Brokering Belonging: A Duoethnography of Sisterhood, Stigma, and Siblinghood Across Borders

• In Event: Intersectional Disability Justice Critical Autoethnographic Counter-Histories as Living Archive

Abstract

Objectives
This study employs a collective dialogic diary, articulated through duoethnography, to examine how two sisters of brothers with intellectual and developmental disabilities—one a 1.5th generation Korean-American immigrant living in the United States, the other residing in South Korea—have navigated, resisted, and ultimately re-scripted the systemic forces that shaped their childhood through adult identities. We trace a full arc from early childhood through adulthood, foregrounding the tacit labor of sibling brokers (Authors, 2024), a role largely marginalized within discourses of disability and special education systems.
Perspectives
Anchored in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Korean feminist thought, our analysis positions critical consciousness and cross-sibling solidarity as liberatory counterforces (Delgado, 1989; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). We map how learning spaces—college classrooms engaging disability discourse, disability-justice collectives (Berne et al., 2018), and sibling peer networks—offered conceptual tools to interrogate previously naturalized forms of oppression.
Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources
Through sustained dialogic analysis (Sullivan, 2011) via collective diary, we illuminate how migration, language, and policy regimes recalibrate siblings’ relationships to caregiving, advocacy, and self-conception. The collective diary itself becomes a decolonial method: “Naming the world” together, we transform internalized trauma into public critique and (re)claim narrative agency. Material anchors such as food, public transit, and school corridors reappear as palimpsests where trauma, pride, and resistant joy co-exist, demonstrating that memory is always embodied and politically charged.
Substantiated Conclusion
Our shared generational experience unfolds first within South Korea, a context where ableism is veiled by moralist and medicalized discourses (Andrews, 2017) and where patriarchal norms cast siblings—especially daughters—as silent caretakers and emotional shock absorbers. Close readings of our diary entries surface recurring patterns of public stigma and 체면 (“saving face”), episodic self-erasure, and the intergenerational transmission of shame (Goffman, 2009). These themes reveal how social institutions—schools, faith-based organizations, transit systems, and clinical settings—simultaneously disciplined our families and constituted the epistemic horizon through which we understood disability.
A critical breakpoint emerges when one author emigrates to the United States at the age of thirteen, creating a natural experiment in transnational comparison. Juxtaposing our post-migration trajectories exposes both continuities and ruptures: While U.S. special-education structures offered new legal rights language, they reproduced racialized ableism that reinscribed shame in different keys; conversely, the sister who remained in Korea negotiated intensified neoliberal pressures to secure private therapies amid scarce public supports.
Scholarly Significance
Our findings contribute to three interventions. First, they re-center siblings as complex cultural and affective agents, not auxiliary supports. Second, they advance duoethnography as a methodology that couples rigorous reflexivity with political commitment, challenging Western, resilience-focused framings of sibling adjustment. Third, they theorize “sibling brokering” as a gendered, transnational practice shaped by intersecting regimes of ableism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. By making visible—and critiquing—the structures that produced our pain, we enact what we advocate: The reclamation of voice through collective vulnerability (Authors, 2019), critical education, and solidaristic praxis. In doing so, we illustrate how liberatory storytelling can transmute personal memory into a shared framework for dismantling the very systems that once scripted our silence.

Authors

• Jane Y. Jeong, University of Texas at Austin

• Minji Lee, Ewha Womans University