Family Breakdown and Invisible Homeless Women: Neoliberal Governance During the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea, 1997-2001

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the South Korean welfare administration’s reluctance to consider homeless women as deserving of state aid during the Asian debt crisis (henceforth the crisis) and the emergence of a pathologizing, popular discourse of family breakdown. Based on fieldwork I did in Seoul between 1998 and 2000, this article seeks to elucidate how the diagnostic discourses and prescriptive measures of “family breakdown” (kajong haeche or kajok haeche) proved congruent with a policy measure of selecting “deserving” homeless citizens defined as male breadwinners with employability and rehabilitating capacity. I argue that diverse social actors, including journalists, civic leaders, and government managers, enunciated logics of neoliberal human values; when social actors participated in the social governance of homelessness they relied on such logics to discipline gender and family relationships.1 Building on this analysis I conclude that social governance, particularly of