Feminism Hijacked: Emerging Migrant Care Worker Policies As a Backlash Against Gender Equality in South Korea.

The scholarship on anti-gender movement has shown that the opposition to gender equality is not just to talk about “family values.” Instead, the political force against gender equality nowadays is repackaged as efforts to protect women and “ordinary people” from the onslaught of neoliberalism. In South Korea, the state has long been hesitant to bring racialized workers into the nation’s care sectors despite the chronic labor shortage. Yet such long-standing policy direction is dramatically shifting: the state is fervently promoting temporary migrant labor programs in care sectors under the banner of helping women and families. While much of the public debate around the recent development is focused on migrant care workers’ human rights, I highlight that the recent policy shift coincided with the culmination of care workers’ movements, where they achieved major legislative and institutional changes. In doing so, this study aims to make sense of these developments as reactionary responses to care workers’ gendered struggles to redefine the meanings and the worth of women’s work. Using critical discourse analysis to analyze the policy orientation of benchmark government documents concerning introducing migrant domestic workers, the study shows that the newly implemented migrant care worker policies are emerging from a novel phantasmatic scenario, namely, migrant care workers will resolve the nation’s care crisis by unburdening “our” women from the family, thereby saving the entire nation from its demographic decline. In this what Judith Butler calls phantasmatic sliding, I argue that the issue at hand is reduced to a matter of labor demand and supply with a tactical erasure of gender, naturalizing the gender status quo.