Abstract
In her book, Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights, Hae Yeon Choo focuses on Filipino women migrants in South Korea and systematically studies their rights and identities. She focuses on three groups: migrant laborers, migrant wives of Korean husbands, and migrant hostesses working in military camp-towns.
This book is based on intensive ethnographic research and in-depth, face-to-face interviews. She conducted the first round of ethnographic research and interviews between 2008 and 2010 in two segregated migrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of Seoul, Korea: one an industrial town and the other an American military camp-town. She conducted the first round of interviews with 36 Filipino migrant women and 24 Korean participants, including NGO staff members, social workers, labor activists, volunteers, and religious leaders. She made two return visits to the field with additional interviews in 2012 and 2014. She conducted a second round of interviews with 42 Koreans and migrant workers in 2014.
The last three of the seven chapters are key chapters that compare three different categories of Filipino women migrant workers. Chapter five compares migrant workers and marriage migrants in the political mobilization by and for migrants. The author examines the difference in their identity between the two groups “emerging from their intertwined space of ethnic and religious communities through migrants’ interactions with South Korean civil society actors” (p. 101). Choo indicates that Filipino ethnic organizations and Catholic churches cultivated national and ethnic identity among both Filipino migrant workers and migrant wives. Also, “social and political gatherings organized by advocacy NGOs enabled the collective subject formation among migrant workers” crossing ethnic groups (p. 99). In contrast, “By sharing common experiences and concerns during and after class . . . migrant wives created a collective identity as ‘we foreign women’ and ‘marriage migrants,’ through a structured curriculum set by the South Korean states and administered by civil society organizations” (p. 100). Thus, Filipino migrant women workers have strong ethnic and moderate working-class identities while Filipino migrant wives share with other migrant wives the identity as migrant brides.
Chapter six compares Filipino women migrant workers and hostesses in U.S. military camp-towns. Choo shows that Filipino migrant women workers, as well as men workers, benefit from coethnic social networks in finding their initial jobs and their occupational mobility (p. 123). Moreover, Filipino women workers receive support from Korean advocacy groups. In contrast, Filipino migrant hostesses are usually isolated from ethnic networks partly because of stigma attached to their job. Moreover, “the structure of commissions and tips . . . encouraged competition for GI customers rather than solidarity of migrant hostesses” (p. 130). In addition, “The organization of work in camp-town clubs put migrant hostesses under the paternalistic control of employers” (p. 117).
Chapter seven compares Filipino migrant wives of Korean husbands and migrant hostesses. The Korean feminist discourses consider migrant wives as victims of poverty and migrant hostesses as victims of human trafficking. However, the author shows that “for both groups, the institutions of heterosexual marriage and family, rather than victimhood, offered a potential pathway to marital benefits, legal status and moral recognition in a community” (p. 163). Migrant wives try to prove the sincerity of their marriage by integrating to Korean society and accepting motherhood as the basis of their membership in Korea. Migrant hostesses are reluctant to accept the image of trafficked victims “because they wished to continue their work and pursue intimate relationships with American GIs, which offered a risky pathway to mobility” (p. 163).
Decentering Citizenship could be an ideal textbook for courses on international migration and gender at the graduate and undergraduate level although one or two chapters may not be easy for undergraduate students to understand. Moreover, comparing three different categories of women migrants is an additional strength of this book.
The book is a great contribution to the literature on migrants and women, but it can be improved in the following ways. Although the book has focused on three categories of Filipino women migrant groups, it has covered migrant workers and migrant wives in general in different chapters. I believe it would have been better to provide an overview of migrants in South Korea in general since the late 1980s in chapter two. Second, migrants in Korea, especially marriage migrants, are likely to have encountered many serious problems in their adaptation, partly because of cultural homogeneity and partly because of strong Confucian patriarchal traditions there. Migrant wives of Korean husbands in Korea are likely to have had many difficulties in adapting to their in-laws, especially because they are concentrated in small cities or rural areas where patriarchal traditions are stronger. If the author had introduced these cultural traditions in chapter three, it would have been helpful to the readers.