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Book Cover
E-book
Author Freeman, Caren, 1968-

Title Making and faking kinship : marriage and labor migration between China and South Korea / Caren Freeman
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2011
©2011

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 263 pages) : illustrations, map
Contents Chosŏnjok maidens and farmer bachelors -- Brides and brokers under suspicion -- Gender logics in conflict -- Faking kinship -- Flexible families, fragile marriages -- A failed national experiment?
Summary In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosǒnjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems but also as a patriotic project of reuniting ethnic Koreans after nearly fifty years of Cold War separation. As Caren Freeman's fieldwork in China and South Korea shows, the attempt to bridge the geopolitical divide in the name of Korean kinship proved more difficult than any of the parties involved could have imagined. Discriminatory treatment, artificially suppressed wages, clashing gender logics, and the criminalization of so-called runaway brides and undocumented workers tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity and exposed the contradictions at the heart of South Korea's transnational kin-making project. Unlike migrant brides who could acquire citizenship, migrant workers were denied the rights of long-term settlement, and stringent "as restricted their entry. As a result, many Chosǒnjok migrants arranged paper marriages and fabricated familial ties to South Korean citizens to bypass the state apparatus of border control. Making and Faking Kinship depicts acts of "counterfeit kinship," false documents, and the leaving behind of spouses and children as strategies implemented by disenfranchised people to gain mobility within the region's changing political economy
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Print version record
Subject Intercountry marriage -- Korea (South)
Intercountry marriage -- China
Women immigrants -- Korea (South)
Foreign workers, Chinese -- Korea (South)
Rural families -- Korea (South)
Family policy -- Korea (South)
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy -- Cultural Policy.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture.
Family policy
Foreign workers, Chinese
Intercountry marriage
Rural families
Women immigrants
China
Korea (South)
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780801462818
0801462819
9780801462825
0801462827