in contrast, bestowed new nuances of meaning onto the female body and perceptions of it. For example, when Mee-kyung mentioned “mothers in the Gangnam area”15 to justify her seemingly extravagant expenses for postpartum care, or Su-jin confessed her use of the choriwŏn to access its massage services, they reveal how concerns for body aesthetics are closely tied to their respective class and gender coordinates within South Korean society. Constantly comparing their choices with those of mothers with similar class standing, they legitimated their consumption choices as typical of middle-class mothers. For them, a beautifully managed body is a goal that any middle-class woman should pursue, and commercial postpartum care is a coveted service that facilitates this moral pursuit. In other words, their investment in postpartum care is a moral behavior for establishing desired womanhood in their perceived social contexts. 14 

For more ethnographies about South Korean women’s class mobility in the 1990s, see Kendall (1996, 2002, 2009), Kim (1993), Lett (1998), and Nelson (2000). 15  Gangnam is the most opulent residential and business district in Seoul. A mother in Gangnam (Gangnam ŏmma) has many cultural and symbolic meanings with respect to South Koreans’ class aspirations. For more details about mothers in Gangnam, see Nelson (2000), Park and Abelmann (2004), and Seth (2002).

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In particular, Mee-kyung’s interpretations of her body and society reveal how young South Korean mothers interpret the new postpartum care practices. She reasoned that beauty-oriented postpartum care practices are desirable and legitimate, since “times have changed” and “women’s bodies have changed too.” Her statement represents two interesting standpoints to which mothers in my study adhered. The first is a progressive evolutionary perspective on the human body and society. Like Mee-kyung, many of my informants insisted that the dictates of traditional postpartum care were no longer valid because the bodies of today’s mothers had evolved enough not to easily develop postpartum diseases, and present living conditions and medical science and technologies are developed well enough to take care of any postpartum health problems. This contemplation about the body, society, and social progress repeatedly appeared in my interviews with my informants. Even though the concept and practices of postpartum care originated from age-old customs, South Korean women experience modernity—and the premise for progress—through very old traditional health concepts and practices. Second, although Mee-kyung’s and Su-jin’s narratives did not articulate this standpoint, their understanding about changing bodies, times, and society indicates that they perceived commercial postpartum care as an aesthetic health method enabling them to maintain their health and beauty, thereby making their lives beautiful, like “a work of art” (Edmonds 2008, 155). As “reflective actors” (Rosaldo 1984, 150), when the women said that times and bodies had changed, they meant that the ideals and meanings of the female body had changed as well. In another interview, Mee-kyung told me, “Pregnancy and childbirth can no longer be an excuse for a woman to have a fat and loose body.” She explained that maintaining a fit, slim body and fair, flawless skin was not optional but obligatory to becoming a successful worker, mother, wife, and person in contemporary South Korea. She repeatedly told me that “being fat” was equal to “being a loser” in Korean society, because a fat body was equated with failure to properly manage one’s self. The tensions between the body and self in Mee-kyung’s narrative reveal again how South Korean mothers perceive their reproductive bodies in relation to the social ethos for self-development. Even though they did not clearly verbalize their postpartum care practices as an aesthetically oriented health treatment for a better person, they embody the consequences of a healthy and beautiful body in their social settings. The imagining of the body as a means to prove one’s competence or self- or personhood had deeply penetrated the minds of the mothers, their families, and postpartum care practitioners in my study, which seemed to securely shore up the current postpartum care industry.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I demonstrated how South Korean middle-class mothers experience their reproductive bodies in the highly stratified postpartum care market and how this experience shapes or reflects their understandings of who they are or who they should be. I argued that the current commercial postpartum care practices form a South Korean version of aesthetic health, imposing a health care regimen that naturalizes intense concerns and investment in bodily aesthetics as central biopolitics in contemporary South Korea. By analyzing women’s own reflections on routine body care practices in private postpartum care facilities, I further argued that the postpartum period is a critical time during which South Korean middle-class mothers experience changing ideals of the maternal body, motherhood, femininity, and self- or personhood. As I have illustrated, middle-class women invest significant time, money, and emotions in postpartum care. They perceive intense bodily management after childbirth as a moral obligation of aspiring middle-class mothers. In their view, bodily health and beauty, and their investment in these qualities, form not just a state free of illness or ugliness, but a state of self-fulfillment. As my informants showed, the body that today’s new mothers desire is increasingly sensual and social. Excess body fat unnerves these women since it signifies failure in keeping aesthetic integrity of the body and self. In many respects, the modern norms of the female body indicate the changing role and status of women in today’s South Korean society. Unlike the bodies of their mothers’ generation, their bodies have acquired intense social significance, whether positive or not, as a medium through which women flesh out who they are. But this new significance by no means frees the female body from domestic responsibilities as a mother and wife. Rather, the new expectations of a sensual and social female body propose different, yet more intensive, standards of the ideal maternal body. My informants often ranted that the standards were too high and their resources were limited. By some accounts, the chance to purchase diverse services for body management seems to offer South Korean mothers more freedom to choose or negotiate for their own interests in health and beauty. But, the flip side of that logic is that an unmanaged or poorly managed, thus “ugly” or abnormal, body means a failure as a person. It also means that those who cannot afford the expense are consequently deprived of the opportunity for selffulfillment. In this vein, the commercialization of postpartum care results in what Shellee Colen (1995) dubbed “stratified reproduction” in South Korean society. The idea that the female body is a direct manifestation of a woman’s self- or personhood is not new within academic debates. Nor is the idea that economically privileged people enjoy greater opportunity

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to carry out modern self- or personhood through the purchase of various goods and services that promote health, wellness, and beauty. But, as many scholars have demonstrated, the constitution and the substance of the relationship between the body and self are always in flux, since they are affected by a variety of sociocultural contexts. This continual reconfiguration, in turn, creates the complexities and contingencies of social life in which different subjects exercise their own politics based on individual perceptions and desires. I hope this chapter is of service to the project of revealing the complexities and contingencies of social life experienced by South Korean women. References Abelmann, Nancy. 2002. “Women, Mobility, and Desire: Narrating Class and Gender in South Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 25–53. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2003. The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1995. “A Tale of Two Pregnancies.” In Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, 339–349. Berkeley: University of California Press. Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1987. “What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–17. Brown, Richard Harvey, ed. 2003. The Politics of Selfhood: Bodies and Identities in Global Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limit of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Cho, Haejoang. 2002. “Living with Conflicting Subjectivities: Mother, Motherly Wife, and Sexy Woman in the Transition from ColonialModern to Postmodern Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 165–195. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Chong, Kelly H. 2009. Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea. Harvard East Asian Monograph 309. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

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Colen, Shellee. 1995. “Like Mother to Them: The Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York.” In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 78–102. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Kathy. 1995. Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. (1970) 1996. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Routledge. ———. (1966) 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Edmonds, Alexander. 2008. “Beauty and Health: Anthropological Perspectives.” Medische Anthropologie 20, no. 1: 151–162. ———. 2013. “Can Medicine Be Aesthetic? Disentangling Beauty and Health in Elective Surgeries.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27, no. 2: 233–252. Featherstone, Michael. 1991. “The Body in Consumer Culture.” In The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited by Michael Featherstone, Michael Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner, 170–196. London: Sage Publications. Feher, Michel. 1987. “Of Bodies and Technologies.” In Discussions in Contemporary Culture 1, edited by Hal Foster, 159–165. Seattle: Bay Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Gelézeau, Valérie. 2007. Ap’at’ŭ konghwagok [The republic of apartments]. Translated by Hye-yŏn Kil. Seoul: Humanitas. Giddens, Anthony. 1993. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gusterson, Hugh. 1997. “Studying Up Revisited.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20, no. 1: 114–119. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haiken, Elizabeth. 1997. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Han Yang-Myeong. 1999. “Han’guk sansok ŭi ch’egyejŏk ihye rŭl wihan siron” [The systematic understanding of birth customs in Korea]. Pigyominsokhak [Comparative folklore studies] 16: 109–127. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Holliday, Ruth, and Joanna Elfving-Hwang. 2012. “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea.” Body & Society 18, no. 2: 58–81. Hurston, Zora Neale. (1935) 1990. Mules and Men. New York: HarperCollins. Jarrin, Alvaro. 2017. The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kang, Yoonjung. 2014. “Love and Money: Commercial Postpartum Care and the Reinscription of Patriarchy in Contemporary South Korea.” Journal of Korean Studies 19: 378–397. Kendall, Laurel. 1977. “Receiving the Samsin Grandmother: Conception Rituals in Korea.” Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 52: 55–70. ———. 1987. “Cold Wombs in Balmy Honolulu: A Korean Illness Category in Translation.” Social Science & Medicine 25, no. 4: 367–376. ———. 1996. Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———, ed. 2002. Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kim, Eun-shil. 1993. “The Making of the Modern Female Gender: The Politics of Gender in Reproductive Practices in Korea.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Francisco. Lee Samsik, ed. 2016. “Kyŏron ch’ulsan hyŏngt’ae pyŏnwha wa chŏch’ulsan tadch’aek ŭi p’aerŏdaim chŏnwhan” [Changes of marriage and childbearing and a paradigm shift in policy measures on low fertility]. Sejong, South Korea: Hankuk pogŏn sahoe yŏnguwŏn. Lee, So-Hee. 2002. “The Concept of Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 141–164. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lett, Denise Potrzeba. 1998. In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class. Harvard East Asian Monograph 170. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Lock, Margaret M., and Judith Farquhar, eds. 2007. Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lock, Margaret M., and Patricia A. Kaufert, eds. 1998. Pragmatic Women and Body Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, Emily. 2001. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1938. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self.” Translated by W. D. Halls. In The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, edited by Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, 1–25. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Miller, Laura. 2006. Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Narayan, Kirin. 1993. “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95, no. 3: 671–686. Nelson, Laura C. 2000. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2011. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror.” Signs 36, no. 2: 359–383. Park, Sang Un. 2007. “Beauty Will Save You: The Myth and Ritual of Dieting in Korean Society.” Korea Journal 47, no. 2: 41–70. Park So-Hyun, Ahn Young-Min, and Chung Kyu-Seong. 2013. “Chungsanch’ŭng chŭkchŏng mit ch’ui punsŏk: Sodŭk chungsim ŭro” [Statistical analysis of the middle class and their prospects: Based on income]. Daejeon, South Korea: T’onggye kyebarwŏn. Park, So Jin, and Nancy Abelmann. 2004. “Class and Cosmopolitan Striving: Mothers’ Management of English Education in South Korea.” Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 4: 645–672. Reed, Lori Stephens, and Paula Saukko, eds. 2010. Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1984. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, edited by Richard Schweder and Robert Levine, 137–157. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas, and Carlos Novas. 2005. “Biological Citizenship.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 439–463. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Seth, Michael J. 2002. Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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Shildrick, Margrit. 2008. “Corporeal Cuts: Surgery and the Psycho-social Body.” Body & Society 14, no. 1: 31–46. Shilling, Chris. 1993. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Sich, D. 1981. “Traditional Concepts and Customs on Pregnancy, Birth and Post Partum Period in Rural Korea.” Social Science & Medicine 15B, no. 1 (January): 65–69. Song, Jee-Eun Regina. 2012. “Building an Empire One at a Time: Cultural Meaning and Power of Starbucks Korea.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis. Turner, Bryan S. 1984. The Body and Society. New York: Basil Blackwell. Urla, Jacqueline, and Alan C. Swedlund, eds. 1995. “The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, 277–313. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weiss, Meira. 2002. The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woo, Keong Ja. 2004. “The Beauty Complex and the Cosmetic Surgery Industry.” Korea Journal 44, no. 2: 52–82.

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SIX

Gendered Narratives of Transition to Adulthood among Korean Work-Bound Youth

HYEJEONG JO

I was sitting at a dining table with A-ra and her boyfriend, Se-yoon, on a Friday evening.1 A-ra, a twenty-year-old convenience store cashier, generously invited me to hang out with her and Se-yoon, a twenty-one-year-old assistant cook, at a small, sparsely decorated three-bedroom apartment that her parents owned. Sharing ddeok-bbo-kki, a common Korean street food, the three of us pleasantly bantered until A-ra asked me to remind her of my research topic. Despite my intention to casually introduce the research to my potential informants, my answer triggered a good-natured argument between them. When I explained to A-ra that I would like to know how Korean high school–graduate workers (go-jol no-dong-ja) view their journey of becoming adults in Korea, A-ra bluntly said, “I think that a high school graduate is now a loser in Korea.” Her sudden remark stopped our conversation short. Unsure of how to respond, I asked her why she believed so. She explained, “I couldn’t understand why parents and other adults kept telling me to go to college until I actually started living without a college education. Having experienced what it is like to live without a college degree in Korea, I now see why people always talk about college.” Quietly listening to A-ra, Seyoon countered, “That’s absolute nonsense. There are people who become successful without ever having entered a college classroom. I can live a happy life without a college education at all.” A-ra half-jokingly rebuked Se-yoon, “You’re just naive. I think that you don’t think thoroughly.” She chuckled as if trying to subdue the serious atmosphere. Irritated by what 1 

In this chapter, pseudonyms are used for names of people and places.

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A-ra had said, however, Se-yoon coldly responded to her: “I think that you are too negative.” While interviewing twenty-seven Korean work-bound youths who were pursuing work with only a high school education (no college) in the industrial city Harbortown, I repeatedly encountered gender differences in meaning-making of social status—pessimistic versus optimistic perspectives—as presented by A-ra and Se-yoon. Both male and female young workers with low-wage service or manufacturing jobs in Harbortown recalled that they began to work less deliberately because their parents could not afford to pay for their material needs as teenagers and happened to stay in the same industry afterward. Yet, their understandings of their social status diverged. Female informants in the study shared a pessimistic prospect whereas male informants showed an optimistic expectation for their future life. I argue that their diverging viewpoints are derived from their gendered understanding of social institutions that shape the transition to adulthood. Based on the analysis of the gendered narratives of male and female work-bound youth, this chapter discusses the ways in which social institutions help young people construct their understanding of opportunities and constraints in their lives. Moreover, through their narratives, I show how the intersection of social class and gender mediates the ways in which social institutions organize their pathways to becoming adults. Specifically, in this chapter, I first discuss the transition to adulthood as an institutionalized process and how this process is shaped by the intersection of various social categories. Second, I briefly introduce my methodological approach and data-collection process. Third, I illustrate the gendered narratives of male and female workers, which they build on their own understandings of social institutions for young people. Finally, I discuss implications of these findings for social policies for work-bound youth. Institutionalized Pathways to Adulthood in Korea While many believe one’s coming-of-age is a personal experience, sociologists characterize it as a social process. They describe the transition into adulthood as the accomplishment of a series of institutional benchmarks as young adults, which often includes the completion of education, the entry into the labor market, and the formation of family (e.g., marriage and childbearing). When one has had all these experiences, one is fully recognized as a “normal” adult. When one fails to perform any of all these rituals, one’s status as an adult tends to be questioned. Public concerns about young people’s delayed transition—exemplified by “boomerang kids” in the United States, “NEET youth” in Japan, and the “sampo (three

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surrenders) generation” in Korea (Genda 2007; Sandberg-Thoma, Snyder, and Jang 2015; South and Lei 2015)—reflect a social belief in the normative pathways to adulthood and a tendency to problematize those who deviate from them. Overall, the transition to adulthood is an institutionalized experience through which individuals earn an adult status by following the cultural rules that define who is an adult and how one should be an adult. This institutionalized process is further shaped by the intersection of gender and social class. As outlined in the introduction of this volume, “gender and class, among other social categories, are intimately intertwined and interdependent.” Intersectionality teaches us that one’s biography is interwoven by one’s multiple social positions (Collins 2015; Crenshaw 1991). In this sense, one’s coming-of-age story is constructed by the interconnectedness of various structural forces. While many sociologists illustrate the power of social class and gender in young adulthood, they tend to investigate these two social categories separately or focus on their correlations (Arnett 2001; Furstenberg 2008; Park 2013). Previous studies mainly delve into different paths that people in different social groups take during the transition to adulthood, rather than how various social categories operate together to create privileges or disadvantages for young people. Therefore, several interesting questions remain unanswered in our understanding of the transition to adulthood: How are young men and women marginalized or privileged in different domains of society (e.g., production, reproduction)? How are their class experiences and gender experiences intertwined in the process of the transition to adulthood? How does this intersectionality construct the narratives of their transitions? Situating the transitions to work among Korean male and female youths in this larger sociological research, this chapter investigates how they construct their narratives based on their understanding of social institutions that guide the paths to adulthood. For this task, it is informative to discuss major social institutions that organize the transition to adulthood of work-bound youth, including the labor market, higher education, military conscription, and marriage. As peers in other industrialized countries have experienced (Weis 2013; Rosenbaum 2001), the labor market has become increasingly precarious for work-bound youth in Korea. Along with the global economic transformation, the domestic economic shift has created a disadvantage for this group of young Koreans. Since the financial crisis of 1997, the labor market has transformed itself under the neoliberal social regime. Whereas Korean capitalists had actively sought the flexible use of the labor force even before the crisis, the financial crisis accelerated the neoliberal transformation of the labor market (Koo 2001; Shin 2010). This economic shift hit those individuals at the lower level of the socioeconomic hierarchy severely as the

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segment in the labor market for less skilled workers became precarious. The restructuring of the economy caused the number of full-time industrial jobs to shrink rapidly, and the size of the irregular workforce—people working in irregular jobs—to increase sharply. Therefore, compared with previous generations of working-class workers or their college-educated peers, work-bound youths find it harder to have regular jobs that provide job security and good incomes (Lee 2002).2 In particular, unskilled workbound youths often fall into low-income, low-skill jobs, and their less favorable work situation continues due to a lack of opportunities for vocational training or higher education (Nahm, Kim, and Han 2018). Compared with male counterparts, female work-bound youths struggle more severely in the labor market. For example, despite the increasing labor force participation of women, they are paid substantially less than their male colleagues (Kim and Shirahase 2014; Seguino 1997), the glass ceiling remains firm as promotions are limited (Cho, Lee, and Jung 2014), and discrimination and penalties against female workers, particularly those with children, are substantial (Brinton, Lee, and Parish 1995). At the same time, because of the imbalance between the increasing number of female college graduates and the staggering growth of employment opportunities for them, the labor market competition for female workers is intensified. Therefore, work-bound youth, who do not have college education, are disadvantaged in this competition, which leads them to low-income, low-skill jobs in manufacturing and the service industry. In addition to the labor market shift, the educational structure has changed unfavorably for work-bound youth. With the emergence of the mass higher education system, which offers better access to college education for more young people, work-bound youths have arguably lost institutional guidance for their transitions (Brinton 2011; Cook 2016; Krei and Rosenbaum 2001; Rosenbaum 2001). In Korea, secondary schools are heavily focused on academic education without providing an alternative to college. Korean vocational education—which usually occurs within vocational high schools (30 percent of all high schools in Korea)—emphasizes general skills and has not been sufficiently developed to train students in specific occupational skills (Park 2013). Therefore, Korean work-bound youth now take an unguided journey to becoming adults with little educational support. 2  In 2015, among Korean youths aged fifteen to twenty-nine, regardless of their educational level, about 64 percent were hired for irregular jobs. Particularly, the proportion of workers with only a high school education engaging in irregular work was much higher than that of workers with a college education (45.7 vs. 19.3% for men; 55.1 vs. 24.2% for women).

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Female work-bound youths likely face difficulties finding spouses who can help them to achieve independence from their parents. Because of their disadvantaged status in the labor market, young female workers often view marriage as a particularly important institution for their transition to adulthood (Kim, Lee, and Park 2016). Yet, their low educational status can be an obstacle when they try to achieve the transition through marriage. As researchers have pointed out, the division of household labor between men and women within families remains highly rigid in Korean society (Nelson 2000): Korean women take care of the household economy and play a pivotal role as “educational manager” for their children’s academic development. Therefore, women’s education is a crucial cultural resource for the family’s cultural reproduction. Further, young female workers are likely disadvantaged in the marriage market as they lack college education and hence are less competitive than their college-educated peers. In fact, according to recent studies (Park, Lee, and Jo 2013; Raymo et al. 2015), they are less likely to be married than women with more education. Furthermore, if they get married, due to educational homogamy (i.e., status matching within marriage), which is increasingly prevalent in Korea, these young women are also more likely to marry men with similar socioeconomic status (Smits and Park 2009). While male work-bound youths are marginalized in the labor market and education, they go through another pivotal institution that shapes their transition to adulthood—universal military conscription, applicable to Korean men only. As Hyun Mee Kim states in another chapter of this volume, in general, compulsory military service is “a double-edged sword.” She explains that completion of military service, which is a “classless” institution, plays a critical part in the construction of hegemonic masculinity. Military service transforms adolescent boys into docile nationals with male national identity (kungmin) and reinforces their ideas of the “real man” as a capable worker and family provider (Moon 2005). On the contrary, college-bound male youths consider that military service disrupts their education and smooth transition to the labor market because it takes almost two years (e.g., twenty-one months for the army) of their early adulthood against their will, according to Kim. Methods of Study For this study, I interviewed twenty-seven work-bound youths (fifteen males and twelve females) from the ages of eighteen to twenty-two between November 2013 and January 2015. All informants were high school graduates, except for three male informants, of which two were high school dropouts and one was a college dropout. All informants were living in Harbortown at the time of the interviews.

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Harbortown is in a southern part of Korea and is well known for its industrial district, which has helped the local economy remain vibrant since the 1960s. This district, with about 150 companies employing more than 16,000 workers, is the backbone of the local economy. The occupational status hierarchy among Harbortown people is organized by whom they work for and whether they work inside or outside the industrial district. Full-time unionized workers in a few major companies enjoy comfortable material lives because of high wages and generous benefits such as medical benefits, paid leave, and educational subsidies for employees’ children. Workers at numerous small subcontractors that support major chemical companies are less likely to enjoy the same level of economic well-being as workers at larger companies. Also, it is hard to find unions at smaller firms. Within the district is a service sector that serves people who work in the district and includes retail stores, restaurants, and bars. The service sector provides employment opportunities for female workers, whom chemical companies started to hire only from the early 2000s, and less-educated male workers. More of my informants worked part time in the low-wage service sector and fewer worked full or part time in the manufacturing sector at the bottom of the industrial hierarchy in Harbortown. Eight male informants worked at convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, and Internet c­ afés. Another five male informants delivered Chinese food or pizza. The other two were temporarily employed by subcontractors in the industrial district. Work was similarly reported by women. Nine female informants worked at convenience stores, restaurants, and Internet cafés. Two female informants were sales clerks at women’s clothing stores. Only one female informant worked full time at a manufacturing factory in a city near Harbortown. I recruited the informants by using a snowball-sampling method. I initially contacted high school teachers in Harbortown and asked them to introduce me to their recent graduates who did not go to college. After I met two female informants, I asked them to introduce me to their friends who were working. During the interviews, I asked mainly about their educational and job experiences: how they had made the decision not to go to college, how they felt about the decision, and what their career plans and aspirations were. The interviews lasted from one hour and twenty minutes to three hours. With the consent of the informants, I audio-recorded and transcribed all interviews. To analyze interview transcripts, I used opencoding techniques. After reading the interview transcripts several times, I added conceptual labels to narratives that described relevant events, experiences, and feelings reported by the interviewees. Next, I analyzed themes across interviews to identify meta-themes. At the same time, I documented deviant cases from the major patterns of my findings.

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“It Just Happened”: Drifting to Precarious Work Min-cheol, an eighteen-year-old high school dropout working at an Internet café, has been pursuing financial—if not full—independence from his father since he was in the eighth grade. Although he is now living in his father’s house and rarely has had a stable job, he has “not received a single penny” from his father, a construction worker, since he started his first job at a convenience store. Not only does he pay his own bills, he also helps his father support the family and pay for his older brother’s college education. He feels obligated to do so until his brother “becomes financially stable enough to help [his] father in return” when he graduates and gets a job. However, Min-cheol did not begin to work in order to help his family. He started to work from much earlier than his college-bound peers for his immediate need for “money” as a teenager. Growing up in a less affluent family did not only mean hunger and poverty to him; it also meant losing chances to socialize with friends. He often felt that he did not have enough money to “hang out with friends.” As a teenager, he had many things that he wanted to do. He said, “I wanted to go to an Internet café with friends [to play computer games], buy something good for my then-girlfriend, or buy clothes—stuff like that. You know, teenagers should wear the same clothes as other kids wear.” Yet, according to him, those things often came with a price tag that he could not afford as a kid. And, it meant that he could not hang out with his friends sometimes. To a young boy, it was more bearable “to have to eat the same instant noodles for three days” than to miss out on hanging out with friends. Even though he thought that he was not in a state of absolute poverty, he felt bitter about his sense of relative poverty. He vividly remembered one day when he had to decline an invitation to go out with his friends. Looking down and playing with his fingers, he said, “Probably it was when I was a seventh, no, eighth grader. After a midterm exam or something, my friends wanted to go to play computer games at an Internet café. ‘Hey, let’s go!’ They asked me to join. But I couldn’t. I did not have any money in my pocket, not even a single penny. I said, ‘No. I don’t have money. You guys go. I’m just going back home.’” Even though he pretended to be “cool about it” when he told his friends to go without him, it hurt him. When asked how he felt as he was walking back home alone, he said, “It was fucking embarrassing!” That embarrassing feeling of deprivation impetuously led him to take up his first part-time job. A few days after the incident with his friends, Min-cheol unexpectedly came across a job ad posted in a front window of a convenience store on his way home from school. He decided to apply for the position on the spur of the moment. He said that he was thinking

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when he saw the ad, “Fuck, I don’t know. I should make money on my own if my dad can’t give it to me.” Min-cheol was afraid that he was too young to work legally. He lied that he was seventeen, and “The owner [of the convenience store] let me work without asking further questions.” The day after his application, Min-cheol started work in a green uniform. He continued in that first job until he stopped attending high school. After he dropped out, he became a full-time worker in irregular jobs. Even though he worked six to eight hours a day for at least five days a week (depending on his employer’s request), throughout his five years of work experience he had not had any employment benefits that would go to fulltime workers. Min-cheol said, “I’ve never had unemployment insurance or health insurance or even signed a proper employment contract.” His jobs have barely paid minimum wage, and the wages were always determined by the “owner’s generosity.” He was paid slightly more when he “met a good owner” and paid less when he did not. When an employer treated him badly or the work was overly demanding, Min-cheol just “took some time off” from work. However, when he became short on money again, he had to return to one of “those boring jobs” for which he did not feel rewarded: As the proverb goes, “Necessity knows no law.” It is shitty to work at Internet cafés or convenience stores. There is no future with these sorts of jobs, I know. However, I have to do any work given to make ends meet before I find a real job. Also, after I left high school, I couldn’t ask my father to support me in any way. It’s embarrassing when you ask your parents to help you when you are not a student any more.

Changing jobs often, Min-cheol became caught up in similar types of irregular work. He did not plan on continuing his part-time job as a convenience store cashier for an extended period when he handed the job application to the store owner. Yet, Min-cheol hopped from one service job to another in the poorly paid service sector. Particularly, since his older brother had started college in Seoul two years previously, he had to be more financially responsible. It was getting harder for him to stop working and pursue different careers in which he might feel more fulfilled. As one thing led to another, the part-time work that he decided to take in an impulsive way as a teen gradually turned into a quasi-permanent situation as he became a young man. Most informants—both male and female—reported that they had gone through transition experiences similar to Min-cheol’s. Although they haphazardly started part-time jobs to pursue teen consumeristic culture, they gradually slipped into jobs “with no future,” and a temporary job situation turned into a permanent one. Furthermore, their risky transitions to irregular work were further shaped by their lack of college education. As

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A-ra’s narrative demonstrates, informants found it challenging to move from their current part-time irregular jobs to full-time regular jobs. Nineteen of them—including all female informants—reported that they had attempted to improve their jobs, but no one had succeeded in doing so. They commonly pointed out that they could not get a better job than they had at the time of the interviews, since college education had become the prerequisite for entry-level jobs and college served as an institutional broker between its graduates and employers. Like Min-cheol, A-ra, the pleasantly cheerful twenty-year-old woman whose comments opened this chapter, started her first part-time job when she was a student to satisfy her materialistic needs as a teen. She remembered that “buying cosmetic products and clothes” was her initial purpose in getting a job. To a teen girl who cares about her reputation among peers, work meant “earning extra allowance to enable her to buy ‘necessities’ that any [teen] girl needs to have.” She explained that she chose to work without considering the consequences, hoping to have more disposable money to buy herself the clothes or cosmetic products that her peers were obsessed with: You know, [as a teen girl] you can’t go out without wearing makeup. You can’t even go to school without makeup. You can’t even go to school in the morning. It is an embarrassing thing to do. Looking back, I was very naive to begin working to make some money to buy stuff. However, I then had to do it, because I wanted to get new clothes and cosmetic products. It’s because that’s what all the other kids around me would do.

A-ra did not feel that it was okay to ask her parents to pay for what she wanted to buy. She felt “the sense of constraint” (Lareau 2011): she felt uncomfortable talking honestly to her parents, street vendors who sold sportswear, about what she wanted to possess as a teen girl. She did not want to put an additional financial burden on her parents’ shoulders when she knew that “they were already working hard enough to make ends meet.” She said, in a subdued voice, “I couldn’t tell them to pay for everything I wanted. I couldn’t tell my parents to buy me luxuries when they were working hard to raise my brother and me.” As a solution to her dilemma, A-ra chose to start work at the end of the spring semester of her second year of high school. She started working at a convenience store a fifteen-minute walk from home. It was a fun experience to her in the beginning: “It was fun to work at the store. I liked meeting and chatting with people. It was fun to scan stuff, receive money, and put money into the cash drawer. Also, the money was not bad for a teen. It was enough to buy what I wanted.” Despite her initial excitement, she never expected to continue working there. “I didn’t imagine that I would

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be still scanning barcodes behind the counter at twenty years old. I thought I would be doing something better when I graduated from high school.” After graduation, A-ra began to think more seriously about having a “real career” as an adult. She half-jokingly described a real career as “those jobs for which you wear a nice suit, looking professional.” However, in contrast to her expectation, she has worked as a cashier at the same convenience store for almost three years. She tried to find a way to become a wedding planner while working. She enrolled in a few classes to get licenses, believing that she would be able to leave her current job and have a more rewarding job that could provide a better salary and social reputation: I’ve spent quite a fortune to get licenses relevant to the [wedding planning] job. I thought that I would get a job once I had a few licenses. I have three licenses—one in makeup, one in wedding planning, and one in facial massage. It took over a year and a half of classes and license examinations, though there are a few more license examinations to take to be more advanced in the field.

Her plan did not work well, however. Even with her licenses that she believed would help prove her readiness for the job, it was not easy to become a wedding planner. Over a year, A-ra had applied for four entry-level jobs related to wedding planning, but she did not receive any callbacks. “I’ve been totally ignored [by employers],” she said when she bitterly summarized her experience from the past year. Despite her discouragement, she was hoping to apply for more jobs, but there were not many openings. While she unsuccessfully searched for a full-time job as a wedding planner, her part-time job begun as a teen had gradually turned into a full-time job. When she began, she used to work eight hours, two days a week. She was working for more than forty hours a week when I met her. Yet, her hourly wage had barely increased (approximately forty-five cents over three years), and she did not have any of the social welfare that was granted only to full-time workers with regular jobs such as unemployment insurance and health insurance. Although she believed that she could get out of her temporary work situation someday, it was hard for her to tell when it would actually happen: Looking back, I happened to keep the job. It’s like the law of inertia. Even though I didn’t want to keep the job, I am doing the same job because I am used to it. I can’t think of any better jobs that I can easily find now. They will ask for college degrees anyway. I will keep applying for wedding planning jobs, but I am not sure [if I can find one]. I will have to keep working here [at the convenience store] until I find a job as a wedding planner.

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As Min-cheol and A-ra recalled, their transition to irregular work had “just happened.” They drifted to work without sufficient consideration or deliberate preparation. Both began their careers in a hasty way to pursue materialistic needs as teens. Hoping to participate in the consumeristic peer culture that their parents could not afford for them, they decided to be financially independent from an early age. They initially chose work as a short-term strategy to deal with their materialistic needs. Although they had planned to work temporarily in these jobs, their work situation became prolonged, which trapped them in low-wage temporary jobs. “A Life without a Future”: The Perpetuating Transition of Female Informants Despite the similar patterns of initial motivations for the informants to begin work, the ways in which they understood their transition to adulthood were divergent. In the study, the female informants were anxious that the transitional period in their lives, into which they had stepped in an unplanned way, might become their permanent social status. Their anxiety came largely from their understanding of the salient role of a college education, which they lacked, in shaping a young woman’s transition to adulthood in the Korean context. Female informants saw a college education as a practical and cultural means to achieving a legitimate status as an adult even though they themselves had chosen not to pursue college education. Therefore, they were worried that their journey to becoming a self-sufficient adult might be unsuccessful because they did not go to college. Particularly, female informants were concerned about their future as a worker with only a high school education in three ways, as described next. Limited Opportunities in the Labor Market

First, young female workers in this study were worried that their transition period might be endless, as high school workers would be penalized in the labor market due to the mass supply of better-educated workers. For example, when Hyun-joo, a reserved twenty-one-year-old server at a local coffee shop, graduated from high school, she planned to transition to a stable regular job, preferably an entry-level office job. Like other female informants, she expected to work in the low-status service industry only for a few months before she found a permanent job. However, she had recently begun to feel that it might not be an unattainable goal to find an office job. A few months before the interview, her mother, who was working at a cafeteria of a refinery in the Harbortown industrial district, introduced a job opportunity to Hyun-joo through her personal network. She happened to know “someone who knows someone” in her company’s human

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resources department. Hyun-joo was at first very happy about the opportunity because she thought that the job would be “more stable” than any other job she had had. She would not need to change jobs when she felt that the employers mistreated her or if her “fickle employers” unexpectedly fired her without a good reason. She was also excited about having a fixed work schedule and long-term job security. In addition, she could expect a pay raise based on seniority as well as diverse corporate benefits, including paid leave. Moreover, this opportunity could allow her to escape her precarious work, which she felt was more a job for a teen than an adult. Hyun-joo had firmly believed that she would get the position because she had this “string” to the person in HR. She was hopeful. However, Hyun-joo had to compete with another female candidate, one who had recently graduated from a four-year college in Seoul. Hyun-joo later found out that the other candidate who was given the job was a college graduate who had moved back to her parents’ house. This event frustrated her severely. It taught her that she was competing with college-educated job seekers, as unemployment was prevalent even among college graduates. She felt bitter about her future chance to win the job competition against college graduates: I know that college graduates, even from four-year schools, are struggling these days. I’ve been told that there are very few jobs available to young people in general. A lot of people now have college educations, and they cannot find jobs. Naturally, the job market cannot be favorable for people like myself. Who would choose a high school graduate over a college graduate when they pay the same salary?

Her failure to get the office job made her anxious about her future. She said, “How can I imagine getting a better job on my own when I couldn’t with good help?” Therefore, she was anxious that she might have to continue the irregular part-time service work indefinitely, which she felt to be “a life without a future.” Being trapped in the current work situation meant to Hyun-joo that there would be no progress in her life, and hence she might be unable to complete her transitional journey to an independent adult: To be honest, I feel that I am living a life without a future. I am doing the same thing every day without any hope for the future. The real problem is that I have done this kind of job for many years, like four or five years already, since high school. My life has been the same since then. I am still living with my mom. She pays the bills. I manage to make spending money and pay my phone bill, but that’s it. I am no different from [the way I was in] high school. Nothing has changed. I don’t feel like I am an adult, even though I am actually an adult in a legal sense. Probably, I won’t ever be able to feel that I am an adult if I keep living like this.

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Social Stigma as a Less-Educated Worker

Second, female informants in the study were anxious that they would not earn social respect as a worker with only a high school education. They were worried about their future status as marginalized members in the college-for-all society. Particularly, they considered a college education as a sign of better personhood, as they believed that college education could make people intelligent and advanced. As they did not have a college education, they felt that they were “inferior” or “lesser adults” who would not be able to earn social respect, while their college-going peers could expect better treatment from society. For example, Joo-hee, a cheerful twenty-one-year-old waitress, understood that she held a lower social status compared with her friends who were headed to college, including two-year junior colleges. A social gathering that she had with her old high school friends who came back home for a winter break helped her to develop the idea about her less favorable social status in Korean society. While she was meeting her friends at a bar, she felt great discomfort. She felt that her friends had changed substantially whereas she had “remained the same.” To her, her friends were living in “a new world.” She thought that college provided them with a valuable chance to transform themselves from adolescents to culturally sophisticated young women. In a bitter tone, Joo-hee recalled her impression of her old friends at the gathering: They looked like, how should I say, new women? They clearly seemed to have a refined style while I looked like a high school girl. It was so good to see them after a year, but I felt that something was different. [Interviewer: What did you feel was different?] I felt uncomfortable being with them even though I know that they are still good friends of mine.

The discomfort that she had during the meeting came from the cultural chasm that she felt between her friends and herself. When I asked her in what way she felt her friends were different, she said, “Probably what they wore. No, probably the way they spoke might have made me feel that way.” Joo-hee felt strange and distant when her friends uttered various jargon that college students often used, such as “major,” “general education courses,” or “term papers.” To Joo-hee, those words made her friends look more culturally advanced. Compared with her friends, she felt that she was “left behind” in the same environment while her friends were exploring “a new world.” Moreover, Joo-hee was concerned that due to her lack of college education, which made her culturally “inferior to the friends,” she might not be able to earn as much social respect as her college-going peers. She was

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ambivalent about the social hierarchy system, which was shaped by educational achievement. On one hand, she thought that “it’s not fair to treat people differently based on their educational level.” On the other hand, she felt that “it makes sense that they [college graduates] receive better treatment [than high school graduates] because they are educated and knowledgeable.” This understanding of the educational hierarchy created a fear when she thought about her own life because it was obvious to her that “people might ignore people like me.” She explained her anxiety thus: “When people look at me and my friends, they can tell that my friends are more educated. They speak differently. I speak like a teenager because I’ve lived like a teenager. Looking at myself, I worry no one would treat a person nicely when she behaves like a teenager.” Disadvantages in the Marriage Market

Finally, female informants in the study were concerned about their marriageability: they saw that the chance to get married to a “decent man”— one with the economic capability to be a family provider—was shaped by educational achievement and occupation. As a recent study shows (Kim, Lee, and Park 2016), marriage is an important pathway for Korean women to achieve independence, regardless of class. Because women’s economic opportunities in the labor market are limited (Cho, Lee, and Jung 2014; Kim 2018), the importance of marriage in their transition to adulthood is more pronounced than for men. Female informants, therefore, believed that their future spouses’ economic security would be crucial for them, as Su-ji, an outgoing twenty-two-year-old convenient store clerk, explained: When a woman has a means to live by herself, like having a good job or making lots of money, I think that she doesn’t need a husband. She can enjoy her life freely without being chained to anyone. But how many women can live like that? Probably a few who appear on TV? Especially for women like me with [only] a high school diploma, it is almost impossible having those jobs that pay enough to live alone. So, women like me can’t help but want to get married to men with economic capabilities.

However, Su-ji was pessimistic about her chance to meet a decent man. She felt that her current job would make her a less attractive woman to many men. Based on her experience with male customers with whom she interacted at work, she believed that men looked down on “women like me.” Because of her low social status as a convenient store worker, Su-ji expected that she had a lower chance to get married. Su-ji said, “I don’t think that I will even be able to get married ever. Who would want to marry an old woman working at a convenience store? Probably a guy working at the same store?”

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In addition, Su-ji felt that having only her high school diploma would make it even harder to marry a decent man. She thought that college education was crucial when a woman was searching for a mate because it could signal her ability to be a capable mother. As articulated by researchers (Nelson 2000), she understood education as an indispensable resource for a woman to be a productive wife and mother in the Korean context. Particularly, she thought that men would prefer women with a better education because it would enable a mother to assist in her children’s education in a more effective way. She said bitterly, “Wouldn’t men prefer a woman with a college degree to one with [just] a high school diploma? Even guys who only graduated from high school would think that their wives should be college graduates, so they could educate children well.” Overall, a feeling of anxiety and instability penetrated the narratives of female work-bound youths in this study. Their transition to work in the era of mass higher education in Korea made them feel that they might face a never-ending journey to becoming an adult. Contrasting their transition-toadulthood trajectory to the one enjoyed by their college-attending friends and projecting their future meager status in the college-for-all society, female work-bound youths share deep concerns about both their present and their future status in Korean society. “Until the Military Starts”: The Progressive Transition of Male Informants In contrast to the female informants in the study, the male informants presented relatively optimistic interpretations about their transitions. Not only did they think that their unstable work situation would not last long, they also thought that they would be able to make a successful transition to a respectable male worker. Their confidence in their future, which is starkly different from female informants’ pessimistic assumption about their future status, was derived from their distinctive understanding of two major social institutions shaping young Korean males’ transitions to adulthood: college education and military service. College as “a Matter of Choice”

About college, the male informants understood that college education was “a matter of choice,” not a rite of passage for everyone, although they were aware of the prevalent college-going norms among their peers. Whereas they generally agreed that a college education would increase their opportunities in life, male informants felt that going to college would mean to them a waste of resources. For example, Chang-woo, a reserved twentytwo-year-old, was confident about his career choice to work as an assistant

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cleaner at a subcontractor. His job was helping experienced workers to clean factory facilities in the industrial district. Whereas he was discontented with his current job, he felt positively about his decision to work before his military duty instead of going to college: My job doesn’t pay well. It’s also physically demanding. I am just doing it to get by before military service. I want to help my parents to support the family a little. I don’t seek job satisfaction or a bright future out of this job. I am just looking at money [I earn from my work]. I won’t regret not going to college though. I knew that I was not college material. [I knew that] I would fail to graduate even from the least prestigious two-year junior college that would be willing to accept anyone. Why should I go to college when it was obvious that I would become a loser?

Also, Chang-woo criticized those people who go to college only to “save face” when they are not sure whether college would help their future career. He firmly said, “Some people in Korea go to college simply to avoid embarrassment.” Compared with female informants who thought of college education as the utmost capital in the Korean labor market, Changwoo understood that the benefit of a college education might be selective: it can be less helpful if one chooses to attend college just “to be like everyone else.” From his perspective, one should decide to go to college as a strategic choice after calculating the expected benefit of the education in one’s future career trajectories and the costs of college education. And hence, for him, college education would be “useless”: Working hard at a factory while making a little money is better [for me] than spending a great deal of money to go to college. Why should I squander money to look good to others? I think that going to the factory is the right choice for me. I don’t make lots of money. However, at least I didn’t waste money on a college education that would be useless for me.

Similarly, other male informants were skeptical about the practical value of college education. Based on their personal observation of those individuals who had failed to find a lucrative job with a college degree, they were critical about college education. For example, Sun-ho, a pleasantly talkative twenty-one-year-old convenience store clerk, stated that “college has become high school.” He believed that college should be a matter of choice. Sun-ho raised his voice at one point in the interview: “I could’ve gone to a two-year college in my neighborhood, but who would value a degree from that college? Honestly, everyone has a college degree. You can get one if you can pay even if you are really dumb.” Sun-ho’s skeptical perspective about college education was supported by his encounters with college graduates

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at his workplace or exposure to similar types of service jobs that he believed would not necessarily require a college education. He confidently said: I’ve seen people who are working at convenience stores or gas stations with college degrees. I have a coworker who graduated from that college that I was thinking about applying to [when I was a high school senior]. He is much older than me, but he is working with me at the same convenience store. Whenever I see him, I am saying to myself, “I’m glad that I didn’t go to college!”

In the meantime, Sun-ho saw that the social skills he had built from diverse “work experiences in the real world,” rather than college education, could be a better asset to his future career. He thought that he would have a competitive advantage, especially compared with job seekers with an associate’s degree, because he had “real experiences” from his work. However, his college-attending peers would “know nothing about the real world,” because they had been “locked up in a glass house” under the protection of their parents and educational institutions. Therefore, in his view, his peers would lack real-life skills that he possessed, including the ability to network with people from all walks of life and communicate with social superiors: Of course, they [friends at two-year colleges] must be smarter than I am. But, they have no idea what the real world looks like. I know it because I have been working since I was young. Also, I’ve gone through the ups and downs of life while they’ve been stuck at school. I am not sure, but if I were an employer, I would hire someone like me who has a great deal of experience compared with those with zero experience but college degrees.

Military Service as an Alternative Pathway to Adulthood

While rejecting the idea that college would be necessary for a better future, male informants considered military service—which is mandated for every Korean man who has the physical capability to carry it out—as a pivotal institution for their successful transition to adulthood. To male informants, the opportunity to participate in military service was crucial in three aspects. First, male informants believed that compulsory military service would provide a chance to put their unsatisfying jobs to an end. Joining military service was a sort of “evacuation plan” for them. Whereas they regarded their current job as a mere stopgap, they could see the current situation as bearable because they would leave soon for military service. In other words, the prospect of military service helped them to see the unsatisfying

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present as a temporary situation between adolescence and a new chapter of their lives as grown-up men. Hyun-sik, a stout twenty-one-year-old who describes himself as social, was excitedly waiting to begin his military duty in the navy. Part of his excitement about military service was from his expectation that he would leave his job soon. He was working as a delivery person at a local diner six days a week from eight to ten hours per day depending on his employer’s request. When asked to describe his job, he immediately poured out complaints about it. His major dissatisfaction was that the job was overly dangerous and did not pay sufficiently. He summarized his work thus: “I expose myself to the danger of death only to make a little money to get by.” Despite his dissatisfaction, Hyun-sik would not leave his job for another three months because he would “restore his freedom” soon when he began his naval duty. For now, Hyun-sik needed to keep the job to make a living and save some money before joining the military. Considering his anticipated military service, his job was bearable; otherwise, he would be motivated to escape it or feel more pessimistic about his future options. He stated: “I plan to continue the delivery work only until September. I will throw the motorbike key to the boss and quit my job on September 30th sharp.” Hyun-sik emphasized the exact date he plans to leave his job and continued, “I wouldn’t leave the job [until then]. I will tolerate this dirty job until September. After that, good-bye, zaijian!” He emphasized that he would be able to leave his job soon by saying “good-bye” in English and Chinese in turn. Another expectation among male informants was that the military service period would serve as a “time-out” during which they could achieve maturity as men. Whereas they saw their current work as a temporary situation that would simply pass, they interpreted the two-year military service as a meaningful period when they could explore their identity and make plans. They generally considered military service as an essential developmental period that they needed to go through to become a real man with psychological maturity and a sense of responsibility as a future breadwinner. Second, many male informants considered military duty as a chance to design the future trajectories of their lives. For example, like many young workers in the study, Kyu-tae was excited about military service. He thought that the military duty period would give him an opportunity to “seriously think about general things about my life such as my aptitude, my career, and what I want to do for a living.” Based on the advice that he had gathered from older men around him (i.e., older male friends and male family members), Kyu-tae especially expected that the strictly structured military lifestyle would be beneficial for his personal development.

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Particularly, he believed that the disciplinary lifestyle and the substantial restriction on his personal freedom during his duty would be helpful for him by causing him to reflect on his earlier life and make a concrete plan for the rest of his life: You know, I was told that I would get to think about life in many ways. To be honest with you, I have lived without much discipline so far. I’ve lived just as I wanted. However, as you know, the military is different from the rest of society. There are many rules that you should obey and the schedule that someone else sets up for you. It’s a real world. You’ll never be allowed to behave as you would in the civilian world. I think that the strict lifestyle [in the military] will give me a chance to look back on my own life and reflect on myself seriously.

Particularly, he anticipated that he would benefit from the military duty as he would be able to “grow up to be a mature man” during his service. He expected that the military service period would be a transformative experience: he would change from his old self, whom he described as a “childish and irresponsible kid” to a new and improved self, someone he would be able to call “a real man” (jin-jja nam-ja). To Kyu-tae, a real man was not simply a man with psychological maturity; a real man would have a mental readiness to take full responsibility for his family (i.e., his wife and children). In a solemn manner, Kyu-tae said: I think that the military will make me a real man. [Interviewer: What do you mean when you say a real man?] When I leave the military, I will have a better plan for what I want to do for a living for the rest of my life. I don’t have any plan now, right? Also, I think that if I figure out a better plan for my life, I will be a man who at least knows what to do to, not starve his wife and kids.

Finally, military service had importance for male informants because they believed in the practical value of the military experience. They thought that the completion of military duty would give them a leg up in the labor market. In their perspective, military service was a prerequisite for a secure position in the labor market, especially in the traditional manufacturing domain. Many male informants—twelve of the fifteen—hoped to find jobs in one of the manufacturing firms in the town after military duty. They expected those jobs to provide more stable life conditions than the underpaying service sector jobs that they had. They believed that military service would be helpful for achieving their goals. In their view, one practical benefit of completing military service was that they would obtain social status as a “normal Korean man” (jeong-sangjeog-in han-gug nam-ja), one with physical health and mental soundness

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who could work. Nam-il, a twenty-year-old busboy at a Korean barbecue restaurant, remarked, “Men with military experience are 180 degrees different from those without.” He explained his understanding of the social meaning that military service had in Korean society: When you finish military service, it is a sort of certificate showing that you’re a man who can deal with physical and mental challenges. It shows that you are a normal Korean man. [Therefore], people will treat you better and give you lots of respect. You can think that the military is something like that. When you tell other people that you finished the military [service], they will automatically think of you as a man without a problem, a normal man.

Based on his understanding of the positive aspects of military service, Nam-il expected that his chance to have a lucrative manufacturing job would be improved once he finished service. To him, military service was of importance because he believed that one’s military service record would confirm his physical and mental capability to carry out physically challenging tasks at work. Therefore, he applied to the navy, which is usually considered to be tougher than other military organizations in Korea, hoping to be a “stronger man.” In a confident manner, he explained his plan: From my perspective, employers would prefer those men who were in the navy because it means that they are stronger. The work that I want to do in the future is physically tough and mentally stressful. Obviously, those from the navy will fit the job better than other men who were in the army or the air force because navy men are stronger. One’s experience in the navy says that he is a stronger man, and I think that employers would prefer men from the navy.

Overall, compared with female peers who interpreted their transition in a pessimistic way, male informants in the study presented an optimistic perspective about their current situation and their future status as an adult. The female informants constructed their narratives based on their understanding of the role of a college education in shaping the transition to adulthood among Korean young people; by contrast, the male informants projected as the most important institution for their transition the military service, which would help them to achieve social status as a respectable man in Korea. Conclusion In this chapter, I illustrated how young male and female workers in Korea understood their transition to adulthood. The most pronounced

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finding is that meaning-making diverges by gender. However, this finding demonstrates that the intersectionality of social class and gender organizes various pathways to adulthood. Both male and female informants who grew up as members of the working class reported experiencing the spontaneous, haphazard transition to work without sufficient guidance or training. Yet, they believed that their life trajectories would be different from each other: female informants felt that their status as less-educated female workers would hurt their chance to earn social respect, to meet a man who could help achieve their economic security, and to find another career. On the contrary, male informants believed that military service, a social institution that molds Korean men into “real men,” would give them a chance to overcome class disadvantages derived from their lack of educational achievement and low-status occupations and to be a respectable male worker with a family. Overall, the informants’ perceptions of how social institutions shaped their life trajectories, opportunities, and constraints led them to construct their gendered transitional narratives. This finding has important implications for Korean society. First, my study calls for our attention to the development of social policies that help young workers. In Korea, the transition to adulthood is becoming riskier and more precarious for work-bound youths than for those with advanced education. As demonstrated by the narratives of female youths, they feel “trapped” in their transition to adulthood while they work hard to find an exit from their current situation on their own. After high school, it is hard for young people to expect institutional help unless they proceed to college. Although male informants believed that military service would provide them with a second chance and “symbolic recognition” as respectable men (Moon 2005, 130), their optimistic belief in the institution has not been warranted by research. Military service, in the Korean context, is a classless institution. It requires all male citizens who can physically serve their civic duty to participant in the military training. Therefore, it is hard to tell whether this particular institution could provide social advantages for young men who do not have college education, as the informants in this study believed. Therefore, various types of institutional support outside school and the military should be available to work-bound youth, such as better employment opportunities and affordable vocational training. Expanding higher education opportunities and encouraging all individuals to go to college does not solve the entire problem. Every society has working-class occupations, such as drivers, restaurant servers, factory workers, and so on (Lamont 2009). Even in a society where information and knowledge are the core of the national economy, people must fill in those less-prestigious,

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physically arduous occupations. Moreover, it is unrealistic to expect that everyone can achieve social mobility through their own hard work given the nature of social structure. However, Korean society does not provide institutional resources for those young people who pursue their transition to adulthood outside college campuses, as its policies for young people tend to be focused on college-educated youth. In addition, intersectionality should be sufficiently considered for social support for work-bound youth. As a policy initiative, for example, the Korean government developed a program called “HI” to support young individuals with high school educations in the labor market. Though it aims to offer them better employment opportunities by providing post– high school vocational training, it does not consider how male and female youths have different experiences at school and work and how they perceive their futures differently. However, as this chapter shows, class and gender interweave young people’s experiences and perceptions in a complex way. While work-bound youths are disadvantaged in the labor market, their pathways to adulthood are further shaped by gender. Their marginality and privilege should be understood in terms of their multiple positions. When we develop social policies, therefore, we should seriously consider the gendered marginality of young workers. References Arnett, J. J. 2001. “Conceptions of the Transition to Adulthood: Perspectives from Adolescence through Midlife.” Journal of Adult Development 8, no. 2: 133–143. Brinton, M. 2011. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, M. C., Y.-J. Lee, and W. L. Parish. 1995. “Married Women’s Employment in Rapidly Industrializing Societies: Examples from East Asia.” American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 5: 1099–1130. Cho, J., T. Lee, and H. Jung. 2014. “Glass Ceiling in a Stratified Labor Market: Evidence from Korea.” Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 32: 56–70. Collins, P. H. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. Cook, E. E. 2016. “Adulthood as Action: Changing Meanings of Adulthood for Male Part-Time Workers in Contemporary Japan.” Asian Journal of Social Science 44, no. 3: 317–337. Crenshaw, K. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6: 1241–1299.

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Furstenberg, F. F. 2008. “The Intersections of Social Class and the Transition to Adulthood.” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 119: 1–10. Genda, Y. 2007. “Jobless Youths and the NEET Problem in Japan.” Social Science Japan Journal 10, no. 1: 23–40. Kim, B.-H., J. K. Lee, and H. Park. 2016. “Marriage, Independence and Adulthood among Unmarried Women in South Korea.” Asian Journal of Social Science 44, no. 3: 338–362. Kim, Y. 2018. “Rethinking Double Jeopardy: Differences in the Gender Disadvantage between Organizational Insiders and Outsiders in Korea.” Sociological Perspectives 60, no. 6: 1082–1096. Kim, Y.-M., and S. Shirahase. 2014. “Understanding Intra-Regional Variation in Gender Inequality in East Asia: Decomposition of CrossNational Differences in the Gender Earnings Gap.” International Sociology 29, no. 3: 229–248. Koo, H. 2001. Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krei, M. S., and J. E. Rosenbaum. 2001. “Career and College Advice to the Forgotten Half: What Do Counselors and Vocational Teachers Advise?” Teachers College Record 103, no. 5: 823–842. Lamont, M. 2009. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lareau, A. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, B. 2002. “The Change in the Labor Market Structure for Youth after the Economic Crisis.” Labor Policy Research 2, no. 4: 1–16. Moon, S. 2005. Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nahm, J. W., Y. M. Kim, and K. M. Han. 2018. “A Study on Labor Market Precariousness of the Working High School Graduate Youths.” Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies 49, no. 1: 221–262. Nelson, L. C. 2000. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. Park, H. 2013. “The Transition to Adulthood among Korean Youths: Transition Markers in Productive and Reproductive Spheres.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 646, no. 1: 129–148. Park, H., J. K. Lee, and I. Jo. 2013. “Changing Relationships between Education and Marriage among Korean Women.” Korean Journal of Sociology 47, no. 3: 51–76.

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Raymo, J. M., H. Park, Y. Xie, and W. J. Yeung. 2015. “Marriage and Family in East Asia: Continuity and Change.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 471–492. Rosenbaum, J. E. 2001. Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications. Sandberg-Thoma, S. E., A. R. Snyder, and B. J. Jang. 2015. “Exiting and Returning to the Parental Home for Boomerang Kids.” Journal of Marriage and Family 77, no. 3: 806–818. Seguino, S. 1997. “Gender Wage Inequality and Export-Led Growth in South Korea.” The Journal of Development Studies 34, no. 2: 102–132. Shin, K.-Y. 2010. “Globalisation and the Working Class in South Korea: Contestation, Fragmentation and Renewal.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 40, no. 2: 211–229. Smits, J., and H. Park. 2009. “Five Decades of Educational Assortative Mating in Ten East Asian Societies.” Social Forces 88, no. 1: 227–255. South, S. J., and L. Lei. 2015. “Failures-to-Launch and Boomerang Kids: Contemporary Determinants of Leaving and Returning to the Parental Home.” Social Forces 94, no. 2: 863–890. Weis, L. 2013. Working Class without Work: High School Students in a De-Industrializing Economy. Abington, UK: Routledge.

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SEVEN

Diverging Masculinities and the Politics of Aversion toward Ethnically Mixed Men in the Korean Military

HYUN MEE KIM

For a very long time, the military in South Korea was an exclusively male social institution that enforced the idea of Korean ethnic purity, playing a pivotal role in the state’s formation of a specific male national identity through mandatory military service. The military served to socialize, classify, and rank men in ways that fortified their relationships to the state based on ideas of “hegemonic masculinity” and idealized nationhood (Arkin and Dobrofsky 1978; Moon 2002; Sasson-Levy 2003). Many feminist works have critically examined the disciplinary nature of the military by associating masculinity with hypersexuality and the exclusion of women by considering women as objects of subjugation (Enroe 1980; Kwon 2000, 2013; Moon 2002, 2005). Moon (2002, 80) sees the South Korean (hereafter Korean) military as forming hegemonic masculinity through a number of interwoven notions and practices that reinforce the notion of adult males as family providers who remain distant from domestic responsibilities such as household work and childcare. One of these practices is the completion of a man’s mandatory military service in his twenties, a critical rite of passage in the process of becoming a “real man” in South Korea. Until recently, the military banned the conscription of ethnically mixed men—those with one Korean parent and the other parent of another ethnicity—on the grounds that they might upset the status quo. Male citizens who were not of pure Korean stock were exempt from the responsibility of military service until 2009, when the regulation was abolished as unconstitutional. Yet, despite the fact that male citizens of mixed descent have been drafted since 2012 as a result of the revision of the Military Service Act, their subordination as a racial minority has more than cancelled out their putative advantages as “males who have done their national duty” (uimu)

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in contemporary Korean society. This chapter investigates how the military has dealt with growing social concerns and debates over the direction that the military should take in this globalized milieu. It especially focuses on the nature of social contestation over the conscription and management of so-called multicultural soldiers in Korea’s military in relation to issues of combat capabilities, allegiance, and loyalty. In the early 1990s, following regional neighbors Japan and Taiwan, which were experiencing similar demographic shifts, South Korea began to actively recruit international brides for farmers and urban working-class men who occupied disadvantaged positions in the domestic marriage market. A family formed from a cross-border marriage was termed a “multicultural family” by the government, which regards the mobilization of international women in this manner as part of a national project to reproduce “Korean” families as the basic social unit of society and to increase the country’s declining population (Kim 2011, 2016). Since 2006, the state has emphasized a strong assimilationist model to quickly “Koreanize” these ethnically diverse marriage migrants and implemented a variety of programs to help migrant wives settle down in Korea. The sole aim of fast assimilation, instead of considering heterogeneity, differences, classes, and cultural pride within the boundary of the multicultural family, identified all multicultural families as members of a “vulnerable social group.” The term “multicultural” (tamunhwa) has begun to supplant the concept of “monoethnicity” (tanil minjok), which had long been embraced by society as a source of national competitive success. The term “multicultural society” is now commonly used in daily language. Though the notion of a multicultural society was generally welcomed initially by many South Koreans given its novelty, “multicultural” became a synonym for “foreignness,” “a family member of international marriage,” or “mixed-bloodedness.” Ironically, the notion of multicultural families as a vulnerable social group is deepening, and the occurrence of expressions such as the “second-generation multicultural family,” “multicultural children,” “multicultural adolescents,” and “multicultural military personnel” marks these families with a social stigma. Young men beginning military service who are the offspring of multicultural families have been labeled “multicultural soldiers.” The number of multicultural soldiers increased from 223 in 2012 and to 776 in 2016. According to South Korean Department of Defense forecasts, it will increase to 3,200 in 2019 and 5,000 in 2022. This chapter first analyzes how the Korean military includes or excludes certain men from its ranks on the basis of its structures of hegemonic masculinity. Second, it examines how, after 2012 when the so-called multicultural soldiers were no longer refused a place in the military ranks, scholars

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of the military and the media continued to employ discourses of race and racism about them that simultaneously obscured and normalized their existence within that institution (Fleras 2014, 146; Joseph, Darnelle, and Nakamura 2012). This chapter seeks to identify the problems in the linkage of military service, masculinity, and race and ethnicity from the perspective of the marginalized group of men of mixed ethnicity in the military, or “multicultural soldiers.” It emphasizes the intersection of class, race and ethnicity, and masculinity in the model of normative male citizenship within the context of South Korea’s transition toward a multiethnic society. A little-known fact is the way that the Korean military has always discriminated among its soldiers, classifying and excluding certain troops on the basis of their particular characteristics. Not only men with physical and mental handicaps and those with insufficient educational qualifications, but also Korean men of “mixed-race,” were long forbidden from serving in the military, thus cutting them off from certain social and economic benefits granted to “pure” Korean men. Military Hierarchies of Korean Manhood Although the Korean military was founded on heteronormative gender principles that separated its troops on the basis of ethnic purity, rank, and educational background, it has continued to serve as an economic, political, and cultural system of privilege. Upon the founding of South Korea in 1948, the country’s constitution declared military service to be a basic duty of citizenship and called for a system of universal conscription for men. According to Article 39 concerning military service, male citizens of the Republic of Korea must faithfully serve, and women citizens may be called to active duty to support them. The earliest law regarding military service was adopted in 1949, and in 1957, four years after the armistice ending the Korean War, a system of universal conscription was adopted. To that end, upon reaching the age of eighteen, men were required to take a physical examination to determine their fitness to serve (Hong 2010, 51–53). Prior to the 1960s and the advent of military rule, the system of universal conscription was not applied strictly and, for various reasons, many men did not complete military service. For example, firstborn sons who were responsible for the livelihood of the family or men who found ways to benefit from special privileges were exempt from the draft. Corruption in the conscription process was also frequent. A campaign incorporating a language of equality and democratic values was introduced under the Syngman Rhee regime (1948–1960) to tackle the issue of draft dodgers, and gradually draft evaders came to be perceived negatively as unpatriotic social deviants and stigmatized by the media (Y. Jung 2014).

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Starting in 1961, new laws criminalizing draft evasion were implemented to make draft evasion extremely difficult and costly; these mainly targeted the privileged class (Y. Jung 2014, 133). It was Park Chung Hee’s regime (1961–1979) that succeeded in confirming people’s hegemonic consent to universal conscription. The Park regime stressed nationalism and national identity through the militarization of national security and justifed the conscription of all able-bodied men on the grounds of the presence of threat from North Korea (Shim 2014, 492). The regime also implemented a series of initiatives to eradicate the evasion of military service, such as depriving violators of the military service law of economic opportunities and withdrawing various types of state approvals to run a business (Moon 2002, 93). In addition to facing the state’s military requirements and appeals to patriotism or state security, men were compelled to serve to ensure their economic livelihoods after completing their service. Korean men began to internalize the model of modern hegemonic masculinity through the understanding that only through completing military service would they be able to secure good jobs enabling them to start a family and fulfill their responsibilities as dutiful breadwinners. The stick to this carrot was the threat of punishment if men failed to serve. The right of conscientious objection was and is not recognized, and even religious clerics do not receive exemption from military duty (Shim 2014, 493).1 All conscientious objectors who refused to serve have been imprisoned (or, more recently, forced to seek political asylum in other countries). The civilian regime under Kim Young Sam provided concrete incentives to men completing their military service. Through the Veterans Support Law passed in 1997 and its Enforcement Ordinance (1998), the Kim Young Sam government strengthened the practice of offering specific economic benefits to men having fulfilled their national military service such as additional credit points when applying for jobs (Moon 2002, 105n24). Furthermore, after the 1970s, when the system of universal conscription was firmly in place, severe discrimination between males subject to the draft and those who were exempt began to arise. Higher education was one of the most commonly invoked reasons for postponing or avoiding military service. In the 1970s and 1980s, when active troop levels exceeded two hundred thousand per year, the Korean government kept its elite troops on active duty while instituting an “alternative service program” for the remaining manpower, assigning them to such tasks as public service work or serving as riot police, prison staff, special research assistants, skilled industrial workers, and the like (Hong 2010, 58). Two basic categories were 1 

South Korea’s constitutional court ruled on June 28, 2018, that conscientious objectors be allowed to substitute the required two years of military service with community service.

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established to differentiate among men. Those who were fit to serve were called resident servicemen (hyŏnyŏk), and the exempt were called supplementary or substitute servicemen (p’och’unn’gyokk or taech’ebongmu; Moon 2002, 97). As early as the age of seventeen, young males undergo a medical examination to assess their suitability for military service. As a result of that evaluation, which contains physical and psychological components, together with an assessment of their educational attainment and family background, all male citizens are classified into “grades.” Those in grades 1–4 are deemed “qualified” and those in grades 5–7 are “disqualified” (Song 2015, 64). However, in practice, when the Korean military considers Korean males from the point of view of inclusion and exclusion, the men are grouped roughly into two large categories: “usable” and “not usable” resources, the latter including men exempt for medical reasons, men exempt on special grounds such as economic difficulties or low levels of education, prisoners, orphans, men of mixed ethnicity, overseas permanent residents, those whose whereabouts are unknown, and so on. Prisoners, orphans, and those of mixed ethnicity, without regard to any physical defect, are singled out as being essentially “exempt” from service (Hong 2010, 2). The criteria are arbitrary but heavily laden with varying degrees of class-based, racial, and ethnic assumptions about “who constitutes the body of efficient and trustworthy soldiers” (Moon 2002, 97). Prisoners, orphans, and mixed-race individuals are regarded as a possible threat to the healthy male bonding supposed in the romantic notion of the army as a place where soldiers share a “deep understanding and friendship” with one another through their training and communal life in characteristically twenty-four-hour-aday contact. Despite the Korean state’s emphasis on the equality of universal service of male citizens, the actual implementation of conscription has never been equal but “class-based” (Choi and Kim 2017). Fairness in military conscription has been always questioned. Upper-class male “could legally dodge military service by opting for various forms of alternative service” such as attending graduate programs in Korea or abroad, or serving at statedesignated institutions (Choi and Kim 2017, 519). The Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun administrations from 1997 to 2008 enhanced the auditing of conscription practices and endeavored to abolish corrupt practices of conscription for upper-class youths. Service evasion by the rich and powerful has become a more politicized issue, which threatens the universality of military conscription. Increasingly more Korean men have challenged mandatory conscription through draft evasion or direct opposition (Y. Jung 2014).

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In recent years, in light of cases in which famous young male entertainers and the sons of the wealthy or political elites have gained exemption from mandatory service through various ruses, the system of conscription has been criticized as exacerbating the class and power inequalities that exist in Korean society. There have also been spates of incidents in which soldiers have shot and killed their fellow troops, presumably in reaction to abuse or mistreatment. To counter this image and to encourage males of military service age to enlist, the army has even begun posting signs where young men might see them, announcing their new policy that “bullying and corporal punishment” will not be tolerated in the “new” military. In 2000, the military introduced a “human rights” paradigm into the barracks culture. Korea’s universal military conscription has recently come to be perceived as a double-edged sword by Korean men themselves. On the one hand, completion of military service is a civic duty that serves as a man’s confirmation of his adherence to a set of core cultural values and grants him the right of normative citizenship in areas such as employment, social relations, and so on. For example, successful completion of military service provides him with an advantage when he is evaluated in job applications and boosts his pay slightly when he is hired (Moon 2002; Na, Han and Koo 2014). On the other hand, military conscription represents an essential duty for all Korean men that is at times undertaken against their will. Through military service, the state controls young Korean men as it structures the temporal framework of their life course by imposing a specific “timetable” for performance of that service, between eighteen and thirty-five years old (Song 2015, 64).2 As problems of employment and unemployment grow more severe for Korean youth, young men are seeing military service not only as a physically and mentally challenging demand on their lives by the state, but also as a “waste of time” and a gendered “handicap” when they study and prepare themselves for the labor market. However, as Jo mentions in chapter 6, young males who join the labor force with only a high school education tend to see military service as a pivotal rite of passage that enables them to achieve psychological maturity and a sense of responsibility as a future breadwinner. They strongly believe that the completion of military service qualifies them for regular jobs and higher pay in the ever-more-precarious labor conditions for the young generation. Military service is considered a prerequisite for a secure position in the labor market. Another line of division among men is sexual orientation. Military criminal law prohibits and punishes homosexuality among soldiers, since it 2 

All ages are expressed according to the Western tradition.

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is perceived to harm the “sexual health of the military family” and the “healthy life and morale of the military collective” (Na, Han, and Koo 2014, 365). The law defines sex acts between members of the same gender as molestation, punishes sodomy and other sex acts even when they take place with mutual consent, and prosecutes soldiers on leave who have same-sex relations with civilians (Na, Han, and Koo 2014, 365). Gay and lesbian individuals are still deemed unsuitable for the military under the premise that military law prohibits sex acts between members of the same gender (J-k. Lee 2009; Na, Han, and Koo 2014). Male-to-female transgender women are excluded from active duty and assigned to civil defense, whereas a female-to-male transgender man is assigned to a civil defense unit “once the Military Manpower Administration confirms his status through official documentation and a court decision is rendered” (Na, Han, and Koo 2014, 366). The military has faced challenges from groups in society claiming that the universal human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and mixed-ethnic people continue to be violated. In this context, LGBT groups and mixed-heritage men see military conscription as a procedural right for acquiring normative male citizenship in South Korea. The Korean military has been under continuous attack for violating human rights and has reacted by announcing that its operations will be more open and responsive in the future. From the 2000s, the military introduced a gender mainstreaming policy into the military by expanding the utilization rate of female military personnel and opening opportunities for military participation for married women in 2007 (Kim 2018). The Korean military has become a contested domain in which diverging masculinities (and femininities) intersect with class, sexuality, and race to compete for normative male citizenship, social belonging, and equality. Men of Mixed Ethnicity and the Politics of Aversion Mixed-race men were exempted from military conscription, but instead of enjoying the perks of exemption like those privileged individuals who had gained exemption, they suffered the consequences of being excluded from military life because of deep-seated aversion to skin color. They were being discriminated against. The Korean military has been the key actor in identifying, reinforcing, and rewarding the ethnic purity of South Korea’s men. In this era of rapid mobility among its citizens, the emergence of “multicultural soldiers” and the possibility of incorporation of Koreans living abroad into the military sparked a new debate about what constitutes “the perfect Korean soldier.” The lack of awareness and the racism in Korean society have highlighted the degree to which the Korean military is an organization

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tainted by institutional racism. Institutional racism refers to both overt and covert processes by which organizational measures and standard operating procedures—rules, procedures, rewards, and practices—have the intent or effect of excluding or exploiting members of a racial minority and thereby adversely penalize them (Fleras 2014, 145; Scheurich and Young, 1997). Even without aversive practices, the Korean military would be considered a racially biased organization from the perspective that it kept in place restrictions promoting racial purity until 2009. The challenge of incorporating the multicultural soldiers into the military served to broaden perspectives on what constituted masculinity, but, at the same time, it initiated a debate over exactly who was deemed a proper man and who was fit to be a soldier. Korean society, and by association the military, is replete with examples of aversion to ethnically or racially mixed people. The incidence of “mixed-race” children increased rapidly during and after the Korean War. From the 1950s onward, throughout the Korean War and later during the U.S. military occupation, many mixed-race children were born to Korean women and American servicemen, but they disappeared from the South Korean landscape through state-sponsored international adoption programs. Under the banner of “One Nation, One People” (with an underlying assumption that in one country only one ethnic group should exist), these mixed-race children born during the Korean War era were sent abroad for adoption. During the period 1955–1961, out of 4,190 children sent abroad for adoption, 2,691 of them, or about 62 percent, were of mixed race (cited in Lee 2008, 35). Those who remained in Korea were, however, exempted from military service, even in the event that they were drafted or signed up to serve voluntarily. This exemption signified an aversion to their skin color. The Military Service Act, Article 136 of 1993, reads, “In the case of clearly, externally identifiable persons of mixed race, they are included in disqualified conscription status.” That is, people who appear to be of mixed race are not allowed to participate in barracks life. Not only are distinctly ethnically mixed people banned from the induction physical but also, regardless of their physical fitness level, they cannot participate in the military. The organization asserted that the external appearance of men of mixed ethnicity was a type of “defect” preventing them from serving, but it did not concretely explain why such men could not serve on active duty. They were simply defined as possessing a distinct appearance of “otherness” that prevented them from being included in the category of the “elite forces” that the military desired. In Korea, the concept of “mixed race” is extremely unclear. Generally, it denotes any person born to a Korean ethnic parent and an immigrant parent who is therefore not of full-blooded Korean ethnicity. Considering the historical record, from the Mongol invaders who took up residence in

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Korea, through the colonial-era “Japan and Korea Are One” policy that led to Japanese-Korean intermarriage, to the sexual unions of American troops and Korean women during the U.S. military occupation, it has not been easy to establish who was of “pure blood” and who was of “mixed blood” in Korea. Nevertheless, on the basis of being “clearly, externally identifiable,” such men—especially those whose non-Korean parent was black or white—were barred from conscription. In Korean society, where the people (minjok) and the nation (kungmin) have long been one and the same, a Korean national (kungmin) whose father or mother is of a different race does not conform to the ideal type. A soldier of mixed ethnicity is imagined as a disturbing presence in whom obedience to the demands of the state and the hierarchical solidarity between males cannot be reconciled. The Korean military, which has influenced Korean organizational culture by treating the mutual harmony of identity, male solidarity, and hierarchy as its most important value, has contributed to the strengthening and perpetuation of racism. In that respect, the military in Korean society has fortified its inbred nature, rather than serving as an organization that represents the whole of civil society in all its complexity. Multicultural men, instead of being exempt from military life, have been entirely excluded from it. The door to a military career was completely shut to them. Without having completed military service, a Korean man cannot satisfy one of the basic demands employers make of job seekers; thus, by being denied the chance to serve in the military, ethnically mixed men were often subject to poverty. In the new millennium, public debate about the “multicultural society” in South Korea had a profound effect on the military. As the ethnically homogenous state gave way to a multicultural society, the debate intensified around how the military could change. Fueling the debate was the reduction in the population due primarily to the decline in the birth rate after the 1990s. The number of men considered required for a robust military became insufficient. This dearth of military manpower also resulted from the fluid situation of Korean men in their twenties. From the 1990s onward, “global mobility” within Korean society rapidly increased, stimulating the desires of Korea’s rising transnational class. The number of children sent by their parents for education in English-speaking countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, and so on—climbed rapidly, and, by 2010, the number of elementary, middle, and high school students being educated abroad had reached 410,000 (Cha 2013, 2). Some of the students continued to reside in foreign countries after obtaining permanent residency, and as multiple paths arose as alternatives to returning to Korea for military service, the number of potential male army recruits grew unpredictable.

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It became evident that not only the offspring of marriage migrants, but also those of foreign workers who had acquired Korean citizenship and new settlers from North Korea needed to be introduced into the military to keep up its numbers. This logic benefited from the fact that the economically productive sector of the population was aging rapidly and the shortage of a labor supply of good quality was adversely affecting the nation’s growth potential. In order to achieve “sustainable growth and a sustainable society,” an expert on the military concluded that Korean society needed to implement a variety of human resource strategies, ranging from the admission of immigrants into the country to enticing well-educated young Koreans living abroad to return. In 2004, a system was even introduced to encourage Koreans holding foreign passports to sign up for the military (Hong 2010, 62). After 2007, when calculations showed that future military manpower would fall short of needs, discussions among the media and academia began to take place about revisions to the military service law concerning the qualifications for new recruits. It was estimated that available military manpower would quickly begin to drop starting in 2017, and that there would be a shortfall of 160,000 troops by the year 2023 (Hong 2010, 60). Thus, the government perceived a need to convert existing “not usable” manpower into “usable” manpower, and so the Military Service Act was revised. As amended in 2005, the act called for the induction of only those ethnically mixed citizens born after January 1, 1987, and allowed them to choose whether to be assigned to active service or as public service personnel (Hong 2010, 56). Additionally, in December 2007, a clause in the military service law that had instituted discrimination on the basis of race and skin color was declared unconstitutional on the grounds that the constitution promised equal treatment to all, and so the law was revised. However, at the same time, the previous provision specifying that “clearly, externally identifiable” mixed-race people—that is, mixed-race individuals with a black or white parent—were disqualified from military service was not stricken from the law. Finally, in 2009, the discriminatory character of this provision that viewed those of mixed Asian and mixed black or white parentage differently was recognized as racist and was struck down, allowing any male citizen regardless of appearance to serve in the military (T. Y. Lee 2009). In Korea, military service is a duty of all male citizens but, at the same time, participation requires that the citizen in question be physically, mentally, and socially “normal,” which we can understand as a type of qualification or competence. As a result, because ethnically mixed individuals were viewed as abnormal and treated as second-class citizens, this requirement became problematic (J-k. Lee 2009, 50). The exemption of ethnically mixed

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individuals from military service provided them no advantage; on the contrary, some scholars criticized the exemption as being essentially a policy to segregate them. Consequently, these scholars proposed a forward-thinking policy to accept such men into the military to form a new, advanced, “multicultural” fighting force. Thereafter, the terms “multicultural military” and “multicultural soldier” came into formal use in the Korean military. Finally, in 2011, the amendment to the military service law that specified that, “regardless of race or skin color, the duties of military service were incumbent” on all males came into effect and the “multicultural soldier” was thus born. The Korean Ministry of Defense, in its publication “The Multicultural Era and the Advanced, Powerful Army” (2010), divided multicultural families into three types—“international marriage families, foreign worker families, [and] North Korean refugees,” and called the offspring of these types of families “multicultural military personnel.” In the case of North Korean refugee families, young people born while their parents were resident in South Korea were then able to join the armed forces, but young people who left North Korea themselves were exempt from service. The Korean military was pushed toward “multiculturalism,” but the individuals who contributed to this change were the so-called second generation of multicultural families. In broad terms, the offspring of multicultural families are of “mixed blood” as they were born to couples brought together through the rapid introduction of international marriages in the 1990s, but since most of the mothers were of Asian provenance, their offspring were largely indistinguishable from “pure-blood Koreans” in terms of appearance. For this reason, they were allowed into military conscription. Ambiguous Integration of Multicultural Soldiers into the Korean Military The social discourse about integrating mixed-race soldiers has both normalized and obscured their position in the military. Since 2011, when “multicultural soldiers” began to serve, about a thousand such men have been inducted each year. In 2014, the number of male offspring of multicultural families subject to conscription was 1,719. This figure should rise to 2,199 in 2015, then to 3,626 in 2019, and 4,730 in 2024 (Yonhap News, November 24, 2014). This shift to a multicultural military has conjured various worries. A social debate has arisen between military officials and scholars concerning the way that “mixed-race” or second-generation offspring of multicultural families should be treated and managed. In 2012, the Ministry of Defense, which had announced the change in direction toward a multicultural military, also changed the wording of the soldier’s oath from “the Korean people” to “citizens,” saying that according to policy, multicultural

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soldiers should not be discriminated against and instead must receive “equal treatment.” In addition, it declared that soldiers from multicultural families should be protected from exposure insofar as it was possible and so it would not be releasing a tally of the number of such soldiers who had joined the ranks, advancing the opinion that releasing such information would discriminate against personnel (Hong 2012). Furthermore, the Ministry of Defense announced that it had developed training materials titled “The Strong, Advanced Army in the Era of Multiculturalism” for the multicultural soldiers, and that it intended to provide such training to all soldiers on a regular basis (Bae 2010). However, as the discussion in the rest of this section will show, these intentions coupled with further social discourse have culminated in a striking paradox in the treatment of multicultural soldiers. Policy Recommendations

Beyond the changes announced by the Ministry of Defense, the ongoing social discourse led to various policy suggestions to address the challenge of introducing multicultural soldiers into the ranks of the military (Choe 2010; Park 2011). This process of policy recommendation focused on three major concerns about the multicultural military and the multicultural soldiers. First, due to the heterogeneity arising from the military’s shift toward multiculturalism, there has been a concern that the solidarity between soldiers will weaken. If “military culture” is defined as sharing not only the same values but also the same standards of behavior—discipline, cooperation, loyalty, devotion, and traditions—and holding all to the same standard, some participants in the discourse worry that, with the introduction multicultural soldiers, cultural conflicts would be amplified because of increased heterogeneity within the same organization (Hong 2010, 67–68). The idea of cultural heterogeneity was soon reduced to that of an intensification of conflict. As a result, it was deemed necessary that the military should strengthen feelings of brotherhood (tongjilgam) and a common sense of purpose (tongnyo ŭishik). Second, there remains uneasiness about the loyalty of multicultural soldiers. Under the premise that a good soldier shows a high degree of attachment to the state, the offspring of multicultural families should demonstrate loyalty, patriotism, and a shared view of the enemy, but the opinion is that they will inevitably have difficulties doing so and that there will be a marked difference in identity between themselves and ordinary soldiers (Kim 2014, 24). In this opinion, the second generation of multicultural families think, “I grew up in a multicultural family and I am an outsider who doesn’t belong to any country,” and, consequently as a soldier, it is difficult for them to have a clear-cut view of the state that is making demands upon

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them. To counter this kind of thinking, a recommendation was made to provide education on Korean society and history to offspring of multicultural families so that they may gain proper views of history, the state, and who the enemy is (North Korea) prior to their induction, enabling them to reduce the maladaptive triggers that may arise during job seeking or on personality tests (M. Jung 2014). An interesting part of this effort is the constant insistence on the necessity for “security [anti-communist] education” for migrant wives and multicultural families (Lee 2012). Trips to visit the area around the demilitarized zone (DMZ) have even been organized. For example, one police chief from Taegu organized an event he called the “Year of the Rat multicultural family field visit to the DMZ and cultural tour” through which participants visited Yeoncheon in Gyeonggi-do and Ch’ŏrwŏn, where military bases are located. When South Korean media conducted interviews with participants, a resulting news article was headlined “Hopes That the Divided Korean Peninsula Can Soon Be Reunited” (Lee 2012). A third concern is that multicultural soldiers suffer maladjustment to military life, which might lead to further problems. This concern stems from a sense that because multicultural children have suffered severe difficulties and discrimination in their upbringing, they would not be able to adapt to life within the military, in which they face additional discrimination from their fellow soldiers. Park (2011, 183) explains that multicultural children “have been put in difficult educational circumstances, lagging in linguistic development as a result of being raised by mothers with insufficient Korean language skills and experiencing cultural maladjustment.” Consequently, children of multicultural families often suffer in their studies, face crises of identity, and, in the growing-up process, experience emotional stress due to their ostracism from the larger group, and so on. These factors have led to concerns that such individuals pose a possible threat to safety in the barracks. It is said that because of the “barracks stress” they experience, multicultural soldiers become the targets of incidents and crimes while in the military, or vice versa—being targeted causes them stress. For instance, a multicultural soldier may be ostracized by nonmulticultural soldiers and, due to his maladaptation, then attack the ostracizers (Park 2011). Following the surge in international marriages in Korea, concerns and stigmatization connected with the multicultural family and multicultural teens and young adults have naturally extended to concerns about multicultural troops. Because the children of multicultural families have not adapted well to Korean society, it is predicted that their adaptation to military life will also be difficult. According to Kim Yong-ki (2014, 29), children of multicultural families “in the process of growing up cannot adapt to school education, and this is connected to various social problems such as suicide, murder,

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arson, etc. When these kinds of problems are directly introduced into barracks life, disputes within the troops arise and consequently there are social and economic costs for the state and its citizens and the degradation of trust in the military results in anxiety.” Moreover, because of racial discrimination, ordinary soldiers worried that soldiers who had not adjusted properly to military life due to being bullied or ostracized by the group would end up provoking violent incidents. As a result of these concerns, multicultural soldiers became the object of various types of special “care.” For example, they were encouraged to enlist with friends or brothers or given the right to select where they wished to be deployed (Hong 2012). In contrast to these concerns, there is an emerging discourse about the possible “usefulness” of multicultural soldiers. It has been suggested that the presence of multicultural soldiers can contribute to the transnational efforts of the Korean military. Considering that, as of September 2012, a total of 1,451 individuals from fifteen countries had been dispatched as peacekeepers or as medical personnel, multicultural soldiers from Korea stationed abroad could, it has been said, demonstrate Korea’s “multicultural capacity” in overseas activities (Cha 2013, 7). Treatment of Multicultural Soldiers in the Korean Military

The paradoxical element was that, whereas permitting multicultural soldiers to serve in the Korean military would seem to have put an end to the institutional racism of the military, the military itself expanded upon the micromanagement of surveillance of multicultural soldiers. While continuing to perpetuate Korean society’s racial discrimination toward multicultural families and their offspring, the South Korean government and military began a screening process that targeted the multicultural soldiers as potentially dangerous and warranting special attention. First, the Ministry of Defense, which had said it would not keep statistics on or survey the multicultural soldiers, modified its position and introduced an “Integrated Management System” to keep track of them. The Korean military established a policy that prohibited discrimination based on appearance or ethnicity but at the same time introduced a system that distinguished multicultural soldiers from nonmulticultural soldiers (Hong 2010, 65; Kim 2014, 52), thus demonstrating the power of management and control. Starting in 2010, as each multicultural soldier entered training camp, he was tracked in a continuously updated computer system that could single him out. When a soldier from a multicultural family joins the force and it is noted that the new recruit is requested to receive special attention, he is put on a list of “soldiers of interest.” In order to help multicultural soldiers adapt to military service, the military has implemented a “buddy enlistment” system between second-generation multicultural soldiers. Multicultural

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troops remain under restriction and under the supervision of a service member called a “security officer.” Currently, the army excludes multicultural soldiers from serving near the DMZ, and the “relatively straightforward tasks they are assigned” are considered somewhat plum jobs. One officer said that to avoid any “accidents” or “psychological problems,” multicultural soldiers are often granted leave or given permission for overnight stays because they need “comforting.” These measures have resulted in complaints from ordinary soldiers that they are the victims of “reverse discrimination” (Lee 2013). Conclusion I, the undersigned, as a soldier of the Republic of Korea, solemnly swear loyalty to the state and the Korean people, and, observing all laws, promise to obey the commands of my superiors and to faithfully carry out the tasks given to me.

When new soldiers began their military service, they used to sign this oath.3 In 2012, the phrase “the Korean people” was changed to “citizens.” Given the social trend represented by the rapid increase in the number of inductees who were the offspring of international marriages—the socalled multicultural families—this change reflected public sentiment that the word “citizen,” which describes a member of a nation, was more appropriate than the word “people” (minjok), which carries the concept of a Korean “race” (Yoon 2012). This chapter shows how the incorporation of multicultural soldiers poses strategic, legal, and ideological challenges in the current globalizing milieu of the Korean military. The current Korean military vacillates in its adherence to the hegemonic mode of Korean manhood by continually reconstructing a militarized masculinity. The South Korean patriarchy, represented by the military, associates the prestige and status of the nation with the enhancement of a collective masculinity known as “ethnonational masculinity” (J-k. Lee 2009). Against this backdrop, the homogeneity of the soldiers comes to be seen as protecting the loyalty, solidarity, and system of hierarchy among men. However, the Korean military, despite its patriarchal and monoethnic nature, has not functioned as a uniform, unchanging entity. The Korean military has met pressure to participate in the societal current of Korea’s rapid increase in national wealth, burgeoning desire to achieve more on the global stage, and national recognition of the place of cultural diversity. To reflect this change 3 

National Law Information Center, available at http://www.law.go.kr/LSW/lsInfoP. do?lsiSeq=128315#0000, emphasis added.

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in the social context, the military has faced a particular challenge playing its part in Korea’s global ascendency: to accommodate generally respected universal human rights related to sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. The emergence of multicultural soldiers within the army is still a matter of dispute. Their ambiguous position clearly reveals the governmental character of “multicultural society” within Korean society. To improve the security of the active forces with the view toward creating an advanced military of global stature, mixed-race men were allowed to serve in the military but, as in the past when multicultural people were singled out based on particular characteristics, they are still stigmatized on the basis of their “inferiority,” by virtue of their appearance, background, cultural heterogeneity, linguistic ability, and so on. On the surface it looks as though the Korean military’s exclusion of men of mixed ethnicity has come to an end; in reality, identifying multicultural troops as different from ordinary troops, managing and deploying them differently, classifying them as potential threats, and other measures have just put into place a new set of day-to-day racist responses. This kind of management, though giving agency to multicultural soldiers in a particular way, tends to categorize them as the ambiguous subject who cannot acquire full membership in Korean society. The South Korean military has been challenged by a pressing dilemma rooted in a desire to preserve the homogeneity of ethnic soldiers in the face of the increasingly hybrid culture generated by a reliance on transnational migration to maintain and reproduce the Korean family. In response, the sole aim of fast assimilation identified certain soldiers based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, and education as members of a vulnerable group and committed the cultural violence of permanently singling them out as belonging to the class of marginalized or unfit soldiers. The military’s personnel management practices and the discourse of both aversion to and suspicion of the use of multicultural personnel by the media and by military scholars provide ample evidence that deep-seated views of what it is to be a Korean “man” have yet to substantively change. References Arkin, William, and Lynne R. Dobrofsky. 1978. “Military Socialization and Masculinity.” Journal of Social Issues 34, no. 1: 151–168. Bae M. U. 2010. “Sŏultae, kunjangbyŏng tamunhwagyoyuk kyojae kaebal” [Multicultural education textbook for military personnel published by Seoul National University Newsis, January 19. http:// news​.naver​.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=102&oid =003&aid=0003051068 (retrieved May 6, 2014).

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Cha Yongkuk. 2013. “Tamunhwasahoeŭi Han’guginŭi kwajewa yŏk’are kwanhan yŏn’gu” [The Korean military’s roles and missions in the multicultural Korean society]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Yonsei University. Choe Seon-Ae. 2010. “Tamunhwagundaerŭl taebihan min’gwa kunŭi chunbibanghyange kwanhan cheŏn” [Suggestions to the civil society and the military for the preparation of the future multicultural armySuggestions to the civil society and the military the preparation of the future multicultural army]. Korean Academy of Military Social Welfare 3, no. 1: 93–113. Choi, Hee Jung, and Nora Hui-Jung Kim. 2017. “Of Soldiers and Citizens: Shallow Marketisation, Military Service and Citizenship in NeoLiberal South Korea.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47, no. 4: 515–534. Enroe, Cynthia. 1980. Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Society. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Fleras, Augie. 2014. Racism in a Multicultural Canada: Paradoxes, Politics, and Resistance. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Freeman, Caren. 2011. Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hong Seok-Cho. 2010. “Han’gukkun tamunhwa kundaeroŭi chŏnhwane kwanhan yŏn’gu” [Research on the conversion of the Korean army into a multicultural army]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Sangji University. Hong Sangji. 2012. “Tamunhwajangbyŏng ttaro kwallihanŭn’ge ch’abyŏl” [The military’s managing of multicultural soldiers separately is discrimination]. JoongAng Sunday, July 22 (no. 280). http://sunday. joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=26877 (retrieved May 6, 2014). Joseph, Janelle, Simon Darnell, and Yuka Nakamura. 2012. Race and Sport in Canada: Intersecting Inequalities. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Jung Myung-Ho. 2014. “Tamunhwahwan’gyŏng taebi Han’gukkun taeŭnge kwanhan yŏn’gu” [Study on the ROK military response for a multicultural environment]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Kookmin University. Jung, Youngish. 2014. “The Normalization of Universal Male Conscription in South Korean Society and the State Regulation of Draft Evasion and Conscientious Objection: 1950–1993.” TransHumanities 7, no. 3: 125–161. Kim Elli. 2018..“Yŏsŏng kuninŭi nŭnglyŏk issnŭn chakikyepalkwa kunin toeki” [Competent self-development of female soldiers and those becoming soldiers]. Journal of Korean Womens’ Studies 34, no. 1: 141–175.

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Kim, Hyun Mee. 2011. “The Emergence of the ‘Multicultural Family’ and the Genderized Citizenship in South Korea.” In Contested Citizenship in East Asia: Developmental Politics, National Unity, and Globalization, edited by K. S. Chang and B. S. Turner, 203–217. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016. “Can ‘Multicultural Solders’ Serve the Nation? The Social Debate about the Military Service Management of MixedRace Draftees in South Korea.” In Multiculturalism in East Asia: A Transnational Exploration of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, by K. Iwabuchi, H. Kim, and H. Hsia, 127–140. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Kim Yong-ki. 2014. “Han’gukkunŭi tamunhwa chanyŏ ibyŏnge ttarŭn taebibangane kwanhan yŏn’gu” [Study on the preparation for multicultural enlistment to the Korean army focusing on army life]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Chosun University. Kwon, Insook. 2000. “Militarism in My Heart: Militarization of Women’s Consciousness and Culture in South Korea.” Ph.D. diss., Clark University. ———. 2013. “Gender, Feminism, and Masculinity in Anti-Militarism: Focusing on the Conscientious Objection Movement in South Korea.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15, no. 2: 213–233. Lee Hye-Kyung. 2005. “Honinijuwa honiniju kajŏngŭi munjewa taeŭng” [Marriage migration to South Korea: Issues, problems, and responses]. Korean Journal of Population Studies 28, no. 1: 73–106. Lee, Jin-kyung. 2009. “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam War, 1965–73.” Positions: Asia Critique 17, no. 3: 655–682. Lee, J. H. 2012. “‘Pundandoen Han’guk ppalli p’yŏnghwat’ongil toeŏssŭmyŏn’: Hyŏnyŏk ibyŏng aptun tamunhwagajŏng changbyŏngdŭl [“Divided Korea should soon be peacefully reunited”: Drafted multicultural soldiers imagine their future roles]. The Maeil Shinmun, August 30. http://www.imaeil.com/sub_news/sub_news_ view.php?news_id=49261&yy=2012 (retrieved May 6, 2014). Lee Kwang Seok. 2013. “Tamunhwagajŏng chanyŏŭi pyŏngyŏngsaenghwaresŏesŏ yesangdoenŭn munjewa kŭ taeŭnge kwanhan yŏn’gu” [Study on the anticipated problems of multicultural family children in military camp life and on their alternatives]. Korean Public Administration Quarterly 25, no. 4: 1003–1022. Lee T. Y. 2009. “Kun, tamunhwagundaee taebihaeya” [The military should prepare to become a multicultural army]. Yonhap News Agency, June 24. http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec &sid1=102&oid=001&aid=0002730592 (retrieved May 6, 2014).

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Lee Yewon. 2008. “Kwihwan haeoeibyangin chojik’wawa tiasŭp’ora undong” [Returning overseas adoptees’organizations and the diaspora movement]. Master’s thesis, Yonsei University. Moon, Seungsook. 2002. “The Production and Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity: Reconfiguring Gender Hierarchy in Contemporary South Korea.” In Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, 79–113. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2005. Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Politics, History, and Culture Series. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Na, Tari Young-Jung, Ju Hui Judy Han, and Se-Woong Koo. 2014. “The South Korean Gender System: LGBTI in the Contexts of Family, Legal Identity, and the Military.” Journal of Korean Studies 19, no. 2: 357–377. Park An-seo. 2011. “Damunhwajangbyeong ibyeonge ttaleun byeongyeonghwangyeong joseongbangan” [Study on the preparations for enlistment of multicultural youths]. Quarterly Journal of Defense Policy Studies 90 (January): 177–207. Sasson-Levy, Orma. 2003. “Military, Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, no. 3: 319–345. Scheurich, J. J., and M. D. Young. 1997. “Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?” Educational Researcher 26, no. 4: 4–16. Seal, Dong-Hoon, and John D. Skrentny. 2009. “Why Is There So Little Migrant Settlement in East Asia?” International Migration Review 43, no. 3: 578–620. Shim, Dob. 2014. “The Cyber Bullying of Pop Star Tablo and South Korean Society: Hegemonic Discourses on Educational Background and Military Service.” Acta Koreana 17, no. 1: 479–504. Song, Kirsten Younghee. 2015. “Between Global Dreams and National Duties: The Dilemma of Conscription Duty in the Transnational Lives of Young Korean Males.” Global Networks 15, no. 1: 60–77. Yoon S. H. 2012. “Kukpangbu ‘tamunhwagundae’ match’wŏ t’albuk ch’ŏngsonyŏn iptaehŏyong ch’ujin” [The South Korean Ministry of Defense “military diversity” (policy) is considering allowing North Korean defector youth to enter the military]. Dong-A Daily, May 14. http://news.donga.com/3/all/20120514/46219752/1 (retrieved May 6, 2014).

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EIGHT

Maternal Guardians: Intimate Labor and the Pursuit of Gendered Citizenship among South Korean Volunteers Helping Migrant Women

HAE YEON CHOO

The era of late global capitalism is marked by an increasing “commodification of intimacy” that permeates everyday life (Constable 2009). New global “intimate industries” (Parreñas, Silvey, and Hung 2016) profit from intimate labor, the work of forging and nurturing interdependent relations as well as promoting recipients’ “physical, intellectual, affective, and other emotional needs” (Boris and Parreñas 2010, 2). These industries transcend national boundaries, producing circuits of migration for domestic work, sex work, and cross-border marriages. Intimate labor migrants—­disproportionately women and people who differ racially or culturally—enter the intimate spheres of nation-states that were not previously considered immigrant nations. Feminist scholars find that despite the unprecedented scale of the commercialization of intimacy, these intimate industries have not transformed existing social relations of inequality. Instead, they facilitate the reproduction of the hegemonic family formation as well as the cultural scripts of class-specific femininity and masculinity by, for example, relegating gendered care work to migrant domestic workers or to migrant women in cross-border marriages (Parreñas 2001; Yeoh, Chee, and Vu 2014). This chapter delves into the on-the-ground processes by which people accomplish the reproduction and reconfiguration of social hierarchies in the face of the vast expansion of commercial intimacy on a global scale. I An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2017: “Maternal Guardians: Intimate Labor and the Pursuit of Gendered Citizenship among South Korean Volunteers for Migrant Women,” Sexualities 20, no. 4: 497–514. The current chapter is reprinted with permission.

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argue that intimate industries depend on a new form of intimate labor that provides material and affective resources for integrating the challenges posed by transformations in the sphere of intimate work. This chapter addresses the case of contemporary South Korea, where the growth of commercially matched cross-border marriages of South Korean men to women from Southeast Asia and China poses a challenge to the existing national imaginary based on the myth of ethnic homogeneity. I examine how South Korean middle-class women volunteered their invisible and unpaid labor in immigrant integration and new nation-building programs under globalization, participating in a particular form of intimate labor that I conceptualize as maternal guardianship, reproducing and challenging the intersecting structures of social inequality in which they are embedded. Situating middle-class women’s narratives in the sociohistorical context of postwar South Korea, I show how these women responded to the new national challenge of cross-border marriages. The intimate labor involved in supporting the integration of racially and culturally diverse immigrants offered South Korean middle-class women a gendered path to citizenship as mothers of the nation and an opportunity for global self-making. In their view, migrant women as a group—whose integration was considered integral to the reproduction of the heteronormative family and the South Korean nation—required benevolent help and care in addition to assimilation. The South Korean women assumed the position of offering help, reinforcing the hierarchy between South Koreans and migrants. This “migrant encounter” opened up an opportunity for South Korean middle-class women to challenge their gender-based subordination by transforming themselves into “maternal guardians” of migrant women. The gendered intimacy that they developed enabled the middle-class women to assert their moral authority in the face of South Korean men, the “uneducated” lower class consisting of husbands and in-laws, and the “intrusive” upper class that included surveyers and other uninvited outsiders, illuminating the process of making class boundaries. Paradoxically, doing so also reified feminine domesticity—an imagined space of genuine, distinct from commercialized, intimacy—as a site of moral legitimacy, reproduced racial and class hierarchies in South Korea, and upheld the heteronormative family as a unit of membership in the South Korean nation. This chapter is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted as part of a larger ethnographic study of labor and marriage migration in South Korea, which took place over eighteen months from July 2008 to January 2010. The discussion draws predominantly on four months of participant observation in a social integration program for migrant women at Peace Center, a migrant-advocacy nongovernmental organization (NGO) on the outskirts of Seoul. There, I observed interactions

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among three program organizers, five South Korean volunteers, and fifty migrant women participants when I volunteered as a teacher’s assistant and substitute teacher of a Korean language class. In addition, the chapter draws on interviews with twenty-four South Korean social actors involved in migrant advocacy and integration, including social workers, organizers, and volunteers in immigrant integration programs run by NGOs and governments in the period 2008–2010, and forty-three supplementary interviews conducted from April through October 2014. The interviews focused on the research participants’ life trajectories, motivations for and meanings of their work, and relationships with migrants and other South Korean social actors.1 The chapter begins with a section discussing the challenge that crossborder marriages presented to the continuation of the heteronormative family in South Korea. The next section shows how South Korean middleclass women took up that challenge by volunteering their intimate labor in immigrant integration programs for women entering South Korea through cross-border marriages. It also reveals how the middle-class women transformed themselves into “maternal guardians” of the migrant women, thus challenging their own gender-based subordination while sustaining the racial and class hierarchy and the heteronormativity of the Korean nation. In the final section of the chapter, I focus on how the South Korean middleclass women used their newfound knowledge to pursue respect in the face of gendered discontent, asserted their moral authority, and forged a gendered path to global citizenship as mothers of the nation. Cross-Border Marriages and Heteronormative Families Cross-border marriages in Asia have garnered significant scholarly attention as a lens for examining the complex dynamics of gender, race, and labor under globalization (Constable 2005). In the 1980s, Japan and the “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) became new destinations for migrants, predominantly those from China and Southeast Asia. In a context of inter-Asian migration in which labor migrants are granted only temporary legal status, marriage migration presents an exceptional case of access to permanent settlement and citizenship in the receiving country. Labor and marriage migration are not mutually exclusive—migrant women engage in reproductive labor at home as a “wife” and may participate in the labor market as a “worker” (Piper 1

Although I focus on the experiences of middle-class women volunteers in this chapter (about one-fourth of the interview sample), my analysis is informed by comparison and contrast with narratives of South Korean men and youths involved in migrant advocacy and integration projects in South Korea. See chapter 2 in Choo 2016.

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2003). However, labor migrants as short-term “guest workers” and marriage migrants as spousal visa holders are treated as separate categories of migrants in the South Korean immigration system, in which only marriage migrants are eligible for long-term settlement and naturalization. Moreover, women’s migration via cross-border marriages and their inclusion in the intimate sphere of home pose a particular challenge to the nationstate. Marriage-migrant women face heightened border control and daily surveillance due to the suspicion of “fake marriages” (Choo 2013; Friedman 2010), and their bodies are subject to racialized sexual control as boundary markers of the nation (Lan 2008). South Korea began cross-border marriages during the early 1990s as a strategic response to the growth of “rural bachelors,” caused by the departure of women to urban centers, which produced a crisis for the future of heteronormative families (Freeman 2011). To solve this problem and to bolster heterosexual marriage as an institution for national membership, local governments in rural South Korea sponsored marriages between South Korean men and coethnic Chinese (Josŏnjok) women. Demand for cross-border marriages among both rural and urban working-class men quickly increased throughout the country, and commercial and religiousbased matchmaking agencies expanded their business to China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Asian countries. By 2009, 10.8% of all marriages in Korea were cross-border marriages; of these, 75.9% were between Korean men and migrant women (Choo 2013; also see chapter 7 by Hyun Mee Kim in this volume for more discussion of the historical context of marriage migration). These unions preserved heterosexual marriage as a key institution offering a passage to adulthood in South Korea, enabling men to enact their heterosexual masculinities and claim national belonging (Freeman 2011; Kim 2014). The growth of cross-border marriages in the 1990s coincided with globalization in South Korea, a state-driven project geared toward making the nation globally competitive. This project turned cosmopolitanism into a marker of class status and good citizenship. Cross-border marriages enabled rural and working-class families, who otherwise had little access to middle- and upper-class cosmopolitan practices such as foreign travel and foreign education, to participate in a global South Korea (Abelmann and Kim 2005). For South Korean rural bachelors, cross-border marriages offered a particular form of “compensatory masculinity,” ameliorating their alienation from South Korea’s globalization project, providing an escape from the stigma of singlehood, and relegating gendered care responsibilities for their parents to migrant daughters-in-law (Kim 2014). The South Korean state has renegotiated the boundary of the nation by reinforcing migrant women’s domestic roles as wives and as mothers to

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the next generation of Koreans (Cheng 2011; Kim 2013). Migrant women choose cross-border marriages based on complex motivations, including the gendered responsibility to support one’s natal family (Yeoh, Chee, and Vu 2014) and a desire for modern, cosmopolitan womanhood (Faier 2009). However, upon migration, these women’s sense of belonging to South Korea is limited to “maternal citizenship” as mothers of South Korean children (Kim 2013) as well as their expected role as caregivers of South Korean parents-in-law (Lee 2012). The South Korean state has also recognized marriage-migrant women as targets of immigrant integration, and, since 2006, government, corporate, and civil-society funding has flooded into educational projects for these women and their families under the rubric of “multicultural families” (Lee 2008). Various governmental organizations and NGOs now offer programs for migrant women in Korean language development, cooking, and skills training. For example, using government and corporate funding, Peace Center, a faith-based migrantadvocacy NGO with a legacy of working for the labor and human rights of migrant factory workers, recently began offering educational programs to marriage-migrant women. These state-driven programs are a site of critical inquiry for scholars who examine how such programs infantilize and assimilate migrant women in South Korea and Taiwan (Bélanger 2007; Wang and Bélanger 2008). They are considered largely as top-down state projects, leaving unexamined the embodied, laboring subjects called upon to serve the new nation-building project, one that includes migrant newcomers as full citizens. Therefore, my research draws on the scholarship on the critical role of frontline workers, such as social workers, who are in direct contact with migrants in shaping migrant rights and citizenship (Newendorp 2008; Ong 2003). In the rest of this chapter, by bringing to the fore the experiences of South Korean women whose intimate labor buttresses immigrant integration efforts, I highlight how women remake their subjectivities and South Korean citizenship in the space of the migrant encounter, where the politics of race, class, and sexuality intersect with gendered moral imperatives. Intimate Labor, Gendered Discontent, and Maternal Guardians Now my son is twenty-four years old. When I got married, I would have never thought I’d do this kind of [volunteer] work at all. I thought I’d just be a wife, a housewife. I thought, maybe a little bit of work at home on the side, but I didn’t think I would pursue further study or anything. I just wanted a good life. . . . But then something seemed to have gone wrong, and I fell into depression. I just became so depressed, living day to day.

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Recounting the life trajectory that led her to volunteer to help migrant women, Min Hyangmi, fifty-two years old, talked about a turning point involving intense discontentment. Depression had hit precisely when she achieved what she thought she had always wanted: a marriage with a “salary man” that would enable her to be a middle-class housewife, which she considered a marker of “a good life.” The youngest of four children, she grew up not knowing her father, who left her mother when she was pregnant. Hyangmi lost her brother at a young age, which left her family of four women (mother and three daughters) with economic difficulties. To financially support her mother, she chose to attend a vocational high school against her desire for higher education, and, starting with her senior year of high school, she worked at a department store until she married seven years later. Typical of Korean workplaces in the 1970s and 1980s, her employer expected her to quit her job upon marriage, and this was what Hyangmi had desperately wanted. She was tired of the burden of breadwinning, and, in fact, she recalled, “That was why I rushed into marriage, in order to quit working.” Hyangmi’s imagined life trajectory was embedded in the script of gendered citizenship in the modernization drive of postwar South Korea. During Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian regime (1961–1979) and intensive industrialization, members of the middle class became the ideal national subjects in South Korea (Yang 2012), and, as wives of “salary men,” middleclass housewives were called upon to support their husbands and children at home. Whereas South Korean men were mobilized as soldiers and workers, women were expected to serve the nation as temporary workers before marriage, then as household managers and, as mothers, reproducers of the nation (Moon 2005). As such, women’s participation in the labor market before marriage was considered an extension of their role as dutiful daughters in the family, a role that led to a permanent identity as caring wives and mothers. Marriage and motherhood became a site for nation-building through the state’s family-planning policy (Kim 2000; Kim 2001). Under a model of citizenship based on heteronormative patriarchy, the state considered heterosexual marriage as a benefit to the economy and the nation. In turn, by providing reproductive labor at home, women were assured of a mediated economic status and national belonging through breadwinning husbands and children. Especially for middle-class families, heterosexual unions promised “a good life.” Yet, despite marrying “a good man” who provided economic stability, even after the birth of a son Hyangmi felt depressed for reasons that were unclear to her. When her son was in fourth grade, she started having suicidal thoughts, which was a wake-up call to her. She decided to pursue her delayed dream of going to college and enrolled in a distance-learning

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program at Korea National Open University (Han’guk pangsong tongshin taehakkyo), earning her diploma in social work in four years while taking care of her son. She then began her volunteer career, which gave her a renewed sense of self: she read books and taught literacy to senior citizens, cooked for and bathed disabled children in group homes, and, for the previous four years, taught the Korean language to migrant women. Many South Korean women in my study who worked with migrant women as volunteers and organizers shared Hyangmi’s gendered life narrative, which often related to a life of domesticity. These women, in their forties, fifties, and sixties, formed a demographic group that included the majority of volunteers. Coming of age in the 1960s–1980s social milieu, many daughters were expected to give up their ambitions for higher education to support their brothers. After graduating from high school, these women contributed to their natal families through female-dominated occupations, such as secretarial work. Upon marriage, they quit their jobs and moved away from their natal families, sometimes following their husbands’ jobs or their parents-in-law to a different city, an experience that later made them sympathetic to migrant women. Most considered their current socioeconomic standing to be middle class, as their husbands commonly had white-collar jobs such as teachers, so-called salary men, or petty entrepreneurs. Connecting migrant women’s feelings of isolation with their in-laws to her personal experience, Hong Youngjoo, a volunteer teacher in her forties, asked, “How lonely must the migrant women feel, when you can’t even talk and understand what people around you are saying? It was lonely enough when I spoke the same language because my natal family was not around.” Many of the interviewees reported experiencing depression,2 and so they chose volunteer care work, which they saw as an extension of their maternal self, as a way to escape “the force of domesticity” (Parreñas 2008). Their experiences echo what Betty Friedan (1963) called “the problem that has no name” of white middle-class housewives in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and many of these South Korean women expressed an acute sense of gendered discontent as women, yet none of the women volunteers I interviewed participated in feminist movements in South Korea. Working directly with migrant women provided an opportunity for these women to participate in the new nation-building project of global 2 

The narratives of these women resonate with those of the South Korean evangelical Christian women who experienced depression and isolation in the domestic sphere that led them to the Protestant church, as shown in Kelly Chong’s (2006) study. Although some South Korean women in my study acknowledged that participation in the church propelled them to help others in society, most did not approach their volunteer work with migrant women as part of an evangelical mission.

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South Korea through their active involvement in immigrant integration as a continuation of intimate labor at home, yet with renewed meaning in the public sphere. For example, Bae Yoonsook, a fifty-five-year-old volunteer teacher, said that she would like to help migrant women because “they have to learn the Korean language in order to settle in South Korea like Koreans.” Acting on the nation’s imperative to assimilate racial and cultural others, Yoonsook was particularly concerned about migrant women’s maternal roles in their children’s education. Yoonsook said: Our second future generation is in their hands. So last year, when I taught beginner-level Korean, I always emphasized that the basics are important. I told them, “Later, when you give birth to your children, they will ask you ‘Mom, how do I do this?’ You should learn the basics correctly now, so that you can teach them correctly.” . . . It is in their hands that our future lies.

In Yoonsook’s view, helping migrant women, who would be mothers of Korean children, allowed her to contribute to the collective future of the nation—“our future”—a future that she perceived to be at risk without intervention from people like herself. Her motives were based on assumptions that simultaneously naturalized a woman’s place in the family as maternal educator and demanded a “correct” way for a migrant woman to speak Korean and live in South Korea. The Making of a Maternal Guardian

At Peace Center, volunteer teachers were in charge of teaching Korean language classes (two hours per day in the morning, twice a week) and accompanied migrant women to their afternoon classes in topics like Korean cooking, child-rearing, and computer education. The volunteers were also involved in weekly teachers’ meetings, marking student exams and assignments, organizing field trips, counseling migrant women individually, and meeting with the migrants’ in-laws and husbands. As middle-class South Korean women came together as organizers and volunteers for the immigrant integration programs, they took pride in taking up the role of “maternal guardians” for migrant women, which was based on a rhetoric of maternal care. At a weekly teachers’ meeting for the Korean language program, Director Lee, a program organizer in her late forties, told all the volunteer teachers: “Our center has to become like their natal home, so that they can come to us and talk about anything on their mind. We should be like their mothers in their natal family [chinjŏng ŏmma], always standing by their side when they face problems with their husbands and in-laws, and teaching them patiently and slowly, one step at a time.” By enlisting

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a romantic portrayal of the natal home as a space of care and intimacy after which the center should model itself, Director Lee encouraged women volunteers to assume the role of “mother” to migrant women.3 She further argued: Is it that important that these [migrant] women know a bit more Korean vocabulary? No, that’s not the point! There are other centers with more money, and they might have better language programs, but that’s not the most important thing. They hire teachers, but our teachers come out of their genuine hearts. If these women were looking for the best class, they would have gone to the university. They come to us because they know we care.

As Director Lee emphasized the need for care rather than transmitting information and skills, she distinguished the center’s volunteers from an impersonal bureaucracy filled with paid employees, whom she perceived as motivated by money instead of “genuine” care. This glorification of “helping” work—whether in the form of colonial missionary work or contemporary global development projects—involves a gendered moral imperative based on an essential notion of motherhood in what Deborah Mindry (2001) calls “a politics of feminine virtue,” which emphasizes women’s “natural” compassion, benevolence, and caring capacities. Like Euro-American expatriate wives who volunteered at an orphanage in China (Wang 2013) and American social workers who intervened in the intimate, domestic lives of Cambodian refugees in the United States (Ong 2003), the South Korean women volunteers performing intimate labor went beyond promoting the intimate needs of the recipients (in this case, migrant women). That is, this labor enabled the volunteer to transform herself into a maternal citizen of the South Korean nation—a transformation intricately linked to the gendered moral imperatives that reproduced the hierarchical boundary between Koreans and migrants by establishing South Koreans as benevolent helpers and migrants as dependents in need of guidance and care. “What Do Men Know?”

Volunteer teachers grounded their ability to sympathize with migrant women in gender-binary terms and emphasized maternal connections with 3 

While the glorification of home as a space free of conflict, discontent, and politics is commonly subject to feminist critique (see Espiritu 2003), Director Lee’s discursive construction of “natal home” as a space of unconditional support, in contrast to the extended patriarchal family (husbands and in-laws) as a source of “problems,” reflects the contested family norm of South Korea, in which daughters-in-law occupy a subordinate position in the family. I delve into this issue in the next few sections.

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migrant women, which constrained the space available for male volunteers. At Peace Center, there was only one male volunteer: Yeom Daehoon, a married father of two in his forties who ran an English-language institute and perceived the growing number of marriage migrants as a potential social problem. Although no one questioned Daehoon’s ability to teach the Korean language (he was completing his certificate in teaching Korean to foreigners), other teachers and organizers expressed skepticism about his ability to connect with migrant women. Whenever he began a long speech about how migrant women’s language abilities were not progressing fast enough or how they missed too many classes, the other teachers would laughingly respond, “What do men know?” In his absence, teachers like Han Misook commented, “He’s being a man. He’s used to having things his way, in the family or outside. He probably never had to deal with not having things the way he wanted.” By contrast, they constructed “being a woman” as a source of virtues such as self-sacrifice, patience, and caring that enabled women volunteers to make intimate connections with students. The women volunteers correctly pointed out that Daehoon’s standard of student progress was unrealistic. He often compared the migrant women to South Korean middle and high school students learning English, failing to take into account the context of migrant women, including the gendered conditions of domestic responsibility, pregnancy, and child-rearing. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the women questioned Daehoon’s ability in the gendered terms of being a “man” and understood his imposition of this standard on migrant women as the masculine characteristic of “having it his way.” At times, women teachers also grouped Pastor Kim, the male director of Peace Center, together with Daehoon, and accused both of insensitivity to migrant women based on “being men.” By contrast, women volunteers drew upon a shared experience of womanhood as wives and daughters-in-law as a point of connection with migrant women. When discussing conflicts in migrant women’s families, they often commented, “Marriage is like that. That’s what in-laws are like! It’s all the same for Korean women—so much sacrifice!” After two months of volunteering, Daehoon left Peace Center, and the following semester, the volunteer teachers returned to being an all-female group. As highlighted by the perceptions of the South Korean women volunteers, gendered intimacy with migrant women was a source of legitimacy that transformed the discontent produced by their family life, including feelings of isolation, sacrifice, and subordination to husbands and in-laws. Volunteers reconstituted their selfhood by taking up the role of maternal guardians, a position of benevolence and understanding toward migrant women. Simultaneously, the efforts of women volunteers were also geared

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toward preserving the marital families of the migrant women. The most valuable moment of their work with migrant women, many recalled, was to see them settled in a “harmonious family.” An Taeyoung, a sixty-one-yearold volunteer, explained: “Sometimes when I meet with migrant women, there are some who make me concerned, making me wonder how they would adjust to South Korea and live here. How would she settle and make a family here? It makes me feel uneasy [bul’an]. When I see women like that become settled and stable in their families, that’s when I feel the most rewarded.” For reasons such as this, South Korean women volunteers participated in the project of immigrant assimilation as a continuation of their gendered citizenship duties as mothers to protect the South Korean nation and the heteronormative families that sustained the nation. Their intimate labor also reinforced a gender binary and the hierarchy between Koreans and migrants, while upholding a gendered virtue of care work free from commercialization. Pursuit of Global Citizenship as Middle-Class Women in South Korea When South Korean volunteer teachers claimed their space and voice as the “maternal guardians” of migrant women, and, by extension, of heteronormative families and the Korean nation, they also engaged in self-making on the basis of South Korean class hierarchy. In the eyes of these middle-class women, upper-class and lower-class Koreans were a source of collective frustration due to a common characteristic, namely, their “ignorance” stemming from a lack of culture, sensitivity, and respect. The source of this ignorance differed by class; whereas lower-class ignorance arose from a lack of culture and global exposure, upper-class ignorance came from power and privilege. The volunteers felt the need to protect migrant women from the insensitive intrusion of these groups and thus claimed knowledge and moral authority through gendered intimacy. People Below: Controlling Husbands, Ignorant Mothers-in-Law

South Korean women volunteers were vocal about their concerns over “still-ignorant Koreans.” They often discussed the problem of the controlling behaviors of the husbands and in-laws of migrant women as the key obstacle to their work but also as the reason why their work was absolutely necessary. Women volunteers were concerned that because migrant wives were targets of suspicion over “fake” marriages, some Korean husbands and in-laws used tactics such as hiding migrant wives’ passports and identification cards or not allowing them to learn Korean in order to prevent the migrant women from running away. At Peace Center, teachers worried especially about Kareen, a Filipina woman whose Korean husband was

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known as “too obsessive” (seloso among Filipinas). Kareen was twenty-five years old, and her husband, a factory worker, was in his early forties with two teenage sons from a previous marriage. He was very reluctant to let Kareen attend Korean language classes at Peace Center or the Filipino Catholic church, fearing she might run away. Thus, Kareen would attend regularly for a few weeks and disappear for another few weeks. When Peace Center organized a field trip for migrant women, he refused to let Kareen go. He yelled at me on the phone, “Why is your organization trying to break up my family? If there’s a trip, shouldn’t a Korean person, pastor, or whatever, call the husband and properly explain what it’s all about? Wouldn’t you be angry if it were you? Would your organization be responsible for my family?” His words evidenced his patriarchal entitlement; as the patriarch in “my family,” Kareen’s husband felt he had the right to permit or deny his wife a certain level of mobility. When I discussed this incident with other South Korean volunteers, it struck them as an all-too-familiar story. Husbands’ patriarchal claims were a constant source of tension and “headache” for volunteers. Volunteer teachers at Peace Center routinely criticized such behaviors as stemming from “premodern,” “backward,” and “ignorant” ways of thinking. “It is really coming from an uninformed, backward mindset,” claimed Misook, with a deep sigh: These husbands and families try to control migrant women, not letting them come to classes like this, or meet their friends from their own countries! Then they complain that their daughter-in-law is not adjusting to Korean life and blame her! If they don’t let them come to a program like this, how would they learn Korean? How can she be happy if she’s confined to the house with nobody to talk to? Behaviors like that are what actually drive these women to run away!

The South Korean volunteers often talked about the migrant women’s inlaws, especially mothers-in-law, as unfit to offer the care necessary for migrant women’s settlement and integration in South Korea. In the eyes of middle-class volunteers, these in-laws lacked sensitivity to South Korea’s cultural progress, and their actions were harmful to migrant women’s integration. One afternoon, Misook returned from a counseling session at the home of a Vietnamese migrant woman who was having trouble with her mother-in-law, and vented, “These in-laws treat the women as if they had bought them. They say things like, ‘We paid this much money [to the matchmaking agency] to bring you here.’ How insensitive! And they expect them to follow their ways and disregard everything from before they married! Still so patriarchal! It might have been like that in my time, but it’s now the twenty-first century!”

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Misook, who was in her early sixties, linked the patriarchal expectation that migrant daughters-in-law follow the customs of their husbands’ families to her own experiences as a Korean daughter-in-law in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when she lived with her in-laws before they passed away. In her mind, those norms of family relations were associated with South Korea’s backward past (Choo 2006; Kim 2006) and were no longer compatible with a modern South Korea of the twenty-first century. Misook wanted neither her own daughter nor the migrant women she worked with to follow them. Ham Sojung, who was listening in on our conversation, agreed with Misook’s assessment: Some of them, especially the mothers-in-law, are real problems. They expect the migrant women to learn Korean quickly, just picking it up naturally by talking to family members, and there’s no need for classes. That’s just ridiculous, right? But then, how would they know what it’s like to learn a foreign language, how difficult it is, and how long it takes? It’s not like they have ever been to a foreign country or even learned English or other foreign languages themselves.

For Sojung, problems with in-laws stemmed less from a “backward mindset” than from incapacities related to their lack of global exposure through travel or language learning. In contrast to most South Korean volunteer teachers who had university educations and some level of English proficiency, migrant women’s husbands and in-laws were farmers or factory workers who rarely spoke English, a salient class marker in South Korea (Park and Abelmann 2004). Unlike the middle-class volunteers, who had global involvement through mission trips, travel for pleasure, and children in boarding schools, most in-laws and husbands of migrant women lacked the resources and the leisure time to develop such experiences and participate in the new South Korean cosmopolitanism. Lacking those abilities and experiences, the in-laws—lower-class South Koreans who were not keeping up with a modern, global Korea in either their norms or their knowledge—were deemed inadequate agents for the social integration of migrant women, thereby justifying the intimate labor of middle-class South Korean women. Echoing the sentiments of Hong Kong social workers who worked with mainland Chinese marriage-migrant women (Newendorp 2008), South Korean volunteers often talked about the need to educate in-laws to address the migrant women’s problems, but they were not optimistic. As Youngjoo said, “It is really them [the in-laws] who need education—we try to provide it, but they never come.” The work of middle-class South Korean women volunteers to differentiate themselves from the less-cosmopolitan lower-class in-laws of migrant wives and to socially construct their intimate labor as necessary resonates

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with EuyRyung Jun’s critique of a Korean “multicultural” project that aims to build multicultural sensitivity among individual Koreans as “a self-­disciplinary project,” in which “the question of the Other is used to create a sense of moral satisfaction in the Korean self” (2015, 89). However, this instance differs from Jun’s broader evaluation in that the subject in need of change was not an abstract “Korean self” but lower-class South Koreans in particular. By constructing boundaries in relation to the lower class, volunteer teachers transformed themselves into the agents of change that modern, global South Korea needed: agents who could help keep intact the heteronormative, nuclear family of migrant women. People Above: Uninvited Intruders, Researchers, and So-Called Experts

Aside from controlling husbands and in-laws, the object of the volunteer teachers’ most common complaints revolved around uninvited “intruders” to their space. Social-integration programs were a common area of investment and attention from the South Korean state, corporations, media, and academia. Because migrant women embodied the prospect of a new, multicultural Korea, many groups outside Peace Center took an interest in their lives and invested resources in programs to help them adjust to their new society. The routine tasks required of the South Korean volunteers included distributing countless questionnaires and managing visitors. With the “multicultural boom” in South Korea, many government institutions, research institutes, and universities developed abundant state-sponsored research projects that delved into every detail of migrant women’s lives. These included, for example, their demographic information, motivations and circumstances of migration, physical and mental health, relationships with in-laws and natal families, social networks, and transnational ties to the home country. Because Peace Center depended on government funding and donations, state bureaucrats and corporate executives visited the center on a regular basis. Pastor Kim, the director, routinely gave tours to corporate CEOs, private foundations, local government officials, church groups, journalists, researchers, and university students. Volunteers were asked to recruit marriage migrants for media interviews and private meetings with funders. Although they had some leeway for screening participants, volunteers were expected to comply with Pastor Kim’s requests. The volunteers chafed at these requirements and asserted their own authority and knowledge over and against that of funders or researchers, often feeling indignant toward outside visitors whom they perceived as intruders of “their” space from above. One cold morning in November 2008, while I was in the middle of teaching the intermediate-level Korean class, Pastor Kim knocked on the

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door and asked for thirty minutes of class time for government research. Two men and one woman, all dressed in suits, followed him into the classroom. They introduced themselves to the migrant women as a team from the local government (one social worker employed by the province, one researcher in social work, and one psychologist) and explained that they were interested in the mental health of marriage migrants. The researcher explained depression to the migrant women before distributing questionnaires, which included personal questions about their family life and state of mind, such as, “What is your family’s monthly income?,” “Have you ever felt suicidal?,” and “Do you have sleeping problems?” As the migrant women filled out the surveys, the social worker walked around the small classroom, taking pictures of the presenters and students from different angles. The researcher then started what they called a “focus group,” in which migrant women were asked to talk about their conflicts with husbands, children, and in-laws caused by communication problems, cultural differences, and financial difficulties. Some of the migrant women participated while others remained silent. When other volunteer teachers read the questionnaires after class, they joked about how poorly made they were and how inappropriate they were for the Korean language level of most migrant women. The teachers were also vocal about their cynicism regarding “those research projects” and raised a fundamental question about the production of knowledge and decision-making. Misook complained: I don’t understand what all these research projects are all about. They are supposed to be experts, like people with Ph.D.s, right? But what do they really know about our women? Do they ever find out anything about our women through these surveys? How do they make important decisions, policies and all, from their desk [cheksang mŏri]? Most don’t even come down here and bother to talk to us in person. [Emphasis added.]

Misook’s sharp critique of the politics of knowledge production clearly drew boundaries between volunteers who have intimate ties with migrant women and “people with Ph.D.s” who claim the authority to construct knowledge about migrant women and make decisions based on that knowledge. The volunteers’ criticisms of “expert” knowledge production from a distance resonate with James Scott’s concept of “technical knowledge” (1998), which does not take local, practical knowledge into account, and Dorothy Smith’s concept of “objectified knowledge” (1990), which distorts embodied knowledge grounded in everyday life. After observing how “expert” knowledge was collected and produced firsthand, volunteer teachers questioned the validity of “desk” knowledge in contrast to “real” knowledge acquired through personal contact with migrant women in

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intimate, daily encounters. Misook first referred to migrant women at Peace Center as “our women” in possessive terms, but, later in her statement, she conflated migrant women and volunteer teachers as “us.” In this sense, she expressed her disapproval of the “experts” who failed not only to develop intimate knowledge of migrant women but also to validate the knowledge of middle-class South Korean volunteer women like herself “down here.” Viviana Zelizer (2005) describes “knowledge” as a defining factor of intimate relations. South Korean women volunteers drew upon the power of such intimate knowledge to assert themselves against interloper “experts.” Director Lee proudly proclaimed that the program Peace Center offered “can only come from true understanding of our women’s lives.” Expanding on this “true understanding” of migrant women, Youngjoo said, “It comes from the act of caring about [ma’eum sseuneun gŏt]!” She continued, referencing a poem quoted by best-selling Korean author Yu Hongjun (1993): Do you know this saying? “If you love something, you get to know it; if you know it, you get to see it; and what you see then would not be the same as before [saranghamyŏn alge doego/ almyŏn poinani / kŭttae poinŭn kŏsŭn / chŏngwa kat’ji an ŭrira].” That saying makes more and more sense to me. I think that’s what an understanding is, that is, coming from love. And that’s how I feel when I am here at the center.

Youngjoo’s reliance on the Korean literary imagination to explain the meaning of her work with migrant women exemplifies an underlying epistemology in which love and caring, rather than objectivity and training for expertise, are central to the making of knowledge. As a Korean language teacher, Youngjoo lacked formal credentials. She had graduated from a four-year college with a degree in German literature more than twenty years earlier and lived most of her adult life as a housewife and a mother. But her lack of credentials and experience did not make her unknowledgeable; according to the epistemology of intimacy, it was her caring intention that mattered. In fact, maternal love for migrant women held a special place as a basis of authority among volunteer teachers at Peace Center. During teachers’ meetings and at informal gatherings, the individual teachers shared intimate knowledge about migrant women’s lives: a husband’s job loss, tension with a mother-in-law about attending church, child-rearing difficulties, and so forth. Lamenting that some in-laws and husbands were detrimental to migrant women’s adjustment to Korea, teachers took pride in finding ways to help these women. Knowing details about the women’s finances, interpersonal relationships, and health was more important than teaching them “a few more Korean words” and became a standard that the volunteer teachers would strive to achieve, a source of pride, and even a matter of competition among them.

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Teachers, as part of their volunteer work, actively sought opportunities to gain intimate knowledge about migrant women. When I substitutetaught an intermediate-level Korean class for Youngjoo in the middle of the semester, I found that students were submitting weekly diaries as part of their homework. The pedagogical purpose of this not-unfamiliar practice in South Korean elementary schools was to cultivate habits of writing in Korean and correcting grammar and spelling. But I was struck by Youngjoo’s comments on the diary entries. Not only did she correct grammatical errors and awkward phrases, but when students wrote about difficulties at home, feelings of homesickness, and conflicts with husbands or in-laws, she also wrote lengthy notes with consolation, advice, and encouragement. She often suggested that students come and talk with her after class as well. Teachers of the beginner-level classes did not have access to this method of intimate exchange due to the students’ level of language proficiency, but they used other methods such as home visits, phone calls, and offers to mediate family conflicts. Peace Center volunteer teachers asserted, “When we bring in outside experts, they know nothing! They don’t know how to talk to our women at all.” In the setting of Peace Center, middle-class women volunteer teachers reconstituted their selfhood by accumulating intimate knowledge of migrant women as the medium through which they asserted their expertise against “the people above” while claiming their place in global South Korea against “the people below.” Conclusion In this chapter, I examined South Korean volunteers’ maternal guardianship of migrant women as a case of an intimate labor that emerged in response to the global expansion of an intimate industry, namely, cross-­border marriages. This new intimate labor assisted the state in reproducing the social hierarchies that cross-border marriage had the potential to challenge. South Korean middle-class women, whose domestic roles as housewives and mothers were heralded as an ideal of women’s citizenship in the 1960s through the 1980s, were called upon to provide intimate labor as a continuation of their maternal duties for the nation to integrate marriage migrants, who were considered racial and cultural others. In light of the gender-based subordination these women volunteers had experienced in family life and the labor market during the late twentieth century, they embraced these opportunities for involvement outside the home, joining state-motivated immigrant integration initiatives to assimilate migrant women into South Korean families and the nation. South Korean women volunteers’ self-making as the “maternal guardians” of migrant women—and by extension, their

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making of the Korean nation—was an intersectional process that challenged their own gender-based subordination while upholding racial and class hierarchies and the heteronormative family in South Korea. South Korean women volunteers asserted their moral authority and national membership in the face of gendered and classed discontent in contemporary South Korea. For these women, South Korea in the twenty-first century was still fraught with “lower-class” people who failed to embody a more cosmopolitan, less patriarchal, “modern” South Korea and with “upper-class” people with power, privilege, and money who did not pay due respect to intimate knowledge. As such, the volunteers’ intimate care for migrant women became the medium through which these South Korean women pursued respect and recognition. Migrant encounters opened up a space for their intersectional self-making and pursuit of a gendered path to citizenship in global South Korea. By delving into the intimate labor of South Korean women volunteers and the remaking of their subjectivities, this chapter has illuminated the process through which social hierarchies are reproduced and reconfigured as intimate industries are globalized. Questions remain over the meaning and consequences of the intimate labor and the project of immigrant integration. How does the South Korean middle-class women’s “maternal guardianship” status affect migrant women, the supposed recipients of their intimate labor? Is the South Korean women’s self-making project achieved at the cost of migrant women? As the immigrant integration program offers an avenue for support, it could serve as a focal point of community formation, functioning as a site of self-making for migrant women within and across ethnic groups, empowering certain groups of migrant women. Yet, it might also render invisible those migrant women who are not attending such programs due to their full-time work, thus excluding them from public view. Or, it may exclude women deemed unworthy of support because they break the heteronormative family by divorcing their husbands or those who choose not to, or are unable to, become mothers. Instead of focusing on the boundary between South Koreans and migrants, future research should examine the diverse effects of the migrant encounter for various groups of South Koreans and migrant women—of different social class, gender, and marital status—to examine the complex ways social inequalities are reproduced and transformed in South Korea. References Abelmann, Nancy, and Hyunhee Kim. 2005. “A Failed Attempt at Transnational Marriage: Maternal Citizenship in a Globalizing South Korea.” In Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational

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———. 2008. The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. New York: NYU Press. Parreñas, Rhacel, Rachel Silvey, and Hung Cam Thai. 2016. “Intimate Industries: Restructuring (Im)Material Labor in Asia.” Positions: Asia Critique 24, no. 1: 1–15. Piper, Nicola. 2003. “Wife or Worker? Worker or Wife? Marriage and Cross-Border Migration in Contemporary Japan.” International Journal of Population Geography 9, no. 6: 457–469. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wang, Hong-Zen, and Danièle Bélanger. 2008. “Taiwanizing Female Immigrant Spouses and Materializing Differential Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 1: 91–106. Wang, Leslie. 2013. “Unequal Logics of Care: Gender, Globalization, and Volunteer Work of Expatriate Wives in China.” Gender & Society 27, no. 4: 538–560. Yang, Myungji. 2012. “The Making of the Urban Middle Class in South Korea (1961–1979): Nation-Building, Discipline, and the Birth of the Ideal National Subjects.” Sociological Inquiry 82, no. 3: 424–445. Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Heng Leng Chee, and Thi Kieu Dung Vu. 2014. “Global Householding and the Negotiation of Intimate Labour in Commercially-Matched International Marriages between Vietnamese Women and Singaporean Men.” Geoforum 51, no. 1: 284–293. Yu Hongjun. 1993. Naui munhwayusan dapsagi [My journey for cultural heritage sites]. Seoul: Changbi. Zelizer, Viviana. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES The Institute of East Asian Studies was established at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1978 to promote research and teaching on the cultures and societies of China, Japan, and Korea. The institute unites several research centers and programs, including the Center for Buddhist Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Korean Studies, and the Group in Asian Studies. Director: Associate Director:

Kevin O’Brien Martin Backstrom

CENTER FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES Chair: Robert Sharf CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES Chair: You-tien Hsing CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES Chair: Dana Buntrock CENTER FOR KOREAN STUDIES Chair: Laura C. Nelson GROUP IN ASIAN STUDIES Chair: Aihwa Ong

The Spread of the Korean Language

The Spread of the Korean Language Through the Korean Diaspora and Beyond

You and Ha INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES

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Edited by Clare You and Yangwon Ha TK 2

INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ● BERKELEY

TRANSNATIONAL KOREA 2

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