Diasporic Bodies in Unification Time examines how state and religious discourse cast transnational migrants as emblems of a desired national future. It is also about how those national imaginaries shape who is recognized, on what terms, and with what material consequences. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in South Korean schools for North
Korean-background youth, the dissertation traces the concept of Korean unification as it is circulated and materialized across multiple scales: the macro level of state and civil society institutions preparing for unification (what I call the “unification apparatus”), the meso level of alternative schools for North Korean background youth, and the micro level of North Korean
migrants and their children.

A large subset of this final category consists of children born out of coercive reproductive arrangements between North Korean women and Chinese men. These children are raised in China and later arrive to South Korea as teenagers with little interest in the future of Korean unification. Still, they are turned into emblems of a national future. Page 99 of my dissertation
falls in Chapter 2: North Korean Diasporic Lives and Rupture, where I discuss the backstories of North Korean women and their children:

“Women who crossed independently, without using brokers and without the ability to speak Chinese, had to rely on the goodwill of impoverished Korean-speaking Joseonjok residents in Jilin. Some residents offered temporary protection and food. Other residents, however, sold these women to brokers themselves. NGOs estimate that over 60 percent of North Korean girls and women between the ages of 12 and 29 who have escaped were trafficked into China’s multimillion dollar sex trade. Many were sold as prostitutes to brothels both in the border provinces and further, while others were sold into forced marriages with rural Chinese men. In recent years, a growing number have been coerced into cybersex trafficking, which includes live-streamed sexual abuse and rape to a paying clientele of mostly South Korean men. Whether sold into the sex trade or as wives, most of these women give birth to children in China.”

Chapter 2 briefly diverges from the larger arc of the dissertation concerned with how South Korea translates the stalled state project of unification as materially advanceable through the lives and bodies of its North Korean-background migrants. This translation operates through public media, campaigns, spectacle, and performance; through religious movements that reframe spiritual practices as forms of preparatory labor; and through student-teacher fictive kin networks and pedagogy in alternative schools. By moving from the macro and meso levels into the microlevel histories of migrants themselves, Page 99 gestures toward one of the dissertation’s central tensions: diasporic lives remain out of sync with South Korean state planning, even as unification relies on and erases the conditions of coercion and exploitation that bring North Korean-background migrants to South Korea in the first place.