Autonomy As Integration: How Marriage Immigrants Leverage Role Complexity Advantage through Engaging in Civic and Ethnic Roles in Asian Democracies

Three decades after the onset of intra-Asia marriage immigration to Taiwan and South Korea, two emerging migrant-hosting societies with Confucian heritage, much research attention has been given to how the long-lasting sociocultural foundations produce and reproduce marriage immigrants’ status subordination within and beyond marital families. In reality, some marriage immigrants have engaged in and socialized into multiple civic and ethnic roles, participating in local civic communities and serving co-ethnics from home countries. Using long-term ethnography and life history interviews with Vietnamese marriage immigrants with multiple civic and ethnic roles in Taiwan and South Korea, this paper has three aims. First, I examine how marriage immigrants with limited social and cultural capital engage in multiple civic and ethnic roles. Second, I demonstrate the challenges these women face and their strategies, when transforming role strains or role conflict to role complexity advantage. Third, I show how role complexity advantage leads to various paths of autonomy for these women, bringing forth diverse consequences to marital family relations and individual subjectivity. This paper extends Rose Coser's (1991) theory of role-set complexity and women's autonomy. It examines the longitudinal making of immigrant women's civic roles in Asian democracies. It shows how immigrant women and host states’ policy trajectories co-create ethnic roles. The paper also discusses the implications for research on immigrant women's structural opportunities for empowerment and autonomy, which should be considered as important outcomes of long-term integration.