A Plurality of Care: The Politics of Postpartum Care Practices in Contemporary South Korea

This talk examines South Korean mothers’ postpartum care practices which have been dramatically reframed through the recent emergence of the postpartum care market, that is the postpartum care facility (sanhujoriwǒn) and the postpartum home-care help (sanhudoumi). Unraveling how Korean traditional postpartum beliefs and behaviors are rearticulated as invaluable maternal care modalities in the increasingly marketized childbirth culture, I will discuss the (re)making of norms and ideologies of the female reproductive body, gender, class, family/kinship, and the state in the neoliberal context of South Korea. By doing so, I will further contemplate on the notion of care. What is care? Who is responsible for giving care and who is eligible for receiving care? Shedding light on various meanings and practices of care in the Korean postpartum care scene, I will discuss how the concept of care can be used to better understand human lives and society.

Yoonjung Kang is Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include childbirth/reproduction, women’s health, care, biomedicine, ethnomedicine, public health, and the global medical and healthcare market. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, tentatively titled A Plurality of Care: Women, Childbirth, and Health in Contemporary South Korea.