Yoonjung Kang

Yoonjung Kang received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her doctoral dissertation, A Plurality of Care: The Politics of Postpartum Care Practices in Contemporary South Korea, 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 care modalities in the increasingly marketized childbirth culture, the ethnography discusses 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. Her research interests include childbirth/reproduction, women’s health, care, biomedicine, ethnomedicine, public health, and the global medical and healthcare market. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea). She was also the recipient of the Korea Foundation Graduate Studies Fellowship (2010-12).