Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Leonard Feldman

Subject Categories

Law and Gender | Law and Politics | Law and Society | Political Science | Political Theory | Sociology

Keywords

Abortion, Politics of recognition, Reproductive crisis, Status, Neoliberalism, Boundary struggles

Abstract

This study historically examines the abolition of the legal ban on abortion and the struggle in South Korea, focusing on the construction of the status of “women who do not reproduce”, and accordingly aims to critically analyze how neoliberal reproductive crisis in South Korea has been reorganized into the new order through the constitutive role of the struggle.

The results of the analysis are as follows: First, by examining Fraser’s theory, I explain that when the “boundary” dividing the realms of production and reproduction is a place of contradiction and struggle, the phenomenon of women not reproducing is centrally located at the place of neoliberal crisis, and thus, that constructing it as the status of “women who do not reproduce” can serve as a medium for structuring the new order. I also argue that this political process can be accounted for, in the conditions of global neoliberalism, through the paradox of recognition by deleting laws.

Second, I explore the historical structure of the neoliberal reproductive crisis in South Korea and analyze the process in which status was placed on the boundary. In the process of institutionalizing two earner households by publicly recognizing women through women-friendly laws and policies, women and labor were separated in the struggle, and in this structure, the reproductive crisis resulting from neoliberal adjustments ended up being focused on as a phenomenon in which “women” do not reproduce.

Third, through the context in which the struggle to abolish the legal ban on abortion in South Korea was formed, I analyze the process in which it ultimately constituted the agreed reproductive order of women and capital as a form of “boundary struggle.” As the neoliberal reproductive crisis was focused on the issue of abortion by the state, women’s claims to abolish legal ban on abortion were structured as a struggle to legally recognize the status of “women who do not reproduce”. As a result, I argue that new reproductive norms and relationship have been observed in South Korean society as the law was deleted.

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