This paper explores the politics of scale of women marriage migrants in a rural village in South Korea with particular focus on their agency. Drawing on a qualitative case study, I show the way these women deal with multilayered discriminations and negotiate their intersecting identities in and through daily spaces and scales. The study finds that they challenge the imposed identities, which are poor, sexualized and passive, by constructing scales of referencing, recognition and resistance. This includes constructing transnational social fields of alternative ethnic communities, the home as a safe space and the body as a site of resistance and self-imagination. This research is grounded on the agency-focused migration literature and the feminist approach to the micro-spatial politics in an intra-Asian context.

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international migration South Korea migrants experience identity construction marriage womens status