Dissertation: Citizenship at the Margins |
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Citizenship at the Margins: Gendered Migration and Incorporation Regimes in Production My dissertation comparatively examines how the South Korean state and civil society produce and maintain distinct incorporation regimes for three overlapping groups of Filipina migrant women—factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and “entertainers” at clubs in American military camptowns. I approach citizenship, not as a simple legal category, defined in top-down fashion for an individual by a nation-state, but rather as an interactive accomplishment involving both the host society and the migrants as active agents constrained by the structures of law and policy. Based on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic research, I examine how the boundaries of citizenship are negotiated and contested through everyday interactions among the immigration wing of the state, the migrant advocacy NGOs that represent the privatized state’s welfare wing, and migrants. By examining the ways in which gender and ethnicity are variously invoked, and analyzing how these discursive struggles relate to the management of legality and rights in practice, my dissertation illuminates the gendered governance that emerges at the margins of citizenship. The study adds to the understanding of international migration by bringing in gender as an integral part of incorporation of migrants in the local communities, and considers boundaries and marginality as simultaneously social, political and geographic. Examining citizenship practices at the margins in South Korea can also shed light on similar processes at work in other nation-states. I plan to turn my dissertation into a book manuscript. |
| Funding: This dissertation has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, and the Women's Studies Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. | |