A place of diversity and change : gender, space and agency in a South Korean marketplace area

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between economic development, urban spatial processes, and working-class women's agency and placemaking through ethnographic research. It explores the lives of female street entrepreneurs and dressmakers in the Tongdaemun Shijang (market) area in Seoul, South Korea. Recent redevelopment of the Tongdaemun Shijang area discriminates against these women, enacting dominant assumptions that they are "older married women" and "mothers" who are economically insignificant, working in economic sectors that are "primitive" and "declining," and in an area requiring redevelopment into "modern," "formal," and market-oriented economic spaces. This redevelopment does not consider the diverse interests and abilities of those working in the area, including differences among social categories and among people within each category. Challenging these notions, this thesis aims to reconceptualise the relationship between working-class women's agency, empowerment and economic diversity and urban spatial process, so as to better appreciate women's diverse pursuits of livelihood, wellbeing and sense of self-worth, and the area's creative development. It makes an original contribution to gender and development studies and labour studies of South Korea. The thesis first examines the historical, socioeconomic, and spatial processes through which difference and inequality have been engendered in the emplacement of women in the Tongdaemun Shijang area. It illustrates how economic development and nation building have contributed to the construction of an idealised modern married womanhood and the category of "married and older women". At the same time, urban development furthered the class-spatial transformation of Seoul and the Tongdaemun Shijang area. Subsequent chapters draw on ethnographic fieldwork to better understand female street entrepreneurs' and dressmakers' agency, identities, relationships, and economic diversity. These chapters challenge the view of these women as forced to engage in marginalised economic activities due to their lack of alternatives. They also question the common notion that social change and agency must be publicly visible and directly lead to clear achievements, and involve resistance to the social order. These chapters demonstrate that female street entrepreneurs and dressmakers enacted agency in diverse, creative and ambiguous ways, and appreciated their agency and the changes it led to in their life trajectories. In addition to resistance, the women valued other modalities of agency such as acquiring professional skills and relationship building. They identified themselves in diverse, interrelated ways in contrast to binary identities imposed by others in everyday discourses and practices. And they participated in the economy through unpaid care work, alternative credit, reciprocal work, and gift giving, as well as paid work. The thesis shows that these women's agency contributes to ongoing processes toward empowerment, specifically, an increase in the sense of self as capable, confident, autonomous, realised and worthy. In conclusion, I argue that recognition of these diverse forms of agency and empowerment among women in the Tongdaemun Shijang area could enable forms of development that would enhance wellbeing more effectively than existing processes. Show more