Decentering Citizenship

This five-minute mini lecture outlines themes from the book, Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea, by Professor Hae Yeon Choo, published by Stanford University Press in 2016.

Dr. Choo writes - “This book explores the spaces—what I call the “margins of citizenship”—where migrants negotiate their rights, entitlements, and belonging. Margins are the spaces that defy a simple binary of inclusion and exclusion, occupying uncertain and indeterminate edge. They are, feminist theorist bell hooks argues, “more than a site of deprivation”; margins are “the site of space of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” (2016 p. 15).

Based on 18 months of ethnographic research, Dr. Choo puts forward a comparative, intersectional study of three groups of Filipina women living in South Korea - Factory workers, women married to South Korean men and women working as hostesses for American military camptown clubs, excluded from both of these pathways. 

“Migrant citizenship is not simply determined by legal status and political categories; it is also shaped by interactive processes of translating the formal rights into practice through encounters among migrants, civil society groups, and the state” (Choo, 2016, p.18).