Seungsook Moon

Immigration and Mothering Case Studies from Two Generations of Korean Immigrant Women

Despite the increase of middle-class people among Asian immigrants to the United States over the past three decades,research has paid little attention to these women. Focusing on women’s paid employment, prior research also tends to overlook the significance of mothering to the analysis of gender relations in immigrant families. By bringing together the literatures on gender and immigration and on mothering in families of color,this article examines how immigration and gender ideology,mediated by a family’s economic situation and the employment prospects for educated women of color,shape the organization of mothering and how each pattern of mothering affects the power dynamics underlying the gender division of labor in immigrant families. Three distinct arrangements of mothering emerge from in-depth interviews with middle-class Korean immigrant women collected from suburbs in New York State: (1) shared mothering based on transnational,transgenerational,and nuclear family networks; (2) isolated and privatized mothering; and (3) mothering after retreat from full-time employment.

Carving out space: Civil society and the women's movement in South Korea

Is civil society gendered? What can the Korean womens movement tell us about the very notion and working of civil society and the 1990s history of democratization in South Korea? Students of democratization have overlooked these questions in their study of civil society as a vehicle of democratization and counterweight to the repressive state or the totalizing market (Silliman and Noble 1998; White 1996; Koo 1993; Cohen and Arato 1992; Gold 1990; Keane 1988). Recent criticisms of the celebration of civil society as the third path to societal democratization point out that such analyses tend to lapse into abstract discussions of relations between the state and civil society, devoid of a specific historical or social context (Fine 1997; Tempest 1997; Blaney and Pasha 1993). This absence of context can also lead to an inadequate view of civil society as a uniform and homogeneous space without social inequalities or divisions.

Trouble with Conscription, Entertaining Soldiers Popular Culture and the Politics of Militarized Masculinity in South Korea

Gender and military studies focus on Western postconscription societies, overlooking the significance of military service to gender order in the larger society. Concerned with the military’s changing form in industrial and democratic society, military sociology literature argues for the broad trend toward the decline of the conscription-based military and highlights not only economic factors but also geopolitical factors influencing this trend. Yet this literature overlooks the significance of gender in interpreting such geopolitical factors. Focusing on the problem of equity in conscription in contemporary South Korea and on one popular cultural response to that problem, this article examines the importance of men’s conscription to the organization of meanings and practices of masculinity (and femininity) in larger society and argues that the geopolitical reality in Korea that justifies militarized national security and the existence of conscription is embedded in the gendered interpretation of what is being threatened and to be protected.

Living memory of Roh Moo Hyun: Group cohesion, cultural politics, and the process of symbolic interaction

This article examines how Roh Moo Hyun, the 16th President of South Korea, was remembered during the several months following his suicide in May 2009. For this purpose, the article focuses on major commemorative texts about Roh published during this period and identifies three recurring themes in the emerging commemorative narrative about him: (1) a defiant dreamer who aspired to build a good society, (2) a nonmainstream politician who challenged the status quo and therefore was destroyed, and (3) a democratic president of common people. Building upon sociological approaches to collective memory, this article situates these themes in the larger sociopolitical context of contemporary Korea and argues that the living memory of Roh helps us understand the role of collective memory in promoting group cohesion, the deeply political nature of memory, and the importance of cultural symbols to the interactive process of constructing the commemorative narrative.

Local meanings and lived experiences of citizenship: voices from a women's organization in South Korea

This article examines how urban middle-class women in contemporary Korea understand the idea of citizenship and experience it in their lives. Focusing on the discourse of citizenship narrated by members of the Peoples Friendship Society (PFS), a leading womens organization with local branches, the article illuminates local meanings of citizenship and how gender and class inflect womens lived experiences of it. The analysis of the citizenship discourse shows the bottom-up process in the development of citizenship as a social status that binds individuals to a community. First, the PFS womens understanding of citizenship reveals the centrality, to citizenship, of their sense of belonging to a society where their lives are intermingled with those of others. Second, there is internal class differentiation among the PFS women in terms of how they relate to the category of citizen. Third, ambiguity shared by these women in their identification with citizen is intimately connected to the normalized view of private and public as oppositional spheres. On the basis of these findings, this article suggests that the expansion of citizenship to marginalized social groups, including but not limited to women, requires societal recognition of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor as being critical to the maintenance of society.

Introduction to “Culture around the Bases: A Forum on the U.S. Military Presence in Northeast Asia”

This introduction discusses how to think about the U.S. military presence as an understudied force of globalization both theoretically and historically. In an effort to bring together three articles written by a sociologist, an anthropologist, and a historian, it engages theoretically with issues of unequal power relations, feelings of ambivalence, and postcolonial agency. It also provides summaries of three case studies on South Korea, Okinawa, and mainland Japan to show both intentional and unintentional cultural consequences of the long-term U.S. military presence in these societies.

Disciplining High-School Students and Molding Their Subjectivity in South Korea: A Shift in Disciplinary Paradigm

Responding to mass deaths of high school students during the Seweolho disaster (April 16th, 2014), this article examines to what extent and how high-school students are disciplined to be submissive and compliant. It discusses daily lives of students on the ground at Danwon High School to illustrate how the imperative to enter college overwhelms daily lives at a “general high school.” It proceeds to analyze how a majority of high-school students are disciplined through “school rules” and the “regulation of students’ life.” It contends that there is an ongoing shift in the major disciplinary paradigm from the authoritarian and militaristic model to the psychological counseling model and assesses the implications of this transformation for the normative subjectivity of young people being molded.

Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China

throughout some of program profiles, there is no systematic presentation of data on retention, GPA, career placement, or even feelings of engagement or psychological self-assessments. The demonstrated effectiveness of these programs is asserted more than illustrated. Further, when describing the programs themselves, only vague consideration is given to key logistics, including the size of each program and criteria for student involvement. In some cases, it appears that programs are compulsory for first-year students (e.g., La Sierra and the College of the Marshall Islands first-year experience programs); in other cases, like the Summer Bridge program at Norfolk State, it appears that students beneath the desired admissions profile are invited to participate. That each program uses a different standard and reaches a different student population is not necessarily problematic. Yet when trying to understand the operation of each program, and evaluate its replicability, the reader is left with limited information. With a natural audience in highereducation administrators, Educating a Diverse Nation is rich with empowering stories and programmatic ideas. Less satisfying is the theoretical framing. Lacking, in particular, is sociological and anthropological insight into the nexus of education and culture. So much wonderful work has been done in this tradition. I kept thinking about Angela Valenzuela’s (1999) book Subtractive Schooling and the ‘‘politics of caring’’ she identified as central to school success among Mexican American youth. Other scholars have carefully explored the meaning of education among immigrant and minority youth, as well as the experiences they have in college when they do matriculate. When Conrad and Gasman write that ‘‘for Indians, pursuing advanced study has often meant working against cultural assumptions’’ (p. 76), I am disappointed that the authors do not provide greater explication of this idea. If the goal is to inspire faculty members and administrators to have greater understanding of the potential clash between their institutional cultures and the cultural backgrounds of their students, the authors provided little substance to begin bridging this gap. Ultimately, Conrad and Gasman offer a timely, impassioned plea for a form of higher education that improves graduation rates, facilitates mobility, and enriches individuals and their communities. I was inspired by the stories of President Sorrell, the charismatic leader of Paul Quinn College, an HBC in Dallas; the community activism engaged in by students in Cal State Sacramento’s ‘‘Full Circle Project’’ reminded me of how empowering a culturally relevant education can be. Questions remain, however, about the degree to which programs like these can be scaled up or whether they can be institutionalized beyond the scope of their charismatic leaders. It is now in the hands of educators and administrators to engage these questions and carry these lessons forward.

The Idea and Practices of Citizenship in South Korea

This essay examines a history of the idea of citizenship and its practices in Korea from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Based on this historical survey, it argues that the prototype of citizenship constructed from the nationalist discourse on building a modern nation is simultaneously collectivist and elitist. This prototype shows that individualistic assumptions implied in the liberal notion of citizenship were selectively modified and reinvented in the Korean context. This prototype became more authoritarian in the discourse of kungmin, and was at times challenged by a populist view among some leftist thinkers and activists. But such challenges were usually unsuccessful in the face of power politics during Japanese colonial rule, US Army Military Government rule, and the authoritarian rule imposed by Korean civilian and military regimes. A significant change in this persistent pattern has emerged since the establishment of procedural democracy.

Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and LegacyEthnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy, by ShinGi-Wook. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 307 pp.

method of reviewing this process in three distinct communities in Rio proves to be convincing: he provides tangible and crucial new evidence that while the state may “appear” to be absent, it is in fact present, but in a way altered by the networking skills of the drug traffickers. The network model argued by Arias “suggests that the rule of law fails as a result of the specific types of relationships that emerge in the broader political system and how those relationships foster and link to alternative political structures operating in ‘brown’ zones” (p. 53). According to Arias, “the limitations of the rule of law reflect not the weaknesses of institutions but the way in which the strengths of institutions are deployed in the interests of powerful criminal or authoritarian actors” (p. 53). Arias effectively and in detail describes how the leaders of the AMs navigate the relationship between residents, drug traffickers, and the state. But his social networking analysis ends up downplaying the problematic or even explanatory nature of entities that fall outside of its model. For instance, it can downplay the important role AM leaders play in protecting residents from violence. And it can move the ever-present problem of corruption among the police forces in the Rio context to the background of the paradigm. One could just as easily start an inquiry in a different place, such as with the lack of credibility of the police forces by residents of impoverished communities. The model bears both the strengths and weaknesses of its structural functionalist antecedents: it explains the constitution of powerful criminal networks as part of a contemporary process of social networking by community actors disenfranchised from other forms of political power, while leaving other (arguably) equally salient problems less analyzed: the historical formation and continued presence of corrupt police forces; entrenched attitudes across classes regarding the relationship between poverty and criminality; and the economic and social problems facing masses of disenfranchised youth who have ready access to guns and who are angry with their place in the world. Drugs and Democracy recognizes this reality clearly, chooses a point of entry, and skillfully provides us with one perceptive new lens with which to view urban violence in Rio de Janeiro. The limitations of this model notwithstanding, this analysis offers comparative insight about criminal networks and an acute understanding of how these networks form and sustain themselves, qualities that traditional ethnographies often cannot deliver. Finally, this book offers an important contribution to policy analysts of urban violence who are seeking lucid points of entry to a complex problem.