Books by Hae Yeon Choo
Decentering Citizenship follows three groups of Filipina migrants' struggles to belong in South K... more Decentering Citizenship follows three groups of Filipina migrants' struggles to belong in South Korea: factory workers claiming rights as workers, wives of South Korean men claiming rights as mothers, and hostesses at American military clubs who are excluded from claims—unless they claim to be victims of trafficking. Moving beyond laws and policies, Hae Yeon Choo examines how rights are enacted, translated, and challenged in daily life and ultimately interrogates the concept of citizenship.
Choo reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Her vivid ethnography of both migrants and their South Korean advocates illuminates how social inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation operate in defining citizenship. Decentering Citizenship argues that citizenship emerges from negotiations about rights and belonging between South Koreans and migrants. As the promise of equal rights and full membership in a polity erodes in the face of global inequalities, this decentering illuminates important contestation at the margins of citizenship.
Gender & Society Blog Post, based on Decentering Citizenship
Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2019
Papers by Hae Yeon Choo
Feminist Formations, 2021
Urban Studies, 2021
Since the 1960s, urban South Korea has seen a series of real estate booms characterised by a huge... more Since the 1960s, urban South Korea has seen a series of real estate booms characterised by a huge surge in the construction of apartment complexes and skyrocketing housing prices. In this environment, many South Koreans have begun to view their homes as a source of profit-making. Through in-depth interviews, I examine how women in South Korea have emerged as agents of this urban transformation by engaging in 'speculative homemaking', an activity that merges the domestic work of household management with the work of real estate speculation. This article investigates how South Korean women's gendered practices are embedded in the larger landscape of women's work for class mobility and reproduction, highlighting class-divergent pathways to homeownership that are propelled by distinct affect-fear, anxiety and ease. Demonstrating how speculative logic pervades the domestic and the everyday, this article foregrounds the significance of gendered labour and affect for the study of urban processes and class formation.
This article uses ethnographic research to examine the intimate labor of South Korean middle-clas... more This article uses ethnographic research to examine the intimate labor of South Korean middle-class women who volunteer in immigrant integration programs for migrant women entering South Korea via cross-border marriages. I show that volunteers participate in South Korea's nation-building project under globalization as the ''maternal guardians'' of migrant women, thus challenging their own gender-based subordination while sustaining the racial and class hierarchy and the heteronormativity of the Korean nation. These women use intimate knowledge about migrant women as a medium to pursue respect in the face of gendered discontent and transform themselves as new global South Korean citizens.
Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article investigates the gendered production ... more Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article investigates the gendered production of migrant rights under the global regime of temporary migration by examining two groups of Filipina women: factory workers and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Emphasizing gendered labor processes and symbolic politics, this article offers an analytical framework to interrogate the mechanisms through which a discrepancy of rights is generated at the intersection of workplace organization and civil society mobilization. I identify two distinct labor regimes for migrant women that were shaped in the shadow of working men. Migrant women in the factories labored in the company of working men on the shop floor, which enabled them to form a co-ethnic migrant community and utilize the male-centered bonding between workers and employers. In contrast, migrant hostesses were isolated and experienced gendered stigma under the paternalistic rule of employers. Divergent forms of civil society mobilization in South Korea sustained these regimes: Migrant factory workers received recognition as workers without attention to gender-specific concerns while hostesses were construed as women victims in need of protection. Thus, Filipina factory workers were able to exercise greater labor rights by sharing the dignity of workers as a basis for their rights claims from which hostesses were excluded.
Based on ethnographic research in an US military camp town in South Korea, this article examines ... more Based on ethnographic research in an US military camp town in South Korea, this article examines camp town sexual commerce as a manifestation of shifting global hierarchies amid Asia's economic ascendance and the decline of US hegemony. Challenging the dichotomous constructions of US GIs as powerful agents and of migrant club hostesses as trafficked victims, the author highlights their shared conditions of “indentured mobility” as constrained subjects bound by migrant labor contracts in their quest for mobility. Revisiting the persisting power asymmetry between US GIs and migrant hostesses, the author's ethnography reveals the ways in which power differentials are deployed by hostesses and club owners as a resource to incite the discourse of benevolence and rescue that attracts US GI customers to the clubs. By engaging the US military camp town as a space of migrant encounter, this article illuminates how global geopolitics, uneven capitalist development, and transnational migration are entangled with intimacy, power, and emotions to shape intimate labor at a critical juncture of the changing global order.
Gender & Society, Aug 2013
Theories of citizenship have largely focused on the provision of rights by law and policy measure... more Theories of citizenship have largely focused on the provision of rights by law and policy measures, as if rights are universally beneficial and cost-free and the invitations of rights will be accepted once offered. I challenge this assumption and highlight the need to empirically address how people negotiate with the benefit and cost of claiming rights. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article delves into the everyday lives of migrant women in two feminized sectors of migration—cross-border marriage and sexual commerce—to situate the act of claiming rights in relation to the gendered pursuit of moral respect. I show that feminist groups in South Korea relied on the discourse of victimization and trafficking in pressuring the South Korean state to account for the human rights of migrant wives and migrant hostesses, while reinforcing the moral hierarchy that renders problematic migrant women’s work and intimate relationships. I argue that the distinctive material and moral costs that accompanied human rights–based provisions compelled migrant wives and hostesses to pursue divergent paths in seeking alternate bases to citizenship that would support their inclusion as moral equals.
Sociological Theory, 2010
In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoreti... more In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. What are the implications for choices of subject matter and style of work? We distinguish three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. The first, emphasizes placing multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives at the center of the research. The second, intersectionality as a process, highlights power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups. Finally, seeing intersectionality as shaping the entire social system pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institutions, instead looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. Using several examples of recent, highly regarded qualitative studies, we draw attention to the comparative, contextual, and complex dimensions of sociological analysis that can be missing even when race, class, and gender are explicitly brought together.
This article offers an integrative review of the literature on women's migration for domestic wor... more This article offers an integrative review of the literature on women's migration for domestic work and cross-border marriages in East and Southeast Asia. By bringing these two bodies of literature into dialogue, we illuminate the interconnected processes that shape two key forms of women's migration that are embedded in the reproduction of women's domesticity. We highlight structural analyses of the demographic and socio-economic shifts that propel women's migration while also attending to the affective dimension of migrant women's desires and duties and to the brokerages that mediate the migrant flow. We finally examine how migrant wives and domestic workers contest the boundary of citizenship as they claim their full personhood against divergent modes of control over their rights, bodies, and mobility. We conclude by pointing out concrete areas where the two sets of literature can enrich each other for future research on gender, labor, and migration.
Gender & Society, 2006
This article explores the gendered construction of South Korean citizenship through the lens of N... more This article explores the gendered construction of South Korean citizenship through the lens of North Korean settlers' experiences in South Korea. Drawing on ethnographic research, the author delves into the citizen-making process, critically examining the impact of gendered modernizing projects on North Korean settlers' daily lives. North Korean settlers are expected to get rid of their ethnic markers and transform themselves into modern citizen-subjects of South Korea. The author demonstrates that the overall frame of perception of North Korean settlers is deeply gendered, with modernity as a powerful ethnic marker. The notion of ethnicized citizenship in the context of two Koreas offers a concrete account of how ethnicities are created and employed in stratified structure of citizenship.
Pp. 128-143, In Inequality & The Politics of Representation: A Global Landscape, edited by Celine-Marie Pascale. New York: Sage., 2013
Teaching Documents by Hae Yeon Choo
This course will explore how we connect our social interactions, family histories, and daily live... more This course will explore how we connect our social interactions, family histories, and daily lives to the historical moment and social forces. It will offer a sociological journey from finding a research question about inequality, learning from literature, and refine the craft of sociological writing. In the process we will ask: How do we practice "the sociological imagination" of C.W. Mills, seeing our personal lives through a sociological lens, embedded in history and politics? How do we develop sociological questions that matter-to ourselves and to society? And how do we learn to build on other scholars and thinkers in our quest to answer our own questions?
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Books by Hae Yeon Choo
Choo reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Her vivid ethnography of both migrants and their South Korean advocates illuminates how social inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation operate in defining citizenship. Decentering Citizenship argues that citizenship emerges from negotiations about rights and belonging between South Koreans and migrants. As the promise of equal rights and full membership in a polity erodes in the face of global inequalities, this decentering illuminates important contestation at the margins of citizenship.
Papers by Hae Yeon Choo
Teaching Documents by Hae Yeon Choo
Choo reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Her vivid ethnography of both migrants and their South Korean advocates illuminates how social inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation operate in defining citizenship. Decentering Citizenship argues that citizenship emerges from negotiations about rights and belonging between South Koreans and migrants. As the promise of equal rights and full membership in a polity erodes in the face of global inequalities, this decentering illuminates important contestation at the margins of citizenship.