The Marriage of Care Labor and Self-Care: Marriage Migration and Neoliberal Refashioning of Care in South Korea

Abstract

Care appears in current feminist scholarship in two distinctive forms: care for others in global care chains and care for the self as a neoliberal imperative. While migrant women perform the former to alleviate the care deficits in affluent households, professional middle-class women pursue the latter on the grounds of a felicitous work-family balance. Exploring the conjuncture of these two modes of care, this article examines neoliberal reconfigurations of care in the context of marriage migration in South Korea. On the basis of fieldwork I conducted in Ansan, “the migrant city” of South Korea, I examine marriage migrant women’s care labor, particularly as foreign mothers in Korean families. I analyze how it channels their self-development activities and, in some cases, expands into a new form of self-care for a better life in the way that neoliberalism delimits. The neoliberal futures that these migrant women cultivate, I argue, make their self-care political, if only provisionally, revealing the mobilization of gendered contradictions within neoliberal reconfigurations of care. This analysis suggests that we should recast our sometimes too ready critique of, and despair about, neoliberal subjectivities into a persistent experiment of feminist politics that engages with the aspirations, in addition to the structural constraints, that emerge within global care chains under neoliberalism.