Myra Ferree Hae Yeon Choo University of Wisconsin Madison
This dissertation research studies the interactive process of boundary-making between citizens and non-citizen migrant women in South Korea. Conceptualizing citizenship as a relational process, the study uses ethnographic data to look at how the boundary of citizenship is negotiated and contested through discourse and everyday interaction among locally grounded actors. The research focuses on variations in citizenship claims as framed by three different groups of Filipina migrant women: labor migrants, working in a factory town in the female-dominated light manufacturing industry; marriage migrants, living in rural communities with their South Korean husbands; and entertainers, working at clubs on an American military base. This project asks (1) what discursive frames are being utilized by Korean nation-state and social actors in the practice of their integration efforts for migrant women; (2) how migrant women themselves reproduce, challenge and/or resist these frames; and (3) how boundaries of citizens and non-citizens are negotiated in the interactions between them.
The findings of this study will contribute to understanding citizenship not only as a formal status but as an interactional process that creates boundaries between citizens and non-citizens. The study adds to the understanding of international migration by bringing in gender as an integral part of incorporation of migrants in the local communities, and considers boundaries and marginality as simultaneously social, political and geographic. Examining citizenship practices at the margins in South Korea can also shed light on similar processes at work in other nation-states. It may help policy makers in national and local governments, migrant women?s advocates, service organizations for migrant women to create more informed policies based varying statuses and experiences of migrant women.
