Ethnographic Discourse Analysis of the Representations of Marriage Immigrant Women in Transnational Spaces of South Korea

Abstract

Recent sociolinguistic research on multilingualism and identities in the context of globalization has recognized the transnational nature of discourses and semiotic resources that flow beyond national and cultural boundaries. In the context of South Korea, significant amount of interests across different disciplines has explored a specific category of multilingualism: multicultural families with Korean men and immigrant women. Despite the extensive societal attention to the phenomenon, no sociolinguistic research has explored the role language plays in discourses that suppresses, regulates, or promotes multilingualism and the gendered discourses about marriage immigrant women’s second language socialization. Given the crucial role of language in creating pubic image of immigrants, it is important to understand what types of ideologies are reinforced regarding marriage immigrant women in different levels of discourses. Uncovering the underlying ideologies in discourses will foreground struggles immigrant women undergo and eventually help bring social changes. To this aim, this dissertation investigates the language ideologies in representations of marriage immigrant women in policy, media, and women’s self-representations through an ethnographic approach. Drawing upon the perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and post- structuralist approach to the analysis of representation, this dissertation primarily examines discourses in the Multicultural Families Support Act, the known television program on marriage immigrants ‘Love in Asia,’ and interactions among marriage immigrant women at a Korean as a Second Language class. The analyses in this dissertation illustrate how policy and media discourses reproduce integrationist ideologies on immigrants and patriarchal gender ideologies on immigrant women. Self-representations of the women in this study, on the other hand, show the complex, dynamic, diverse, and even contradictory nature of their identities that interact with different elements of their identities and contexts. The women of this study create discursive spaces to exercise agency in performing, negotiating, resisting, and even challenging imposed ideologies by reconstructing themselves as transnationals. Thus, this dissertation demonstrates how a better understanding of transnational women’s identities and second language socialization can be achieved through examining the multifaceted nature of their identities and illuminating their voices in response to surrounding discourses.