Hae-Yeon Choo - "Translating Rights into Practice: Sex/Work for Filipina Migrant Women in South Korea"

* Center for East Asian Studies Issues in Contemporary East Asia Colloquium, co-sponsored by the James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies

Hae-Yeon Choo, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto

Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this talk will comparatively examine Filipina migrant women in two sectors of the labor market – manufacturing and club hostessing – to investigate the gendered process of translating formal rights into practice. Although South Korea’s short-term-rotation guestworker policy and restrictive immigration laws contain both migrant factory workers and migrant hostesses in their segregated migrant neighborhoods, the organization of their work and the unique forms of civil society mobilization in each site shaped migrant women’s practice of rights in distinct ways. I argue that differences across these two groups experiences of substantive citizenship were generated by societal understandings of gender and work, according to which Filipina migrant women were recognized as “women workers” in the manufacturing sector but as feminized and infantilized “working girls” in the camptown clubs.