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East Asia

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship: North Korean Settlers in Contemporary South Korea

Abstract

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

As This article explores the gendered construction of South Korean citizenship through the lens of North Korean settlers' experiences in South Korea. Drawing on ethnographic research, the author delves into the citizen-making process, critically examining the impact of gendered modernizing projects on North Korean settlers' daily lives.

North Korean settlers are expected to get rid of their ethnic markers and transform themselves into modern citizen-subjects of South Korea.

Abstract

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

The author demonstrates that the overall frame of perception of North Korean settlers is deeply gendered, with modernity as a powerful ethnic marker.

The notion of ethnicized citizenship in the context of two Koreas offers a concrete account of how ethnicities are created and employed in stratified structure of citizenship.

Introduction

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

This article explores the gendered construction of South Korean citizenship through the lens of North Korean settlers’ experiences in contemporary South Korea.

Based on ethnographic research, author investigate into the citizen-making process in the capital city of South Korea, critically examining the impact of gendered modernizing projects on North Korean settlers’ daily lives from a postcolonial feminist perspective.

Grounding this analysis in research on Cambodian refugees in the United States, researcher take citizenship not merely as a legal status but, in a Foucaldian sense, “as a social process of mediated production of values concerning freedom, autonomy, and security”.

Introduction

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Author argue that as North Korean settlers navigate their lives in South Korea, they expose the invisible underlying code of South Korean society, demonstrating what constitutes a South Korean nation-state as opposed to North Korea.

While most states represent, however imperfectly, some sort of imagined national community, the reverse happened in the political partitioning of Korea during the cold war.

Theoretical Framework

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

To understand the experiences of North Korean settlers in South Korea, author first draw from postcolonial feminist scholarship on gendered modernity, particularly with respect to understanding the ways in which gender relations are used as a measure of a society’s modernity. Second, he draw on studies of migration and citizenship to illuminate the creation of ethnic minority status with changing gender relations. By bringing these two literatures in dialogue, he attempts to shed light on the processes of citizen making in South Korea, where gender relations serve as an ethnic marker for othering North Korean settlers and for reconstituting South Korea as a modern nation.

North Korean Settlers in Socio-Historic Context

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Looking at South Korean citizenship through the eyes of North Korean settlers is particularly meaningful because the national division and conflict between the two Koreas have been central to the nation-building project of South Korea.

Since the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the national division following the civil war of 1950-1953, the process of South Korean citizen making began with North Korea as an enemy and a mirror image.

Under the logic of the cold war, what it means to be a South Korean has been defined as anything that is not North Korean, just as East and West Germany formed their self-images as nations conversely mirroring each other.

North Korean Settlers in Socio-Historic Context

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Since the two Koreas have shared a common language, ethnicity, history, and culture until the past 60 years, both countries in the postwar period strive for legitimacy based on separation and imposed differentiation.

This dynamic of tension and competition took a significant turn in the mid 1990s after the end of the cold war. North Korea went through a severe food crisis, resulting in thousands of deaths and a massive refugee movement into China. Thousands of North Koreans in China were made vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking.

North Korean Settlers in Socio-Historic Context

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

As 70 to 80 percent of the refugee population in China was female, this refugee migration was clearly a gendered one, in which women were relatively in demand to provide cheap labor for the expanding service sector in China, to be marriage partners in Chinese rural villages, and in some cases for sex trafficking. While about 300,000 North Korean refugees were living in China, only a small number of people who had resources made their way into South Korea.

The total number of North Korean settlers in South Korea at the time of my fieldwork was 6,870, according to the Ministry of Unification in South Korea during my interview in June 2005.

North Korean Settlers in Socio-Historic Context

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Most North Korean settlers left North Korea not for political reasons but simply for survival. The immediate family members of many of my informants died from famine, leaving survivors haunted by feelings of guilt, grief, and pain.

When explaining their motivations for coming to South Korea, many North Korean settlers also expressed a yearning for citizenship that they developed during their refugee years in China.

It was not until they were caught by the Chinese police and repatriated to North Korea that they decided to migrate to South Korea.

North Korean Settlers in Socio-Historic Context

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Most North Korean settlers fulfill their desire to gain legal citizenship immediately on arrival to South Korea, but once they arrive in South Korea, they are required to stay for three months at the governmental educational facility of Hanawon.

There they learn how to live in South Korea, studying South Korean politics and capitalist economics as well as gaining practical training in computer usage, basic English, the South Korean accent, driving, and shopping.

After the completion of Hanawon training, they are also granted certain special provisions and benefits including financial subsidies for settlement, health care, and public housing to which other migrants and refugees do not have access.

Methods

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

This study is based on ethnography of North Korean settlers in Greater Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, from May to August 2005.

During this period, he also conducted 41 semi-structured and in-depth interviews with North Korean settlers and South Korean social agents. The first group of the interviewees was 21 North Korean settlers, 11 women and 10 men, ranging in age from 19 to 61.

He had previous contact with a few interviewees from my prior work experience at a nongovernmental organization for North Korean settlers.

Achieving Citizenship

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Through their journey to South Korea, North Korean settlers realize from their lived experiences that citizenship is “a powerful instrument of social closure and profoundly illiberal determinant of life chances”.

Below, he continue with different stories since it represents the experiences of many North Korean settlers and demonstrates that citizenship is not only discursive but also in itself a source of material power.

Gender as a Terrain for Producing otherness

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

“These North Korean men are just untamed. North Korean men are feudal and patriarchal. They don’t listen to women at all. They think of them as their servants or something. And they batter their wives, you know. We don’t do that here in South Korea, do we?”

Gender relations among North Korean settlers are often used as a symbol of difference between North and South Korea.

Depictions of North Korean settler men and women deploy two oppositional concepts for modernity—that is, backward (bad) and traditional (good).

Gender as a Terrain for Producing otherness

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Although both North Korean men and North Korean women are regarded as different from South Korean modern subjects, North Korean men have to respond to the dominant discourse describing them as backward in a negative sense, while North Korean women are subject to two contradictory framings of them as traditional (good) and backward (bad).

This difference in the gendered portrayal of men and women affects the ways in which they adapt to and resist such framing.

Conclusion

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

This research on North Korean settlers’ experiences in South Korea illuminates the significance of a postcolonial feminist framework for understanding the ethnicized and gendered nature of citizenship. North Korean settlers face the constructed barrier of ethnic markers that characterize them as North Koreans and deny them full citizenship.

Ethnicized citizenship has to be constructed actively in South Korea, where in the absence of underlying ethnic distinctions, these markers are created and used in the practices of othering.

By proposing the notion of ethnicized citizenship in the context of two Koreas, I offer a concrete account of how ethnicities are created and employed in stratified structure of social membership.

Conclusion

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Gender relations as a measure of modernity are employed as a strong ethnic marker for North Korean settlers, depicting North Korean men as patriarchal and women as victim-subjects and as opposed to egalitarian and modern gender relations that supposedly characterize South Korea.

Through looking at the citizen-making process of North Korean settler men and women, he demonstrates that not only is the incorporation of individual North Korean settlers gendered but also the overall frame of perception of North Korean settlers itself is deeply gendered, with modernity as a powerful ethnic marker.

Conclusion

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

This process of citizen making is not a unilateral one between the South Korean nation-state and North Korean settlers but operates in a complex web of power relations. This study strengthens the ethno-methodological argument that gender and ethnicity are ongoing societal accomplishments that intersect with each other and illustrates the multiple and complex ways that the newcomers claim their citizenship as agents through negotiation, resistance, and interaction.

Although this research is country specific, the notion of state-based ethnicized citizenship has a potential to be further developed with comparative case studies where the creation of ethnicities has been constituted in the partitions of the nation-building process itself, such as in Germany, India and Pakistan, and the former Soviet Union.

Conclusion

Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship

Locating his research in a continuum of postcolonial feminist scholarship, he attempts to complicate the ways in which gender, nation, and citizenship intersect in the constitution of a North Korean settler’s subjectivities. By moving beyond the victim/rescue framework, he show how North Korean settlers exercise their agency within constraints in their zealous pursuit of South Korean citizenship.

By beginning with the lived experiences of North Korean settler men and women, he illustrates the complexities of their lives that the pre-constructed victim-subject fails to capture. Re-conceptualizing citizenship in a way that accounts for the intersection of gender and ethnicity, while not losing sight of the power relations in which it operates and the agency of the people involved, is an ongoing project for postcolonial research.