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Madamba, Ariana

South Korea (hereafter the ROK) has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at 0.721 babies per woman in 2023. The current administration under President Yoon Suk Yeol has made efforts to address these fertility rates through various directives. To this end, this study asks the following question: to what extent is Korean nationalism invoked and deployed in the discourse of current policy responses to the ROK’s low fertility rate? Using the framework of discursive institutionalism (DI), this study argues that the way in which policy responses to the ROK’s low fertility rates focus on encouraging women to have more children creates a gendered and ethnic expectation for specifically Korean women to have children as an obligation to the state. Further, using the framework of Foucault’s ‘biopower’ theory, this study argues that the discursive construction of Korean women has implications for the question of immigrants and foreign brides in that the state’s valuing of explicitly Korean women renders such non-Korean women as immigrants and foreign brides as not capable of rearing the life desired by the state and incapable of what it means to be the ‘ideal citizen.’

Text

University of British Columbia. POLI_V 492

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0448664

Arts, Faculty of; Political Science, Department of

Undergraduate

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