Privately Public Places: Uprootedness, Care Norms and Home-Making of Migrant Women in Korea

This paper conceptualizes the private/public boundary situated in ‘home’ as contested place and the role of care work in demarcating this boundary. I delineate the process in which ‘unnatural’ or temporary homes of migrant women in a host country become a place where women run away from as well as a place women run to, and the implications of this process on their legal precariousness.  For the purpose of this paper, I focus on two groups of migrant women in South Korea and the contrasting ways in which homes mark the legal boundaries; the paper draws on from field data consisting of participant observation and in-depth interviews with runaway marriage migrants and (formerly) undocumented domestic workers. For marriage migrants who have run away from homes (or gachul yijuyŏsŏng), their absence from homes (or their husbands’ homes) becomes grounds for their legal precariousness. On the other hand, for undocumented migrant domestic workers, homes are private places from which they can find work and, at the same time, seek refuge from the immigration raid. In this process, one is portrayed as irresponsible mothers who abandon their duty of care of their children while the other is portrayed as victims who have been failed by the economic-nationalist immigration paradigm to pick up after other women. In fact, such perspective has been materialized in real laws and policies which have further reproduced or reinforced migrant women's precariousness. I focus on women's presumed normative position as care-giver, and the role that their supposed abandonment/adoption of this position plays in public discourse in shaping the private/public boundaries of homes. Throughout the paper, I present the process in which nationalist reproduction discourse, gender norms and uprootedness (experiences of migration) are essentialized into the duty of care in a particularized private/public place called home.