Ad Hoc Cultural Citizenship: Neotraditional to Multicultural (Non)transition

Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.Under South Koreas excessively urban-centered development and patriarchal rural family life, most rural young women have moved to cities, leaving villages devoid of women in marriageable ages. As many rural bachelors, besides many poor urban men, have begun to marry foreign brides since the mid-2000s, the state and society have collaboratively invented an ad hoc cultural citizenship of multiculturalism. Such citizenship has is conferred on foreign brides with various paternalistic assistances under the loud welcoming of their home-country cultural traits. Paradoxically, the notion of multicultural citizenship more hides than reveals most foreign brides everyday conditions of life and work in rural families. Foreign brides usually live far more Korean (neo)traditional types of rural family life than native Korean women residing mostly in cities. What has been mobilized is not so much their cultural attributes as the material instrumentalities of their gender as women in coping with the wide meltdown of rural families social reproduction.