A plurality of care : The politics of postpartum care practices in contemporary South Korea

This dissertation examines South Korean middle-class mothers’ postpartum care practices which have been dramatically reframed through the recent emergence of the postpartum care market. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic field research in the Seoul metropolitan area between 2012 and 2013, the ethnography unravels how Korean traditional postpartum beliefs and behaviors are rearticulated as invaluable care modalities for childbearing women and newborn babies in the neoliberal context of South Korea. Specifically, the ethnography scrutinizes current postpartum care practices with respect to four relationships that South Korean mothers are closely tied when they perform postpartum care: the market, the state, the family, and the self. By doing so, it engages in scholarly conversations about the ways in which ideas of care, health, tradition, and science and technologies complicate the meanings and practices of childbirth, as well as the (re)making of norms and ideologies of the female reproductive body, gender, class, family/kinship, and the state.LimitedAuthor requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste