Maternal guardians: Intimate labor and the pursuit of gendered citizenship among South Korean volunteers for migrant women

Abstract

This article uses ethnographic research to examine the intimate labor of South Korean middle-class women who volunteer in immigrant integration programs for migrant women entering South Korea via cross-border marriages. I show that volunteers participate in South Korea’s nation-building project under globalization as the “maternal guardians” of migrant women, thus challenging their own gender-based subordination while sustaining the racial and class hierarchy and the heteronormativity of the Korean nation. These women use intimate knowledge about migrant women as a medium to pursue respect in the face of gendered discontent and transform themselves as new global South Korean citizens.

Keywords

Citizenship cross-border marriages intersectionality intimate labor heteronormativity

Introduction

The era of late global capitalism is marked by an increasing commodification of intimacy that permeates everyday life (Constable 2009; Hochschild 2012). New global “intimate industries” (Parreñas et al., 2016) profit from intimate labor, or 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 racial and cultural others—enter the intimate spheres of nation-states that were not previously considered immigrant nations. Despite its unprecedented scale, feminist scholars find that the commercialization of intimacy has not transformed existing social relations of inequality; instead, intimate industries facilitate the reproduction of the hegemonic family formation as well as the cultural scripts of class-specific femininity and masculinity, for instance, by relegating gendered carework responsibilities to migrant domestic workers or migrant wives (Parreñas, 2001; Yeoh et al., 2014).

This article delves into the on-the-ground processes through which the reproduction of social hierarchies is accomplished in the face of the vast expansion of commercial intimacy on a global scale. I argue that intimate industries depend on a new form of intimate labor that provides material and affective resources to integrate the challenges posed by transformations in the intimate sphere. This article addresses the case of contemporary South Korea, where the growth of commercially matched cross-border marriages between South Korean men and women from Southeast Asia and China poses a challenge to the existing national imaginary. I examine how South Korean middle-class women volunteered their invisible and unpaid labor in the project of immigrant integration and new nation-building under globalization, participating in a particular form of intimate labor that I conceptualize as maternal guardianship.

Situating middle-class women’s narratives in the socio-historical context of postwar South Korea, I show how they responded to the new national challenge of cross-border marriages. The intimate labor involved in supporting immigrant integration offered South Korean middle-class women a gendered path to citizenship as mothers of the nation and an opportunity of global self-making. In their view, migrant women—whose integration was considered integral to the reproduction of the heteronormative family and South Korean nation—required benevolent help and care in addition to assimilation. The migrant encounter opened up an opportunity for South Korean middle-class women to challenge their gender-based subordination and confinement to the domestic sphere by transforming themselves into “maternal guardians” of migrant women. The gendered intimacy they developed enabled South Korean middle-class women to assert their moral authority against South Korean men, the “uneducated” lower class, and the “intrusive” upper class. Paradoxically, doing so also reified feminine domesticity—a space of genuine intimacy free from commercialization—as a site of moral legitimacy, reproduced racial and class hierarchies in South Korea, and upheld heteronormativity as a basis for belonging to the Korean nation.

This article 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 that took place over 18 months from July 2008 to January 2010. The article is predominantly based on four months of participant observation in a social integration program for migrant women at Peace Center, a migrant advocacy NGO on the outskirts of Seoul. There, I observed interactions among three program organizers, South Korean volunteers, and 50 migrant women participants as I volunteered as a teacher’s assistant and substitute teacher of a Korean language class. In addition, the article draws upon interviews with 24 South Korean actors involved in migrant advocacy and integration, such as social workers, organizers, and volunteers in immigrant integration programs run by NGOs in 2008–2010, and an additional 43 supplementary interviews conducted in April–October 2014. The interviews focused on the respondents’ life trajectories, motivations for and meanings of their work, and their relationships with migrants and other South Korean social actors.¹

Cross-border marriages, intimate labor, and heteronormative families

Cross-border marriages in Asia have garnered significant scholarly attention as a lens to examine 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 from China and Southeast Asia. In a context of inter-Asian migration where 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, 2003). However, labor migrants and marriage migrants are treated as separate categories of persons in the South Korean immigration system. Moreover, women’s migration via cross-border marriages and their inclusion in the intimate sphere of home pose a particular challenge to the nation-state. Marriage migrant women face heightened border control and everyday surveillance due to the suspicion of “fake marriages” (Choo, 2013; Friedman, 2010) and their bodies are subject to racialized control as boundary markers of the nation (Lan, 2008).

In South Korea, cross-border marriages developed in the early 1990s as a strategic response to the crisis of heteronormative families produced by the growth of “rural bachelors,” caused by the departure of women to urban centers (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 co-ethnic Chinese (josônjok) women. Demand for cross-border marriages among both rural and urban working-class men quickly increased throughout the country, and commercial and religious-based 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). These marriages preserved heterosexual marriage as a key institution that offers a passage to adulthood in South Korea, enabling men to enact their heterosexual masculinities as respectable men and claim national belonging (Freeman, 2011; M 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 that turned cosmopolitanism into a marker of class status and good citizenship. For rural and working-class families with little access to middle- and upper-class cosmopolitan practices such as foreign travel and foreign education, cross-border marriages enabled them to participate in a global South Korea (Abelmann and Kim, 2005). For South Korean rural husbands, 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 (M 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 the next generation of Koreans (Cheng, 2011; M Kim, 2013). Migrant women choose cross-border marriages based on complex motivations, including the gendered responsibility to support one’s natal family (Yeoh et al., 2014) and a desire for modern, cosmopolitan womanhood (Faier, 2009), but upon migration, “maternal citizenship” as mothers of South Korean children becomes these women’s limited path to belonging in South Korea (M Kim, 2013). The South Korean state has also recognized marriage migrant women as a target of immigrant integration, and since 2006, government, corporate, and civil society funding has flooded into educational projects under the rubric of “multicultural families” (Lee, 2008). Various government and non-governmental organizations now offer programs for migrant women in Korean language development, cooking, and skills training. 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 (Belanger, 2007; Wang and Belanger, 2008). Yet these immigrant integration programs are largely considered as a top-down state project, leaving unexamined the embodied, laboring subjects called upon to serve the new nation-building project. Bringing to the fore the experiences of South Korean women whose intimate labor buttresses immigrant integration efforts, I highlight how women re-make 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.

In search of a “good life:” Gendered discontent and racialized migrant encounters

Now my son is 24 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. (Hyangmi Min, 52 years old)

Recounting the life trajectory that led them to volunteer for migrant women, many South Korean women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s—a demographic group that comprised the majority of volunteers—talked about a turning point involving intense discontentment, often relating to a life of domesticity. For Hyangmi, depression hit precisely when she achieved what she thought she always wanted: a marriage with a salary-man that would enable her to be a middle-class housewife, which she considered as a marker of “a good life.” Born the youngest among four children, she grew up not knowing the face of her father, who left her mother when she was pregnant. She also 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 since her senior year of high school, Hyangmi worked at a department store until she married her husband seven years later. Typical of Korean workplaces in the 1970s and 1980s, she was expected to quit her job upon marriage, and this was what she 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 the era of Park Jung-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,” middle-class housewives were called upon to support their husbands and children at home. As all South Koreans were called upon to contribute to the building of the South Korean modern nation, men were mobilized as soldiers and workers, while women were expected to serve the nation as temporary workers before marriage, then as household managers and reproducers of the nation as mothers (Moon, 2005). Women’s participation in the labor market before marriage was considered an extension of their role as dutiful daughters in the family, one 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 (ES Kim, 2000; HM Kim, 2001). Under a model of citizenship based on heteronormative patriarchy, the state considered heterosexual marriage as a benefit to the economy and to 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 and even after the birth of their 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 program at Open University (bangsong tongsin daehak), 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 taught literacy to senior citizens, cooked for and bathed disabled children in group homes, read books to the elderly, and for the past 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. 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 work in female-dominated occupations, such as secretarial work. Upon marriage, they quit their jobs and moved away from their natal family, sometimes following their husbands’ job or families-in-law to a different city, which made them sympathetic to migrant women. Connecting migrant women’s feelings of isolation with their in-laws to her personal experience, Youngjoo Hong 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 depression² and chose volunteer carework, which they saw as an extension of their maternal self, as a way to escape “the force of domesticity” (Parreñas, 2008). Working directly with migrant women provided an opportunity for these South Korean women to participate in the new nation-building project of global South Korea through immigrant integration. For example, Yoonsook Bae, a 55-year-old volunteer teacher, said that she would like to help migrant women because “they have to learn Korean language in order to settle in South Korea like Koreans.” Acting on the imperative to assimilate racial 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 the beginner-level Korean, I always emphasized that the basics are important. I told them, “Later when you give birth to your children, they 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.

For Yoonsook, helping migrant women allowed her to contribute to the collective future of the nation—“our future”—because these women were mothers of Korean children. Her motives were based on assumptions that simultaneously naturalized women’s place in the family as maternal educators and demanded a “correct” way of speaking Korean and living in South Korea for migrant women.

As women volunteers provided sympathy and support to migrant women, and also occasionally intervened, upon request, in resolving conflicts with husbands and in-laws, their efforts were geared towards keeping the marital family together for their “good life.” The most valuable moment of their work with migrant women, many recalled, was to see them settled in a “harmonious family.” Taeyoung An, a 61-year-old volunteer, recalled:

Sometimes when I meet with migrant women, there are some who made 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 become stable in their families, that’s when I feel the most rewarded.

As such, 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.

Intersection of gender and race in the making of maternal guardians

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, childrearing, and computer education. They were also involved in weekly teachers’ meetings, marking student exams and assignments, organizing field trips, counseling migrant women individually, and meeting with in-laws and husbands. As middle-class South Korean women came together as organizers and volunteers of the immigrant integration programs, they took pride in taking up the role of “maternal guardians” for migrant women, which was based on a racialized rhetoric of maternal care. At a weekly teachers’ meeting for the Korean language program, Director Lee, a program organizer in her late 40s, 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 [chinjo˘ng o˘mma], 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 a romantic portrayal of “natal home” as a space of care and intimacy that the center should model itself after, Director Lee encouraged women volunteers to assume a role of a “mother” to migrant women. While the glorification of home as a space free from 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 extended patrilineal family (husbands and in-laws) as a source of “problems” reflects the contested family norm of South Korea, in which daughters-in-law have occupied a subordinate position in the hierarchy within the patriarchal family, which I delve into in the next section.³ Director Lee 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 she emphasized the need for care rather than transmitting information and skills, Director Lee distinguished the center’s volunteers from an impersonal bureaucracy filled with paid employees, whom they 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 essentialized notion of motherhood in what Mindry (2001) calls “a politics of feminine virtue,” which emphasizes women’s “natural” compassion, benevolence, and caring capacities. Like white middle-class women who participated in development projects in Africa to perform “goodness” (Heron, 2007) and Euro-American expatriate wives who volunteered at an orphanage in China (Wang, 2013), the intimate labor of South Korean women volunteers did not simply promote the intimate needs of the recipients (in this case, migrant women). Rather, this labor enabled the self-transformation of the volunteer as a maternal citizen of the South Korean nation—a transformation that did not challenge racialized and gendered hierarchies but reproduced them by establishing South Koreans as benevolent helpers and migrants as dependents in need of guidance and care. The politics of race was intricately linked to the gendered moral imperatives that called these South Korean women to volunteer.

Volunteer teachers grounded their ability to sympathize with migrant women in gendered binary terms and emphasized maternal connections with migrant women, which constrained space for male volunteers. At Peace Center, there was only one male volunteer—Daehoon Yeom, a married father of two in his 40s who ran an English language institute and perceived the growing number of marriage migrants as a potential social problem. Though no one questioned Daehoon’s ability to teach the Korean language (he was completing his certificate on 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 about how they missed too many classes, the other teachers would laughingly respond, “What do men know?” In his absence, teachers like Misook Han 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.” In 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.

Admittedly, it was fair for other volunteers to point out that Daehoon’s standard of student progress was unrealistic. He often compared the migrant women students 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 childrearing. Still, it is noteworthy that Daehoon’s ability was questioned in the gendered terms of being a “man” and his imposition of this standard on migrant women was understood as the masculine characteristic of “having it his way.” At times, women teachers also grouped Pastor Kim, the director of Peace Center, together with Daehoon, and accused both of insensitivity to migrant women based on “being men.” In 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 the in-laws are like! It’s all the same for Korean women—so much sacrifice!” After two months of volunteering, Daehoon did not continue at Peace Center, and the following semester, the volunteer teachers returned to being an all-female group.

As South Korean women volunteers highlighted, gendered intimacy with migrant women was a source of legitimacy that was transformative of 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. For middle-class women volunteers, intimate connections with migrant women constituted a medium through which they asserted their legitimacy and challenged their own gender-based subjugation. Paradoxically, their intimate labor also reinforced a gender binary and a racial hierarchy as well as South Korean women’s gendered participation in the heteronormative family, which produced their discontent in the first place.

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.

Against the people below: Controlling husbands, ignorant mothers-in-law

South Korean women volunteers were vocal about their concerns with “still-ignorant Koreans.” They often discussed the problem of controlling behaviors among 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 IDs or not allowing them to learn Korean to prevent migrant women from running away. At Peace Center, teachers were especially worried about Kareen, a Filipina woman whose Korean husband was known as “too obsessive” (known as seloso among Filipina women). Kareen was 25 years old, and her husband, a factory worker, was in his early 40s 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, and 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 were evidence that he regarded his patriarchal entitlement as absolute; 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 “pre-modern,” “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 meeting 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!

South Korean volunteers often talked about migrant women’s in-laws, 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 vented after she came back from a counseling session at the home of a Vietnamese migrant woman who was having trouble with her mother-in-law:

These in-laws treat them as if they bought the women. 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 be like that in my time, but it’s now 21st century!

Misook, who was in her early 60s, linked the patriarchal expectation that migrant daughters-in-law follow the customs of the husbands’ family 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, these norms of family relations were associated with South Korea’s backward past (Choo, 2006; N Kim, 2006) and were no longer compatible with a modern, “21st-century” South Korea. Misook wanted neither her own daughter nor the migrant women she worked with to follow them.

Sojung Yeo, 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 exposure to the global 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). Also unlike the middle-class volunteers who had involvement with the global through travel for pleasure, mission trips, 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—as lower-class South Koreans who were not keeping up with a modern, global Korea both in their norms and knowledge—were deemed inadequate agents for the social integration of migrant women, thereby justifying the intimate labor of middle-class South Korean women. Volunteers often talked about the need to educate in-laws to address the migrant women’s problems, but were not optimistic about its possibility. 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 working-class in-laws of migrant wives and to construct their intimate labor as necessary resonates 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, p.89). However, this instance differs from Jun’s broader critique 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 that could keep the heteronormative family of migrant women intact.

Against the people above: Surveys, uninvited intruders, and knowledge claims

Aside from controlling husbands and in-laws, 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. Passing out countless questionnaires and managing visitors were routine tasks required of the South Korean volunteers. Alongside “the multicultural boom” in South Korea there developed abundant state-sponsored research projects by government institutions, research institutes, and universities that delved into every detail of migrant women’s lives. This included, for example, their demographic information, motivations and circumstances of migration, physical and mental health, relationships with in-laws and their natal family, 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 room to screen 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 door and asked for 30 minutes of class time for government research. Two men and one woman, all 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 a “focus group,” where migrant women were asked to share with the group information 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 saw the survey after class, they joked about how poorly made the questionnaires were and how inappropriate they were for the Korean language level of most migrant women. They 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 PhDs, 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 mo˘ri)? 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 PhDs” who claim the authority to construct knowledge about migrant women and make decisions based on that knowledge. Their critiques of “expert” knowledge production from a distance resonates with James Scott’s (1998) critique of “technical knowledge” that does not take local, practical knowledge into account and Dorothy Smith’s (1990) critique of “objectified knowledge” that 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 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 not only failed to develop intimate knowledge of migrant women but also failed 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 vis-à-vis 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, a volunteer teacher in her 40s, said, “it comes from the act of caring about (maeum sseuneun go˘t)!” She continued, referencing a poem quoted by bestselling Korean author Yu Hongjun:

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 (saranghamyeo˘n alge doego/almyo˘n boinani/geutte boineun go˘sun/jo˘ngwa gatji aneurira).” 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 where love and caring are central to the making of knowledge, rather than objectivity or training for expertise. As a Korean language teacher, Youngjoo lacked formal credentials. She had graduated from a four-year college course with a degree in German literature over 20 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, intimate knowledge about migrant women’s lives were shared by the individual teachers: a husband’s job loss, tension with a mother-in-law about attending church, childrearing difficulties, and so on. Teachers lamented that some in-laws and husbands were detrimental to migrant women’s adjustment to Korea and took pride in finding ways to help migrant women. Knowing details about migrant women’s finances, interpersonal relationships, and health was more important than teaching them “a few more Korean words” and became a standard for the volunteer teachers to strive for, a source of pride, and even a matter of competition among them.

As part of their volunteer work, teachers actively sought opportunities to gain intimate knowledge about migrant women. When as a substitute I taught an intermediate Korean class in the middle of the semester, I found that students submitted weekly diaries as part of their homework. This was not an unfamiliar practice in South Korean elementary schools, with the pedagogical purposes of cultivating the habit of writing in Korean and of correcting grammar and spelling. But I was struck by Youngjoo’s comments on the diary entries—she not only corrected 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 a lengthy note with consolation, advice, and encouragement. She often suggested that students should come talk to her after class as well. Teachers of the beginner-level classes did not have access to this method of intimate exchange because of the students’ level of Korean proficiency, but they utilized other methods such as home visits, phone calls, and offers to mediate family conflicts.

In the space of Peace Center, volunteer teachers were able to claim, “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 simultaneously claiming their belonging to global South Korea against “the people below.”

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined South Korean volunteers’ racialized 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 and 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. Because of the gender-based subordination that these women volunteers experienced in family life and in the labor market in the late 20th century, they proudly embraced the opportunity 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 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 as a unit of national membership in South Korea.

South Korean women volunteers asserted their moral authority and membership in the face of gendered and classed discontent in contemporary South Korea. For these women, 21st-century South Korea was still fraught with “lower-class” people who failed to embody a more cosmopolitan, less patriarchal “modern” South Korea as well as “upper-class” people with power, privilege, and money who did not pay due respect to intimate knowledge. As such, their 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 reconstitution of their subjectivities, this article illuminates the process through which social hierarchies are reproduced as intimate industries become globalized in late capitalism.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Rhacel Parreñas, Rachel Silvey, and Hung Cam Thai, as well as Katelin Albert, Jennifer Carlson, Catherine Cheng, Clayton Childress, Jennifer Chun, Jessica Cobb, Nicole Constable, Caren Freeman, Jaeeun Kim, Minjeong Kim, Nora Huijung Kim, Namhee Lee, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Neda Maghbouleh, Rachel Rinaldo, and four anonymous reviewers of Sexualities for their insightful feedback. I also thank Hyejin Jeon for research assistance for supplementary interviews and the Global Advisory Program of the Sociology Department at Yonsei University.

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant (AKS-2014-R22) and the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Notes

Hae Yeon Choo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her research centers on gender, migration, and citizenship. Her book Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016) examines how inequalities of gender, race, and class affect migrant rights through a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea—factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and club hostesses.

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