Abstract
Since the 1990s, international migration has accelerated and has transformed many societies in the world, including South Korea (below referred to as Korea), which had been considered homogeneous in terms of its ethnic and racial composition. As a growing number of migrants from mostly “less developed” countries came to Korea for work and/or marriage and settled there, the catchy phrase, “multicultural families,” emerged and spread in public discourse during the 2000s. In 2008, the Korean National Assembly passed the Multicultural Family Support Act (MFSA) to deal with foreign migrants who married Korean citizens and children of such unions.
While ostensibly administering families formed by such international marriages, the MFSA in practice has prioritized a particular type of international marriage, that of Korean men and foreign women, mostly from other Asian countries. This narrow and gendered definition of multicultural family reflects the Korean state's interest in protecting men's right to marry a woman and have children in the face of steadily falling birthrates and the growing shortage of labor in “dangerous, difficult, and dirty” employment.
The patriarchal definition of a multicultural family is what Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea: Reflections and Future Directions, edited by Minjeong Kim and Hyeyoung Woo, examines critically from various angles. The book presents a timely collection of essays written by sociologists and anthropologists working in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Its publication also mirrors how U.S. academia has been globalized beyond the trans-Atlantic interactions by the incorporation of migrant scholars from nonwestern societies, as well as the Korean government's efforts to globalize academia.
The book is successful in coherently bringing ten component chapters together around the underlying question of how to redefine multicultural families in Korean society. The core of the critical discussion in these chapters as a whole is to shake the narrow boundary of the multicultural family and expand it by including social groups that are marginalized and rendered invisible. Divided into four parts, the book begins with a focus on women's agency in negotiating their complex and shifting identities by discussing not only experience of foreign migrant women who married Korean men, whose unions represented the Korean multicultural family, but also those of Korean women who married migrant workers from Pakistan.
Part Two delves into how migration law and policy have shaped the daily lives of migrant women in forming and maintaining their intimate and family relations. In doing so, two component chapters show “precarious family-making” among undocumented migrant women and the upending of the normalized family and kinship relations among Korean Chinese. Part Three illuminates how the Korean state regulates the “vulnerable” national border through the control of transborder marriage between Korean men and foreign women, along with how marriage migrants cope with their precarious lives after divorce.
Finally, Part Four highlights intergenerational relationships and experience of the second-generation immigrant children of not only Korean husbands and foreign wives, but also Korean wives and Filipino husbands. Without obscuring agency of foreign migrant women in their struggle to cope with their marriage to Korean men, each part firmly places the other marginalized women in the center, including divorced foreign migrant women, undocumented migrant women who could not afford to marry, and Korean women who married foreign migrant workers.
The book is reasonably organized in terms of methodology and the level of analysis. Most chapters rely on qualitative research, particularly in-depth interviews, which allows for the discussion of rich details in the perceptions and interactions of various groups of women involved in the redefinition of multicultural families. A few chapters using mixed methods (Chapter 7) or quantitative methods (Chapters 9 and 10) also push the boundary of multicultural families by focusing on divorced women and second-generation immigrant children. In other words, different research methods are constructively used to enable the contributing authors to discuss their findings, which range from individual stories of coping and negotiating with their difficult or precarious lives to institutional mechanisms (for example, the Korean state's law and policy, commercial migration agencies, and civic organizations) and social structures that have shaped those individual stories.
The component chapters show different levels of theoretical engagement. Chapters Two (Julie S. Kim) and Six (Nora Hui-Jung Kim) stand out in their innovative incorporation of bodies of literature beyond studies of international migration, which are more empirically driven around established patterns and strategies of migrant behavior and social relations. Drawing on the economic sociology of money and the social construction of motherhood, Chapter Two demonstrates how immigrant women's mothering is performed around making money, using it, and saving it in their family contexts, which are shaped by the larger society. Building on feminist legal studies, Chapter Six discusses how the “liberal” state in South Korea has been concerned with the regulation of the marriage between Korean men and foreign brides through the regulation of the boundary of citizenship. It shows that the public debate between the vulnerability of Korean men's transborder marriages (i.e., “fake marriages” to get citizenship) and the vulnerability of foreign brides by marriage (as she becomes dependent on the cooperation and good will of the husband and her family-in-law) further justifies more state intervention in the regulation of transborder marriages. This focus on the state as the centralized institution of ruling is necessary for us to understand its enduring significance in the era of transnational migration and neoliberal globalization that have undermined the nation-state’s power.
This book will provide good readings for undergraduate students enrolled in courses about migration, social change, and marriage and families approached from a global and comparative perspective, as well as for scholars and graduate students specializing in international migration, not only in South Korea but also from a global perspective.