The Story of Minh: The Lifeworld of a Marriage-Labor Immigrant Mother
AUTHOR : MinSoo Kim-Bossard
INFORMATION : page. 1~26 / 2016 Vol.10 No.3
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I investigate how Minh, as an immigrant mother, accepts, resists, and transforms
available Korean cultural discourses about mothering. With the goal of exploring and understanding
the discourses about mothering that pertain to immigrant families in Korea, I examine how local,
national, and international histories of race, gender, class, citizenship, nationality, and culture shape
the discourses of mothering in Korea. Through this process, the paper addresses the intersection
between the discourses about mothering and marriage-labor immigrant families in the Korean context.
To examine disparities and contradictions that emerged from my multiple ethnographic interviews
with Minh between 2013 and 2015, I use Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia as an analytic tool. The
paper concludes by discussing the need for establishing renewed perspectives on the role of
“Koreanness,” the complexities of marriage-labor immigrants’ lifeworlds, and mothering as cultural,
emotional, and affective labor.
Keyword :
immigration,mothering,Korea,heteroglossia
Theoretical Framework
Findings
Discussion: Navigating Different Voices as an Immigrant Mother
