Jesook Song,Living on Your Own: Single Women,Rental Housing,and Post-revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea

Reviewed by: Alan Smart, University of Calgary, CA

Financial crises (1997 in East Asia and 2008 almost everywhere) have widely been seen as producing increased insecurity, particularly for the young, for whom unemployment and precarious employment have grown particularly dramatically. In the wake of the Occupy movement, Guy Standing (2012) has received considerable attention for his description of the “precariat” as “the new dangerous class”. The emphasis in Standing’s work, as with other key authors working on precarity such as Loic Wacquant, is on (un)employment along with changes in the redistributive welfare functions of the neoliberal state. This emphasis is clearly crucial, but one result is that the way in which housing increases the precariousness of people’s situations, while sporadically mentioned, is rarely given close attention. Yet, high costs of housing, particularly in the “global cities” like London, New York, Paris or Shanghai which are particularly attractive to young people, may do as much to make people’s living circumstances precarious as do labour markets. The issue is not whether housing is more or less important in creating precarity than labour markets, but that in most cases the two act together to make situations intensely more difficult, and that the impact of housing markets is not simply one that comes down to having enough income to pay for it. For all these reasons, Jesook Song’s book focusing on single women and rental housing in South Korea is particularly welcome and useful. The most important point it makes in this regard is that the particular ways in which housing regimes are organized can make those with precarious sources of income much more at risk, and South Korea is an unusually extreme case of this.

Her research, conducted in Seoul and Busan, South Korea’s two largest cities, in 2005–2007 examined young single women’s experience of finding housing “as a window for viewing and for understanding the frustration and struggles of youth worldwide, with a focus on gendered and affective domains” (p. 2). It succeeds in this aim mostly by making very clear the importance of bringing housing into the analysis; the distinctiveness of the Korean situation and housing regime would make it difficult to draw conclusions directly about youth elsewhere. I would be very interested in seeing her carry out some comparison on precarity and housing in other contexts.

I am not suggesting that the particularities of the Korean housing system make the experience documented by Song irrelevant for those studying insecurity elsewhere. To the contrary, I think the distinctiveness makes the case study even more valuable, because it can be seen as intensifying pressures and processes that are also found elsewhere. Song argues that rental housing provides a

unique opportunity to think about the significance of the informal financial market and gift economy (family, friends, and private loans) – the way the working class maneuvers through the gap between wages and subsistence without relying on the formal financial market (bank loans). Korea’s particular form of rental housing contributes to the polarization of financial classes and also regulates women’s mobility and residential autonomy”. (p. 3)

Informal financial practices partially filled the gap, primarily in the form of rotating credit associations, generally run by women. However, membership in these associations is generally limited to married women and those linked to them through kinship, marriage and schools. Single women wanting to rent on their own become marginalized in such networks. One of the other main ways to obtain the lump sum payment is through cash gifts on marriage. Thus, all of the main systems of housing finance, formal or informal, discriminate against singles, and particularly against single women. The frustrations, struggles and personal difficulties of young women working in poorly remunerated and uncertain jobs in flexibilized industries such as NGOs, tutoring and translation can be much better understood if we consider them in the context of the housing system and not just the labour markets.

I have concentrated in this review on the housing situation because I find it of particular interest and importance. However, it is only one dimension of this book. Chapter 1 explores why and how, given the obstacles, the 35 single women who participated in the research persisted in getting a room of their own. Chapter 3 concentrates on the apparent contradictions between the attractions of a flexible lifestyle and the distresses caused by flexible work, and the affective dimensions of the lives that these women have constructed for themselves. Chapter 4 focuses on the past, and in some cases, continuing social activism of the young women. Ninety percent of Song’s informants were involved in the 1980s movement against the military dictatorship, and this chapter emphasizes the affective dimensions of the tensions between their continuing concern for social activism, but their desire to enjoy themselves. All of these analyses of affective issues give excellent accounts of the young women and the rapidly changing nature of South Korean culture. However, I did end up with the impression that there were actually two books here, clearly linked, but with something of a gap between the political economy and the affective economy. The two are bridged most effectively when the focus is on the rental housing. Particularly in the discussion of the post-revolutionary affect of the single women, I wonder if those who didn’t live alone but otherwise shared the same experience of the anti-dictatorship movement might not have quite similar emotional reactions to the changed times.