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Abstract
This article examines the making of two distinct groups of women—‘prostituted women’ and migrant wives—into citizen-subjects in South Korea at the turn of the twenty-first century. Though the lives of these women barely intersect, they become visible in the public sphere as victims of sexual violence and therefore in urgent need of state protection. Defined as such, prostitutes and migrant wives come under the gaze of the state and civil society through anti-prostitution policy and multiculturalism policy respectively. I suggest that, through the language of protection, the South Korean state and civil society seek to redefine moral order and national borders through the regulation of a woman's body and sexuality. For prostituted women, leaving prostitution restores them to the embrace of the nation as good Korean daughters. For immigrant wives, reproduction is their gendered path to citizenship as good Korean mothers. Through an analysis of the gender ideals reproduced in these policies, and their repercussions on the lives of women, I tease out the gendering of citizenship and nationhood and its tensions with the universalist ideals of gender equality and human rights in the modernising project in South Korea.
Notes
1. According to Ticktin (2008), the rising tide of discourses about violence against women in France at the turn of the twenty-first century—around rape, prostitution, trafficking in women and the Islamic headscarf—is an expression of anxieties about immigration, especially from Arab countries. These discourses allow the state to deport and include in the name of protecting women on the one hand, and render immigrant women inaudible other than as victims of sexual violence on the other.
2. http://www.unog.ch/unog/website/news_media.nsf/(httpNewsByYear_en)/383FB64FCAAAA5EAC12573330045B8E4?OpenDocument (accessed 8 March 2008).
3. National Solidarity for Sex Workers, or Hanyeoyeon, was officially founded on 29 June 2005 at a Sex Workers’ Day festival held at Seoul Olympic Park. The protestors demanded recognition as irregular workers, respect for their human rights, and recognition of the problems they face as labour-rights issues rather than forced prostitution. On 27 August 2005, sex workers in the city of Pyeongtaek set up their own organisation—Democratic Sex Workers’ Solidarity (Minseongnoryeon), to mark themselves as focused on the interests of sex workers rather than on those of sex-trade business-owners. They also wanted to voice their objection to urban renewal projects that sought to demolish red-light districts to make space for corporate expansion. Minseongnoryeon has remained active in these protests and, in 2008, found allies in the National Coalition of Citizens Affected by Forced Evictions (Jeongukcheolgukminyeondae).
4. The judgement by a court in the city of Busan in January 2009 that found a Korean man guilty of raping his Filipina wife said that the man ‘violated the right of sexual self-determination of his wife’. This was a landmark case in which marital rape was first recognised—‘sexual assault’ was the term commonly used before.
5. When asked to comment on the Sex Workers’ Festival, Cho Young-sook, then Secretary-General of KWAU, said, ‘I could not even begin to understand the concept that prostitutes autonomously organised an open gathering. The women have only been mobilised by employers—the pimps—who have been pushed into a predicament by the Special Laws on Prostitution’. In the same report, Kim Hyunsun, director of Saewumtoh, ‘flatly dismissed the suggestions of “sex worker” from some of the women in red-light districts as “not even worth discussion”’ (Choi 1998: 9–32).
6. There is a dearth of valid data on prostitution or trafficking, not to mention the link between the two. The Bangkok office of UNESCO maintains a Trafficking Statistics Project that traces how numerical estimates circulate between governments, intergovernmental organisations and NGOs; http://www.unescobkk.org/index.php?id=1022, last accessed 2 June 2007.
7. National Statistics Office (http://kosis.nso.go.kr), last accessed 5 November 2008.
8. ‘South Korean fertility rate fell to record low in 2005’, The Hankyoreh, 24 August 2006. http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/151725.html (last accessed 29 May 2009). The preference for a son contributed to an abnormal sex ratio at birth even though it decreased from over 116 in 1990 to 107.7 in 2005 (‘Birth and death of women’, The National Atlas of Korea, The National Geographic Institute, http://atlas.ngii.go.kr/english/explanation/social_3_1.jsp (last accessed 1 June 2009).
9. The Act (Law 7166) defines the family as a basic unit of society created by marriage, blood ties or legal adoption. Some feminists and women's organisations have been lobbying for a revision of this legislation with the Basic Act on Family Support—one of their main concerns being the reinforcement of women's traditional roles and the ideology of the nuclear family.
10. The second five-year plan provides for an increase in the number of marriage migrants receiving training under the training programmes Customized Agricultural Education (from 700 in 2009 to 2,500 in 2014) and Skills and Management (from 500 in 2009 to 2,500 in 2014).
11. The seven countries are China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, Uzbekstan and Thailand. See http://www.hikorea.go.kr/pt/InfoDetailR_kr.pt?catSeq=&categoryId=1&parentId=1294&showMenuId=8 (last accessed 21 May 2010).
12. As noted earlier, the Busan District Court convicted a 42-year-old Korean man of raping his 25-year-old Filipina wife in the first such case in the nation's legal history in January 2009. 'The defendant should have treated his wife with affection, because she has difficulties in speaking Korean and feels lonely in this remote foreign country. His behaviour cannot be acceptable as he threatened his wife with a gas gun and knife to have sex against her will', the Busan court was quoted as saying in its verdict. It also noted that the victim was held responsible for failing to make efforts to communicate with her husband and to adjust to Korean culture. ‘Korean Convicted of Raping Filipino Wife,' http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/01/113_37965.html. Then, in March 2007, a Korean man was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment for murdering his Vietnamese wife, Huynh Mai. Another Vietnamese woman, Le Thi Kim Dong, committed suicide while she was pregnant, on 30 April 2007. On 6 February 2008, Tran Thanh Lan, a 22-year-old bride, committed suicide in South Korea (Vietnews, http://www.vietnewsonline.vn/News/Society/5239/Another-desperate-Vietnamese-housewife-in-South-Korea.htm).
13. This is somewhat easier than the normal naturalisation procedure for non-marriage migrants who have to have five years’ residence in South Korea, together with fluent Korean-language skills.
14. For example, the Women Migrants’ Human Rights Center hosted a three-day workshop on ‘Asian Women Migrants’ Strategy Discussion for the Protection and Prevention of Human Trafficking in International Marriage’ on 21–24 November 2006. ‘Marriage trafficking’ was explicitly discussed. But, in December 2008, a regular symposium of the Center was titled ‘Between Adjustment and Violence: Where do Migrant Women's Human Rights Reside?’ The language of trafficking was dropped completely in the presentations.
15. One of her most poignant criticisms is that the voices of migrant women themselves are often subsumed within the narrative of victimhood (interview with Jun Hae-sil, 2 December 2008 cited in Jung Citation2008).
16. This is not to say that migrant women are passive recipients of such ‘state effects’. The agency of female marriage migrants in negotiating these disciplinary effects has been examined by Kim Hyun Mee (2007) in South Korea, by Constable (Citation2003) on women in ‘correspondence marriages’, and by Suzuki (Citation2004) and Faier (Citation2007) on Filipinas married to Japanese men.
17. In 2008 the then President of the MTU, Torna Limbu, and Vice President Abdus Sabur, were forcibly deported despite a call by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea for a stay of deportation until it could investigate allegations of abuse during the arrest: http://action.amnesty.org.uk/ea-campaign/action.retrievestaticpage.do?ea_static_page_id=1216 (last accessed 23 May 2011).