Making Multicultural Families: Changes in Marriage Migration of Women

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines the formation and the maintenance of a new type of family in South Korea, multicultural family. The crisis of social reproduction from the 1990s brought about marriage migration of women and the resulting multicultural families. Deploying the concept of global householding, this paper examines how multicultural families are formed and maintained through immigration and related policies. For this analysis, I locate the family as an important site for reproduction in society, with women as the main service providers. By analyzing policy and public discourses around foreign brides and their multicultural families, I argue that multicultural families, as a circuit of global householding, widen foreign brides’ social reproductive roles beyond their households; foreign brides who are asked to be reconfigured as main caregivers through marriage migration have widened their reproductive roles beyond their households within the framework of multicultural policies.