Privileged Pariahs: Wives of Korean Professional Expatriates in the United Arab Emirates

• In Event: 1564 - Gender and Immigration

Abstract

Scholars have long examined the ways in which migrants integrate in the host society. Through the traditional theories of assimilation and integration, migrants’ tendency to settle has been a subtle assumption within the literature. However, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a unique case in which traditional avenues of incorporation are unavailable to migrants due to exclusionary policies and a jus sanguinis form of citizenship, thereby enforcing the temporary nature of the migrants. In this paper, I ask how mothers married to professional expatriates cope in a host country given their temporary nature. I focus on the wives of high-skilled employees in the Korean companies, who migrate with their families as intracompany transferees on a three to five year contracts. Based on 33 in-depth interviews conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, UAE, I find that these women shape their diasporic subjectivities as “supporters” to inform the navigation of their daily lives. In the experience of marginalization, they cope through reliance on limited social networks, strategic actions of class differentiation under consumer citizenship, and institutional norms and cultural constraints that relegate them to confined agency with intensified motherhood and wifehood.

Author

• Hee Eun Kwon, University of California, San Diego