Mothering as Laboring: Navigating Cultural Discourses of Mothering as Marriage-Labor Immigrants in Korea

This paper examines the ways in which marriage-labor immigrants manage, facilitate, and fulfill discourses about mothering in Korea by giving birth to and raising children. Through a series of semi-structured ethnographic interviews, go-along interviews, and fieldwork with marriage-labor immigrants in Korea in 2013, 2014, and 2015, I investigated the emergent tension and anxiety around the recent demographic changes in Korea and the subsequent impact on discourses about mothering. This paper concludes by exploring the implications of how the reproductive and affective labor of marriage-labor immigrants functions in contemporary Korea to facilitate cultural discourses about gender, lineage, and national identity.