Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explore the way gender has been constructed in relation to the recent number of international marriage immigrants in South Korea. In particular, it looks at how the construction of gender at work in this context has been used to create a place and status for these women in Korean society which largely understands itself to be homogeneous. The author argues that nationalistic and patriarchal discourses have served to construct the foreign women’s gender through the roles of wife, mother, and daughter-in-law in particular ways that serve the interests of Korea as a nation.
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Notes
Nicole Constable has written and edited works on the “mail order bride” phenomenon in America, including Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order” Marriages (2003) and, Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia (2005), and has also contributed to Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, edited by Mark. B. Padilla et al. (2007).
This book also includes a chapter by Nancy Abelmann and Hyunhee Kim entitled “A Failed Attempt at Transnational Marriage: Maternal Citizenship in a Globalizing South Korea.” This is an example of a Korean scholar publishing on the topic in English with an American colleague, bringing international awareness to the issue from the perspective of Korean academia.
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Kim, K.L. Korea and the Gender Construction of Female Marriage Immigrants. Pastoral Psychol 66, 13–25 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0730-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0730-4