At the Crossroads of Citizenship and Marriage: The Court, Foreign Spouses, and Gendered Morality

• In Event: Migration and Citizenship in Contemporary East Asia: Policies, Practices, and Struggles

Abstract

The institution of marriage serves as one of the main mechanisms for acquiring citizenship and claiming national belonging. This paper provides a two-pronged analysis of the crossroads between citizenship and marriage in South Korea. Frist, I review the Korean nationality laws with a particular attention to changes in marital naturalization requirements. In Korea, an automatic marital naturalization for foreign wives has been replaced with a set of naturalization requirements in the name of gender neutrality/equality. Now migrant spouses have to prove their worthiness in the eye of Korean legal authorities and bureaucrats, especially by demonstrating their “good moral character.” Second, using court cases filed by foreign spouses against the Bureau of Immigration, I demonstrate how the interpretation of “good moral character” is coached in gendered and sexualized language of morality and how such gendered morality is tied to the idea of a normal and real marriage. The Korean case demonstrates the continuing significance of gender and the heightened importance of the institution of marriage in deciding who gets to claim citizenship in the age of international migration.

Author

• Nora Kim, University of Mary Washington