ABSTRACT
This article examines how urban middle-class women in contemporary Korea understand the idea of citizenship and experience it in their lives. Focusing on the discourse of citizenship narrated by members of the People’s Friendship Society (PFS), a leading women’s organization with local branches, the article illuminates local meanings of citizenship and how gender and class inflect women’s lived experiences of it. The analysis of the citizenship discourse shows the bottom-up process in the development of citizenship as a social status that binds individuals to a community. First, the PFS women’s understanding of citizenship reveals the centrality, to citizenship, of their sense of belonging to a society where their lives are intermingled with those of others. Second, there is internal class differentiation among the PFS women in terms of how they relate to the category of citizen. Third, ambiguity shared by these women in their identification with citizen is intimately connected to the normalized view of private and public as oppositional spheres. On the basis of these findings, this article suggests that the expansion of citizenship to marginalized social groups, including but not limited to women, requires societal recognition of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor as being critical to the maintenance of society.
