Diaspora, Nationalism and Women: Transnational Nationalism and Korean American Women’S Writings
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International Journal of Global Diaspora Studies 2016. Vol. 2, No. 1 Website: www.wadis.or.kr Diaspora, Nationalism and Women: Transnational Nationalism and Korean American Women’s Writings Kyonghwan Park Department of Geography Education, Chonnam National University (Accepted February 20, 2016; published February 28, 2016) For the last decades, South Korea propelled to mobilize transnational nationalism to appropriate Korean diaspora space and resources for national purpose. Diaspora space is not just a marginal space of expatriate migrants. Rather, the nation-state can capture the transnational social space of diaspora to construct flexible networks of transnational capitalism. This paper explored how diaspora could be appropriated for nationalism, and conducted textual analysis of two Korean American women’s writing. The analysis showed that their voices were not politically organized in terms of critical diasporic consciousness. Rather, they were blurred and subsumed in Korean nationalist narratives. I assume that the relative absence of radical feminist voices in their writings were resulted by the gendered nature of transnational nationalism. Key words: Korean American, diaspora, transnational nationalism, gender, South Korea 1. Introduction Since the last decades, Korean diasporic communities have experienced a rapid resur- rection of Korean nationalism, which is related to both South Korean governmental institutions and Korean diasporic organizations. Accentuating “national competence for the globalized capitalist society” (Overseas Koreans Foundation 1997: 6), the South Korean government has employed strong nationalist discourses to appropriate human, capital and organizational resources of overseas Korean communities for its national development (Park 2009). This national movement implies that transnational social space of diasporic communities is not necessarily an alternative space to the nation-state. Rather, it is always threatened by the potential possibility of being contested and negotiated by nationalism. 4 Kyonghwan Park Following Park’s (2009) recent argument on Korean nationalism, this paper regards recent Korean nationalism aimed to overarch Korean diaspora communities as ‘trans- national nationalism’. It subsequently investigates the ways in which the collective subjectivity of Korean American communities is transnationally produced. Especially, among those discourses surrounding contemporary Korean nationalism, I’ll focus on analyzing the discourse of the ‘Global Korean Network (GKN)’ initiated by the Overseas Korean Foundation (OKF) of South Korea (see also Park 2009). The principal goal of the GKN is to restore Korean national (or ethnic) identity throughout diasporic communities, to construct medium-ranged communication space for both South Korean communities and overseas Korean communities, and to maximize their political, economic and cultural synergy (Overseas Koreans Foundation 1997; 1998). However, as the nation-state itself is often problematized as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983), I assume that the collective subjectivity of diasporic communities would also involve certain process of marginalization of multiple differences such as gender, sexuality and hybridity. For theoretical basis, this paper focuses on ‘diaspora’ (and diasporic collectivity) and its relation to women, gender, and sexuality. For the empirical analysis, first, I will conduct discourse analysis of the GKN in the US context. Archives would include national regulations and laws on overseas Koreans (and Korean expatriates), political speeches of Korean bureaucrats (and officials) on overseas Koreans, and several forum proceedings on the GKN. The discourse analysis of this research will be as follows. How does the discourse of the GKN imagine the overseas Korean national identity in the US context? What is the socio-economic and political background of the discourse? Second, I will also analyze the social production of hybrid subjectivity in Korean American women’s autobiographic writings. The analysis is aimed at illuminating the repressed and marginalized voices of Korean American women. Third, by conducting textual analysis, this paper investigates how Korean women’s ‘gender’ is conceived and constructed among Korean American women. 2. Diaspora space and women This paper strategically conceptualizes Korean Americans as ‘diaspora’. It does so because the term is especially useful to elucidate what kinds of political, historical and geographic implications are internalized in the notion of migration. The concept of ‘diaspora’ is usually defined as ‘expatriate minority communities’ (Safran 1991), that are dispersed to multiple places, that contain collective myths about homeland or homing desire, that maintain a sense of exclusion from the host country, whose collective con- International Journal of Global Diaspora Studies 5 sciousness and solidarity are defined by their relations with the homeland (Safran 1991; Clifford 1994; Vertovec 1997). As ‘diaspora’ presupposes cultural and epistemological ‘in-betweenness’ as well as spatial displacement (Clifford 1992; 1994), the diasporic community as an ‘imagined community’ internalizes multiple, simultaneous and ambivalent relations with the home country and the hosting society (Hall 1994; Siu 2001). And, these variable ‘relationalities’ in which diasporic community is imagined and constructed also resonates specific socio-economic conditions (Brah 1996; Mitchell 1997). Based on the conceptualization of diaspora above, this paper considers Korean American communities as ‘diaspora space’. I operationally define it as a form of socio-spatial materialization of multiple diasporic relations. Diaspora space could be a strategic problematic to undermine descriptive and power-laden notions such as ‘ethnic enclave’, because it presupposes multiple socio-spatial relations that construct migrants’ social space as a ‘place’ (Anderson and Gale 1992; Duncan and Ley 1993). Therefore, diaspora space is located in a radical place for socialist, poststructural and postcolonial feminist geographers. It is so especially when we admit everything on the earth is essentially diasporic as well as hybrid. In this sense, the geography of diaspora space has epistemo- logical priority (and immanence) not only to enrich discussion on the articulation of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, but also not to disregard the dynamic fluidity of social relations in terms of on-going mobility and cultural ambivalence. In the following section, I’ll discuss some of the accomplished and possible (and possibly crucial) feminist geographies of diaspora space in terms of socialist, post-structural and postcolonial feminist viewpoints. First, in the US context, we can understand contemporary diasporic communities as a post-Fordist phenomenon related to the flexiblization and feminization of labor force since 1970s. Most of contemporary Asian immigrants since 1970s have been incorporated into the US economy as laborers in the process of post-Fordist economic restructuring, although there are also a considerable number of people who are self-employed as small- business entrepreneurs or employed in professional occupations (Soja 1989; Sassen 1999; Scott and Soja 1996). Ong et al. (1994) briefly enumerate some of socio-economic crises in the process of industrial restructuring; degradation of labor condition, corporate reorganization and innovation, surge of conservative ideology and new inequality. One of the conspicuous characteristics in the US labor market since 1970s was a significant degree of segregation by gender. It subsequently produced many occupations that are predominantly divided as male work and female work. Through both economic and institutional mechanisms, the gender composition of occupation influenced wage levels associated with gender rather than personal performance or other structural characteristics. As a result, wage became falling as the proportion of female workers gradually increased. 6 Kyonghwan Park Wage levels in un-skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing sphere have been kept low through this form of discrimination. In this context, Asian women laborers were located in the center of flexiblization of the US labor force. They frequently entered into the lowest niche of the pyramid structure in these wage levels. Ong and Azores (1994) clearly showed the ways in which a large number of foreign-trained Filipino nurses have immigrated into the US during this period. In this process, Asian women became crucial labor resources in the US labor market. Thus, diaspora space has become inseparable from the process of what McDowell (1991b) call as ‘feminization of labor market’. Further, ethnic labor market vis-à-vis female labor market has been also related to the colonial and racial gaze of power, as seen in the case of stereotyping Asian male ‘and’ females as feminine, submissive and meek. It could be suggested that the strand of gender-segmented labor market cannot be separated from racial (ethnicity-based) labor market. Although not precisely related to the feminization of segmented labor market in the US, massive Asian migrants and their small businesses have emerged also as visible economic actors of post-Fordist (or postmodern) urban spaces in the US. For example, Los Angeles during the period has experience a sheer expansion of its urban boundary. Initially, the peripheral suburban areas were converted from farms and ranches into bedroom com- munities for middle-income workers