Let’s
talk about how so many writers lazily toss around Confucianism and its’ impact
on gender roles in Korean society. Let’s pursue alternate, more complicated and
more rigorous discussions of Korean society. At stake is not only intellectual rigor, but the pursuit of mutual understanding that can only be achieved when we stop recklessly dismissing cultures when we could be building solidarity. Although there are many pieces in
which we encounter the assertion that Korean gender roles are Confucian, I am going to point to a piece by
Megan Harper who recently contributed
“THE FEAR OF BECOMING A HOUSEWIFE” to Groove Magazine.
Harper writes (emphasis mine),
“This year, I married a Korean man. He isn’t “Korean-Korean,” which
is our code to mean he is comfortable with the ways of life outside of the
peninsula.”
"He
understands the limits that Confucianism places on women and tries his hardest
to understand my expectations of equality."
"I
have met many women with advanced degrees in subjects such as Russian
literature, Chinese and graphic design who abandon all career goals once they
marry. Or maybe it is because many of the young women I work with consider
university to be simply a way to meet a wealthy man and become his housewife."
"What
I was not prepared for, though, was the depth of his parents’ gender roles, my
feelings toward their way of life and the effect these things would have on my
ability to relate to his parents. It is hard to hide my discomfort when I see
my mother-in-law prepare a beautiful dinner that her husband has half eaten
before she even has a chance to sit down. I cannot understand why she tolerates
this lack of family assistance. Although I am embarrassed by my own
narrow-mindedness, this type of event, and my perception of her, makes it very
difficult for me to relate to her; my own refusal to take on the “housewife”
role has made it hard for me to embrace this woman.
I
know that traditional gender roles continue to exist in my own culture, but
they feel much more limiting in Korea. Perhaps it is because, as an outsider,
they are easier to see."
When
I hear similar comments from Americans (ex. I frequently hear something
like "At Chuseok all the men drank and all the women cooked
and cleaned, can you believe how sexist Korea is?") I add this bit of
analysis: Perhaps it is easier to see Korean women this way because I was
raised in a culture that stereotypes Asian women, I was raised falsely to think
that my culture has the 'most' gender equality, I was raised in a culture
willfully blind its own exploitation of Asian women. It is important for people from my culture to unlearn some of the racism and nationalism we were raised with. .
TO
SUMMARIZE the piece, the author (not Korean) discusses a process of negotiating gender
role expectations with her (Korean, but not so-called “Korean-Korean) husband. The
author also reflects on her own attitude toward her (I guess the author would
say, “Korean-Korean”) “traditional” mother-in-law’s gender role and Korean women's sacrifices
for family. The piece emphasizes a link between “traditional Korean” (Confucian)
culture and gender role expectations, contrasting this with only the briefest of references to her own culture. Her unnamed and largely un-examined culture is not subjected to the same lens. The key words used to describe women and her home culture include: equality, independent, respectable, equalized gender roles, etc.
Honestly, at first I wanted to get behind the
effort the author says she is putting into understanding her mother-in-law, but
ultimately found the piece somewhat offensive and the cultural explanations
kind of lazy and stereotypical. This is no doubt because SO
MUCH of our dialog in English-language literature talks about Korea in this
way. I struggle to find English newspapers abroad that don’t talk about Confucianism in every piece about Korea, even when it is about a plane crash >.< Even many Korean friends and classmates will
emphasize Confucianism instead of other explanations possibly because it has become a quick and easy way to describe and emphasize perceived differences. Back to what the Grand Narrative dubbed
the author concludes,
"I
hope to share with others my unexpected limit in understanding that arises from
my own gender role expectations. Regardless of my mother-in-law’s reasoning, it
is futile for me to judge her. I will strive to respect her for the sacrifices
she has made while using my own life to demonstrate equalized gender roles."
FIRST and FOREMOST I have to critique the way that the author positions her life as a demonstration of equalized gender roles to her mother-in-law. Despite prior reflections on trying to be open-minded, the piece asserts a instructive superiority of a not 'Korean-Korean' life and mindset over a 'Korean-Korean' life and mindset. The author also leaves out a lot of incredibly important context about these so-called 'equalized gender roles.' This
discussion may also reveal our blindness to our own privileges and complicity
in exploitation that we externalize and blame on others and other cultures.
LET’S
START with how not unique to Korea it is to have a mother-in-law that does the
majority of the housework or who has ‘traditional’ views about gender,
motherhood or being a wife. Personal disclosure, I recently married an American
man and my mother-in-law and I have some quite different and some shared views
about culture and gender roles even though our citizenship is the same. Before
my partner, I once lived with a long-term with a partner and his mother who
migrated to the US from Mexico. My partner’s mother and I also had some
different and some shared attitudes about culture and gender roles despite not
having the same citizenship. I lived in a homestay in Korea for over a year,
and once again similar and different ideas about gender roles. My mom did all
the cooking and cleaning except for once a week when my father typically
ordered in food and dumped trash. Guess what, if you are raised by a single mom
(as I later was, and as my cousins were), who is it that is doing the cooking
and cleaning? I bet it is usually still mom and not dad. Thinking
about the men in my life growing up, I have an uncle who migrated from Greece
to the U.S. Another uncle migrated from Iraq. During all of the Catholic,
Jewish, Orthodox Catholic, and Islamic holidays, also during the Chuseoks,
Thanksgivings, the quinceañeras, even during the national holidays and other
special occasions that I have attended and participated in, women did the
cooking, the cleaning, the care and love work.
NEXT,
the author is worried about becoming a Korean housewife and wants to keep
working. I would like to see a follow-up reflection by the author on how she
engages her husband, husband’s boss, her boss and most importantly her mother-in-law
or possibly a nanny in a few years when she wants to keep working and is
struggling to find daycare. Will grandma be more relatable or her gender role
more appreciated when the time comes to make that decision? Though, I honestly really
hope we don’t need that reflection because I hope SOME administration will
start taking social welfare policy seriously.
I sense
a rebuttal: So you say American women and European women's workforce participation
has surged? Let's break that down a bit, too. Women in my family, a grandma or
an aunt not working outside the home, absolutely took on the care work while
both or a single parent were working. Let's look at broader social trends. At
the same time that women's workforce participation in the US and Europe has
surged, simultaneously world migration trends reflect a major shift toward a
majority of migrants being female? In origin societies we see complex family
decisions over whether or not to send daughters and wives abroad for migration
to destination states in Europe and the Americas. Migration patterns all over
the world are pushed by gender roles that haven’t changed THAT much in the ‘West’
and by economic competition that compels all sorts of changes in societies. What
work are female migrant laborers doing? Largely care, reproductive and sexual
labor. How many affluent households in the U.S, in Western Europe, in Korea and
Japan are replacing middle and upper-class family housewives with migrant or
increasingly 'competitive market-solution' labor like fast food, boutique
daycare, dry cleaners, etc.? I love all the fancy jargon we (myself included!)
use to glorify and add scientific weigh to our own cultural solutions while we
dismiss other countries for having ‘traditional’ or in this case ‘Confucian’
solutions.
FINALLY,
let’s get to Confucianism. I don't think the author understands Confucianism
and how it has transformed and been transformed by Korean society. Nor do I
think the author tries to think of other explanations besides Confucianism. The
Confucian card is over played and we are missing out on better explanations. Too
often, writers use Confucianism as a neat and tidy quick way to dismiss
something in Korea as essentially 'pre-modern' while simultaneously failing to
make any further inquiry into Korea's modern history and society.
In
particular, let’s drop the 'backward Confucian Korea' trope and seek more
nuanced explanations. Frankly, in the context of this piece, the Confucian
trope pretends that all issues in Korean society today are 'pre-modern' and
tied to some ingrained sexist cultural/religious though pattern. I think that
bit of explanation is tidily left off because that would implicate modern
structures all over the world and also require consideration of Korea's
colonial and occupied recent history. In turn, this ignores the role of
government intrusion into family life in modern Korean history, and especially
the mobilization of family and housewife for a decidedly neo-liberal
international market. Was Park Chung Hee acting in accordance with Confucianism
or aligning policy with the cold war and international markets?
Furthermore,
is that mobilization of women and family an isolated experience in Korea? No.
Even seen a poster of Rosie the Riveter? Or a war-time volunteer nurse? Or a
Red Cross volunteer knitting socks? Oh, those examples are too distant and you
don’t want to compare US and Europe in WWII to post-colonial and Korean War
recover era Korean workforce mobilization? What happens to American and
European women during recession? Hours and benefits cut to keep “more people at
work” rather than all-out cutting jobs? Funny how we keep reading that women
and people of color in America are disproportionately losing benefits and
having hours cut.
Like
the Americas and Europe, Korea has also had mobilization of women for home
labor, for labor in manufacturing and unpaid care labor for troops, students,
husbands and sons, and so has every other country ever. How can we use
Confucianism as the sole explanation for anything in Korean society while
ignoring the influences of religion (Protestantism anyone?), Japanese colonial
state education of women for low pay low skilled labor (Thank you NEW RIGHT textbook revisionism,
what a TRIUMPH that was for gender equality), US-ROK economic ties and
international markets that mobilized men abroad to wars and oil fields, rapid
modernization pressures and lacking social safety nets. I don't have a full
explanation, but lazily tossing around "Confucianism" isn't good
enough and we need to start a better dialog about societies. More urgently, we
need to keep promoting less offensive conversations about Korean women, men and
their families. Not just on blogs but also in news media and academia, too.
Maybe
in Korean society we need a dose of something similar to what intersectional
feminism and the recent #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen dialog represent in the US. As
feminists, let’s stop dismissing other women’s culture and start listening. This dialog would be a vital precondition for really working together to face inequality and other challenges we face in our societies.
I’m
guilty of some laziness too, that’s why I need to keep listening, studying, reflecting and looking for other
viewpoints. Re-reading some of my posts on this blog, I realize that in my living
and studying process I’ve changed my views quite a lot over the past 14 months
of blogging about gender and Korean society. Thank you to readers and critics and friends for your dialog. Since I know I am also in a privileged space
where I can access information as my full-time occupation, to spread some of that
around, here is a short reading list that inspires much of what I have written here:
Chang,
KS and MY Song. 2010. “The stranded individualizer under compressed modernity:
South Korean women in individualization without individualism” The British
Journal of Sociology 61(3): 539-564.
Cheng,
Sealing. "Sexual Protection, Citizenship and Nationhood: Prostituted Women
and Migrant Wives in South Korea," Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies. Vol. 37, No. 10, Dec. 2011.
Cho,
Uhn, “The Encroachment of Globalization into Intimate Life: The Flexible Korean
Family in “Economic Crisis”” Korea Journal 45(3), 2005.
Cho,
Joo-hyun. “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work: Post-IMF Korean Society and the
Construction of Neo-liberal Women” Korea Journal 49(3): 2009.
Nelson,
Laura, “Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South
Korea,” 2000.
Parreñas,
Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work,
published by Stanford University Press, 2001.
Kim,
Hyun Mee. "The State and Migrant Women: Diverging Hopes in the Making of
“Multicultural Families” in Contemporary Korea" in Korea Journal, Winter
2007.
Yi,
Eunhee Kim, “’Home is a Place to Rest’: Constructing the Meaning of Work,
Family and Gender in the Korean Middle Class,” Korea Journal 38(2), 1998.
