Governing Intimacy: The Biopolitics of Marriage Migration in South Korea

This thesis investigates how the South Korean government uses international marriage migration as a strategic response to its population crisis. As fertility and marriage rates fall and a “bride shortage” rises, marriage migration has emerged not simply as a social phenomenon but as a deeply political project that regulates the bodies, behaviors, and intimate lives of migrant women in the name of national survival. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, and informed by critical feminist and postcolonial theory, the thesis conceptualizes South Korea’s marriage migration governance as a biopolitical hinge: a socio-legal mechanism that connects global inequalities to domestic ethno-patriarchal and demographic imperatives through the regulation of gendered and racialized bodies. Using a qualitative methodology that combines Foucauldian genealogical analysis with critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes immigration laws, “multicultural family”...Show moreThis thesis investigates how the South Korean government uses international marriage migration as a strategic response to its population crisis. As fertility and marriage rates fall and a “bride shortage” rises, marriage migration has emerged not simply as a social phenomenon but as a deeply political project that regulates the bodies, behaviors, and intimate lives of migrant women in the name of national survival. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, and informed by critical feminist and postcolonial theory, the thesis conceptualizes South Korea’s marriage migration governance as a biopolitical hinge: a socio-legal mechanism that connects global inequalities to domestic ethno-patriarchal and demographic imperatives through the regulation of gendered and racialized bodies. Using a qualitative methodology that combines Foucauldian genealogical analysis with critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes immigration laws, “multicultural family” policies, and state-run integration programs. Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach to policy analysis guides the examination of how marriage migrants – predominantly women from Southeast Asia – are constituted in policy as both desirable and deficient: valued or their reproductive capacity, yet expected to assimilate into patriarchal norms. The findings reveal that through mechanisms such as the F-6 visa regime, the Multicultural Families Support Act, and the network of Multicultural Family Support Centers, the state conditions legal and social inclusion on compliance with gendered and ethno-national ideals. In this way, marriage becomes a biopolitical institution, and intimacy itself is governed as a national resource. This thesis conceptualizes this process as producing bio-national citizenship: a conditional form of membership grounded in biological and cultural reproductive utility. By critically examining how the state governs through the intimate spheres of marriage and reproduction, this thesis contributes to broader debates on gendered biopolitics, reproductive governance in East Asia, and the instrumentalization of multiculturalism.Show less

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Governing Intimacy: The Biopolitics of Marriage Migration in South Korea