Life's work and the gendered processes of migrant precarity: the case of Mongolian migrant women in Seoul, South Korea

Sottini, Martina Vittoria (2024) Life's work and the gendered processes of migrant precarity: the case of Mongolian migrant women in Seoul, South Korea. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Text Download (8MB)

Abstract

In this thesis, I identify and explain the empirical processes - namely citizenship-making, labour differentiation, and ethnicisation - which reproduce the various forms of gendered precarity that Mongolian migrant women experience in Korea. I explain how these three processes are interconnected, and mutually exacerbate the legal, labour, and social precarity they each reproduce. By focusing on Mongolian marriage and labour migrant women, I illustrate how different groups of migrants navigate and mitigate these processes and their outcomes in distinct ways. With the concept of Life’s Work at the centre of my conceptual framework, and gender as a complementary conceptual lens, this thesis is based on approximately six months of qualitative fieldwork in the Seoul metropolitan area, split across two phases between October 2021 and May 2022. Conducting fieldwork whilst COVID-19 measures were still in place, I adopted life-story, in-depth, and semi-structured interviews as key methods. Interviews were conducted in person and online with Mongolian marriage and labour migrant women In this thesis, I firstly argue that the empirical process of citizenship-making, which is deeply informed by gendered expectations determining migrant women’s value in Korea’s visa system, contributes to the social reproduction of Life’s Work in the form of legal precarity. Secondly, I show that pre-existing material structural barriers, stemming from the social structure and relations of gender, reproduce the devaluation of migrant women’s market value, which in turns results in migrant women’s labour precarity, which I define as the devaluation of their human capital and subsequent marginalisation into visa-specific precarious segments of the labour market. Finally, I argue that the everyday process of ethnicisation that Mongolian marriage and labour migrant women deal with, contributes to the social reproduction of Life’s Work by reproducing everyday social precarity. By social precarity, I am referring to the social hierarchisation of Mongolian women on the basis of their nationality and ethnic traits, and gender.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Martina Vittoria Sottini
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Shin, Hyun Bang and Mercer, Claire
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4792

Actions (login required)

Record administration - authorised staff only