An ethnography of young, single women struggling to live independently in South Korea.
Living on Your Own is an ethnography of young, single women in South Korea who seek to live independently. Using extensive interviews, along with media analysis and archival research, Jesook Song traces the women’s difficulties in achieving residential autonomy. Song exposes the clash between the women’s burgeoning desire for independent lives and the ongoing incursion of traditional, conservative family ideology and marriage pressure into housing practices and financial institutions. She pays particular attention to the Korean rent system and the reliance on lump-sum cash even for basic subsistence, which promotes tight control of young adults’ lives by family and kinship networks. The young women whose voices feature prominently in this book are a prototype of global youth in crisis: caught between aspirations for the self-development and flexible lifestyle championed by globalizing media and communication technology and the reality of their position as flexible labor in a neoliberal economy.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in the Context of the Global Youth Crisis
1. Journey to a Room of One’s Own
2. Unmarried Women’s Housing and Financial Insecurities
3. Between Flexible Labor and a Flexible Lifestyle
4. Affective Baggage and Self-Suspension
Notes
Glossary of Korean Words
Glossary of Romanized Korean Books and Films
List of Research Participants’ Pseudonyms
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jesook Song is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society and the editor of New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements.
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