Immigration, Mothering, and Disability: Problematizing Cultural Discourses About Marriage-Labor Immigrants in Korea

• In Event: Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Authoring Dis/ability: Meaning-Making, Lived Experience, and Discourse

Abstract

This paper investigates discourses of mothering that marriage-labor immigrant parents navigate in Korea through the lens of Disability Studies in Education. Through informant accounts collected through ethnographic interviews, go-along interviews, and fieldwork carried out in Korea between 2013 and 2015, I investigate how marriage-labor immigrants are perceived as “lacking” and “always already failing” in Korean society. The paper also examines the discourse that assumes the immigrant mothers to subsequently produce “lacking” children. Lastly, I challenge the causal relationship used to explain the “deficit” of the marriage-labor immigrant mothers and their children with perceived disabilities. The paper concludes by problematizing the link between authority of the disability and the cultural discourse about marriage-labor immigrant parents and children.

Author

• MinSoo Kim-Bossard, The College of New Jersey