Migrant women between the law: bargaining kinship, labour, and space - time borders in South Korea

Abstract

This thesis adds to the expanding literature on temporary migration by exploring the temporality of marriage and co-ethnic migration. It uses a combination of ethnography, in-depth interviews and analysis of laws and policies to examine the mobility of Vietnamese and Korean-Chinese (joseonjok) women to South Korea on what this thesis calls ‘temporary ethno-kinship visa programs’. It pays attention to the relationship between cross-border families, the formation and crossing of the border, and migrant women’s intimate labour.

This thesis analyses the multiplicity of borders, particularly the multi-step process of crossing the ‘spatio-temporal’ border. Interrogating a temporal element of the border helps us understand new ways in which contemporary borders are spatialised and how the state shapes, reinforces and maintains contemporary borders. Such ‘bordering practices’ include the state placing a temporal limit on one’s visa as part of the system of multiple borders. The borders are no longer just territorial but individualised and dependent on bodily practices and relationships migrants maintain with the citizens and the destination state. Migrant women in South Korea constitute an embodiment of ‘borderlands’ with shifting boundaries drawn according to the relationships they form with South Korean citizens and, ultimately, the state. As a result, Vietnamese marriage migrants (who enter South Korea on the basis of their marriage to South Korean men), and Korean-Chinese migrants (who are granted entry through ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ ethno-kinship relations) experience distinct configurations of borderscape.

Migrant women in this study bargain with the state using various forms of intimate labour to cross the border and claim membership of the state. The market functions as a site where the commodification of intimate labour offered by migrant women intersects with the ‘financialisation’ of opportunities to cross the border. This encounter allows migrant women to ‘sell’ their intimate labour and ‘buy’ services to cross the border. Through ethnography and in-depth interviews, this thesis examines how migrants creatively utilise market forces in response to restrictive immigration measures, while bearing the risks and insecurities of the informal market.