Movement for migrant women’s rights in Korea

Focusing on multicultural family policy between the state and civil society

Abstract

  This paper explores the feminist activism for migrant women’s rights in South Korea as an example of associative activism by local citizens through the framework of political opportunity theory. After democratization, many civil society organizations were established to support migrant men and women separately, based on the discourse of workers’ rights and women’s rights, respectively. Feminist advocacy organizations emerged in the late 1990s to support migrant women workers, entertainers, and foreign wives of Korean men, who lacked resources to organize themselves and improve their lives under strict immigration control. Their activism developed further by being affiliated with the mainstream Korean women’s movement. The collaborative relationship between the progressive government and the women’s movement and the establishment of the Ministry of Gender Equality created an institutional opportunity for activists to participate in policymaking; the discourse on women’s rights and violence against women was likewise a discursive opportunity. The feminist contestation of multicultural family policy and campaign for the right of residency illustrate the divergent approaches of the government, which aimed to selectively integrate migrant wives into the Korean family as reproductive labor, and the movement for migrant women’s rights. This movement has brought Korean feminism, with its perspective of diversity and transnationalism, to the mainstream. The transnational aspect of the migrant women’s movement is also consistent with the history of Korean women’s activism in support of the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery and female sex workers for US soldiers.