Full Details

Friday, April 3

In the Shadow of Working Men: Gendered Labor and Migrant Rights in South Korea
Part of the Worlding Korea Lecture Series
Time:
3:00 pm
Presenter:
Hae Yeon Choo
Location:
4130 Posvar Hall
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
Contact:
Lynn Kawaratani
Contact Email:
lyk12@pitt.edu

This talk will investigate the gendered production of migrant rights by examining two groups of Filipina women in South Korea: factory workers and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Based on ethnographic research, I identify two distinct labor regimes for migrant women that were differently shaped in the shadow of working men. Divergent forms of civil society mobilization in South Korea sustained these regimes: migrant factory workers received recognition as workers without attention to gender-specific concerns while hostesses were construed as women victims in need of protection. Thus, Filipina factory workers were able to exercise greater labor and social rights by sharing the dignity of workers as a basis for their rights claims from which hostesses were excluded. Emphasizing gendered labor processes and symbolic politics, this talk will offer an analytical framework to interrogate the mechanisms through which a discrepancy of rights is generated at the intersection of workplace organization and civil society mobilization.

Hae Yeon Choo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on gender, migration, and citizenship. Her interest in using intersectional analysis informs her articles in Sociological Theory, Gender & Society, and positions: asia critique. Her book manuscript The Margins of Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (under contract with Stanford University Press) examines how inequalities of gender, race, and class affect migrant rights through a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea—factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and club hostesses. She has also translated Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.