Youna Kim

Female Individualization? Transnational Mobility and Media Consumption of Asian Women

Women are travelling out of South Korea (hereafter, Korea), Japan and China for very different reasons than those that sent them into diaspora only 20 years ago. From the mid-1980s onwards there has been a rising trend in women leaving their country to experience life overseas either as tourists or as students, which has eventually surpassed the number of men engaging in foreign travel. Now, 80 per cent of Japanese people studying abroad are women (Kelsky, 2001; Ono and Piper, 2004); an estimated 60 per cent of Koreans studying abroad are women; and more than half of the Chinese entering higher education overseas are women (HESA, 2006; IIE, 2006). This phenomenon is part of a larger trend described as the ‘feminization of migration’, yet there remains a striking lack of analysis on the gender dimension (World Bank, 2006). Today women are significant and active participants in the increased scale, diversity and transition in the nature of international migration. Studying abroad has become a major vehicle for entry into Western countries (Lucas, 2005) and East Asia continues to be the largest sending region every year. In 2005, 53,000 Koreans, 42,000 Japanese and 62,000 Chinese students moved to US institutions of higher education; and 4000 Koreans, 6000 Japanese and 53,000 Chinese students moved to UK institutions of higher education. Studying abroad has become a common career move for relatively affluent women in their twenties. This new generation of women, who depart from the usual track of marriage, are markers of contemporary transnational mobility, constituting a new kind of diaspora – a ‘knowledge diaspora’.

Experiencing globalization Global TV, reflexivity and the lives of young Korean women

Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, thisarticle aims to detail the specific ways in which the cultural experience of globalization impinges upon, and becomes integrated into, the changing lives of young women of different classes. The central arguments revolve around the significance of reflexivity: global TV, in particular, helps to create an important condition for the practice of reflexivity, by opening up a rare space where Korean women can make sense of their life conditions in highly critical ways and can imagine new possibilities of freedom – social mobility and individualization – within the multiple constraints of their social context. The imagination of freedom is however bounded by the pervasive main concept governed by local rules – sexual morality – which means young womens lives are made and remade through the dialectical negotiation between the locally governed rules and the globally defined fields of possibility.

Diasporic nationalism and the media Asian women on the move

• Drawing on empirical research in London, this article explores how young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women make sense of transnational lives and the media, and paradoxical consequences for identities. It argues that the tendency to celebrate transnational mobility is often separated from mundane reality and obscures actual conditions and experiences of social exclusion. It further argues that the ethnic media arise at the heart of the paradox of transnational experience, as electronic mediation intensified by the Internet provides a necessary condition for the possibility of diasporic nationalism. Diasporic nationalism emerges as reactionary ethno-nationalism within global knowledge diasporas of people who appear to be bilingual cross-cultural negotiators moving regularly between different cultures and participating in exchanges across national borders. Diasporic nationalism becomes particularly potent and perhaps more salient through transnational flows and movement, nationalizing both transnational spaces and the Internet’s simultaneously dis-embedding and re-embedding capacities in forming a partial yet unending connection with home. •

How TV Mediates the Husband-Wife Relationship

In his groundbreaking essay, “Media, Technology and Daily Life” (1984), Hermann Bausinger raises the question of the relatively unexamined relationship between the media and the everyday. Central to his argument is that television is a constitutive part of the way everyday life is conducted. Television is a mediated family member—yet inconspicuous and naturalized in its domestication. Although Bausinger pays little sociological heed to everyday life implicated in the relations of gender, age or class, he initiated a phenomenological approach to explore how television enters everyday life. How does it manifest itself and what does it mean? This article develops into an empirically grounded account of television and everyday life. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this study explores specific ways in which television is integrated into the everyday lives of women of different generation and class positions. What are the distinctive features of Korean women’s experience of television in the intimacy of domestic life, in particular, in relation to their husbands? The focus of the study is on how television mediates the husband-wife relationship in different social locations. My aim is to offer a nuanced, thick texture of television mediation that occurs in, contests and transforms particular spaces of contemporary Korean homes. For the framework of this study, I mainly refer to western theoretical and empirical work on women as audiences. This is because, in examining relationships between women and media culture, Korean television studies have been predominantly concerned with the issues of women as “representations” and women as “creators” but rarely, women as “audiences.” A dominant model of television media research is a political economy approach. Although there exists a productive body of knowledge on the socio-economic position of women and gender relations, Korean women’s studies have not yet empirically examined how women’s lives intersect with the everyday experience of the most popular media, television, from sociological and cultural perspectives. Any exploratory study of what womendowith television in everyday life is largely absent. The relative absence of ethnographic audience studies in Korea leads me to review existing western literature, mainly Anglo-American, to discover differences and similarities between the western scholarship and the Korean fieldwork. Ethnographic studies of television in everyday life are still relatively rare, and mostly conducted in a western context. Some of the classic studies in the West offer insights into how television mediates the husband-wife relationship, in particular, the gendered aspects

The Body, TV Talk, and Emotion: Methodological Reflections

Drawing on the authors fieldwork on women, television, and everyday life in South Korea, this article discusses three key issues in the research process to add insights into Western media studies on how women interact with popular culture. Central to the discussion is, first, a normative ideal of the female body as a condition for being there in the field; second, womens TV talk as a form of reflexivity; and third, outpouring emotions as an effect of the research interview. The article suggests that methodological reflections on the body, TV talk, and emotion could combine to yield a better understanding of the process by which we come to theorize the relationship between women, television, and everyday life.

Mobile phone for empowerment? Global nannies in Paris

Feminization of migration has emerged as a common livelihood strategy to alleviate poverty and escape difficult socio-economic, cultural, and familial situations. Mobile phones have become the most crucial and pervasive communication device that enables migrants to be simultaneously mobile and connected, anytime and anywhere. Is the mobile phone empowering or disempowering as a new form of social control? Based on a long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this study presents a case for the importance of the detailed investigation of everyday contexts and power relations to better understand the complexities of mobile phone use in work life. This study will argue that, far from an instrument of empowerment, the mobile phone can work to reinforce already existing power relations and mundane social structures, leading to more unequal and enslaving relationships in work life.

Diasporic daughters and digital media: ‘willing to go anywhere for a while’

ABSTRACT This study explores the paradoxes of digital media as place-making practices in the lived and mediated experiences of relatively silent or invisible groups of migrants – educated and highly mobile generations of Korean, Japanese and Chinese women in London. One of the striking features in the transformational nature of international migration today is the salience of provisionality and the nomadic symptom (‘willing to go anywhere for a while’), as evident among the East Asian women in this study. Underlying the processes of circulatory migration flows, modes of social organization and transnational experiences are the accelerated globalization of digital media, Internet and its time–space compressing capacity. As this study will argue, todays circulatory migration and provisional diaspora is significantly enabled, and driven in part, by the strategic and mundane use of mediated cultural spaces, through which movements are not necessarily limited but are likely to increase in their impact, and further sustained in various transnational contexts, albeit with unintended consequences. The electronic mediation of Internet plays a significant role not just in facilitating the ongoing physical mobility and possibly maintaining its long-term durability, but also crucially in constituting and changing the way in which diasporic lives and subject positions are experienced and felt in otherwise a sense of placeless-ness. New spaces, connections and various capacities of mobility are now changing not only the scale and patterns of migration but also the nature of migrant experience and thinking, and therefore the complex conditions of identity formation.

Digital media for intimacy?: Asian nannies’ transnational mothering in Paris

ABSTRACT Based on a long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this study presents the complexities of digital media use in the management of personal space and relational life by exploring how migrant mothers struggle to deal with transnational mothering. It critically analyses the potentials and limitations of digital media, mobile phones and the Internet in particular, in creating intimacy in material and symbolic ways across transnational spaces. It will argue that, while the perpetual connectivity of digital media in family life may appear to serve as an instrument of intimacy and empowerment for migrant mothers, it can also become new sources of digital fatigue and morality, double burdens and anxieties about the uncertain consequences of transnational communications.

Digital media and intergenerational migration: Nannies from the global south

ABSTRACT Based on long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this study explores the possibilities and limitations of digital media use for minorities, given that more and more young women from the global south engage with digital media. It will argue that transnational relations and practices are not necessarily and inevitably a progressive process, but pose new yet often risky opportunities more than freedoms, or foster a normalization of risk.