Family Breakdown and Invisible Homeless Women: Neoliberal Governance during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea, 1997-2001

This article examines the relationship between the South Korean welfare administration's reluctance to consider homeless women as deserving of state aid during the Asian debt crisis (henceforth the crisis) and the emergence of a pathologizing, popular discourse of family breakdown. Based on fieldwork I did in Seoul between 1998 and 2000, this article seeks to elucidate how the diagnostic discourses and prescriptive measures of "family breakdown" (kajông haeche or kajok haeche) proved congruent with a policy measure of selecting "deserving" homeless citizens defined as male breadwinners with employability and rehabilitating capacity. I argue that diverse social actors, including journalists, civic leaders, and government managers, enunciated logics of neoliberal human values; when social actors participated in the social governance of homelessness they relied on such logics to discipline gender and family relationships.¹

Building on this analysis I conclude that social governance, particularly of homelessness, provides an effective opportunity to understand the prevalence of neoliberalism in South Korea. Neoliberalism in Korea is not just an economic doctrine promoted by international financial institutions or state administrations. Rather, the concept is better understood when we reconsider it as a social ethos that has gained wide explanatory power from various local actors. Although my argument does not imply that there was calculated complicity among various social actors, it does show that conflicting social actors can produce powerful coordination at a time of national crisis. In the South Korean case, activists did voice criticisms of Kim Dae Jung's welfarism on grounds of its insufficient support for poor people. However, civil rights activists' own activities devoted to social relief during the crisis echoed government policy. They too emphasized the need for beneficiaries to be rehabilitated within the confines of a normative family ideology. As a result, the "needy" subjects of the previous welfare regime were predominantly female citizens, especially mothers without family support. The "deserving" subjects of the Kim Dae Jung welfare regime, with the wide support of various civil forces, were breadwinning men with the potential of returning to or creating normative families.

Background of Family Breakdown Discourse

Before turning to the social welfare administration's policy toward homeless women, I begin with an analysis of the film Happy End (Haep'i endû) to illustrate the discourse of family breakdown that emerged so forcefully during the crisis.² An analysis of the film is central to my examination of how and why certain homeless people became "deserving" welfare citizens at that particular historical juncture. In the midst of the crisis, Happy End was one of the most popular films in South Korea. The film portrays a fictional, scandalous homicide as the consequence of an extramarital love affair: a man kills his wife for having an adulterous relationship with another man. The husband once worked as a bank teller but became a househusband after being laid off during the crisis. He appears to be unambitious and rather timid, dreaming only of simple happiness for his family. In contrast, his wife, Pora, is a successful and ambitious woman who runs her own after-school learning institute for children. Although the film is set during the crisis, when most private learning institutes went bankrupt, somehow Pora manages to keep her business prosperous and to maintain her big apartment. The film climaxes when Pora agrees to her lover's persistent appeals to go out one night, and to do so drugs her baby's milk with sleeping pills. Pora's husband, who has become gradually more suspicious of his wife's late returns home, decides to kill Pora after he finds a remnant of a pill in the baby's milk bottle. It is, in other words, Pora's irresponsible motherhood, rather than her conjugal betrayal, that serves to justify the husband's conviction that he must kill her...