Care as a Gift: The Double Grammar of Interdependence in Personal Assistance Services in Korea

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6. Care, Intimate Labor, and Social Reproduction

Abstract

Feminist scholars of care have long advanced interdependence as an ethical and political alternative to masculine and ableist ideals of autonomy. As this concept has increasingly circulated through global human rights discourses, it has come to be treated as a broadly shared ethical principle for sustainable societies. However, scant research examines how interdependence is translated into everyday practices in institutionalized care settings, particularly in non-Western welfare contexts. This article asks: how does interdependence become lived in institutional care relationships?

This article expands the questions within Bourdieu’s theory of gift exchange—especially his insights on temporal delay and ontological complicity. Accordingly, drawing on ethnographic and autoethnographic research on Personal Assistance Services (PAS) for people with severe developmental disabilities in South Korea (2018–2025), alongside an analysis of fifteen years of PAS policy documents, its analysis identifies a “double grammar of interdependence” that emerges when care ethics are institutionalized through feminized care labor. First, standardized training regimes inadequately prepare care providers for diverse and intensive needs, prompting workers to rely on moral feelings such as devotion, charity, and grace as practical resources to construct their illusion. Second, temporal delays in service interactions generate limited discretionary power for providers while simultaneously rendering that power unstable, as the possibility of non-reciprocation or relational rupture binds caregivers more deeply into relations of responsibility and dependence.

By showing how interdependence operates simultaneously as a mechanism of power in non-Western welfare institutions, this article challenges universalizing accounts of care ethics. Ultimately, it contributes to critical epistemologies of the Global South by demonstrating how globally circulating ethical concepts are reworked through locally embedded institutional, moral, and temporal configurations.

Author

• Junghun Oh, Kyung Hee University