국제결혼 이주여성에 대한 문화사회학적 접근 - 방법론적ㆍ윤리적 논의를 중심으로

Many studies on immigrant women have tended to represent them as heroines, victims, or sexual commodities. As a result, these studies have contributed toward imposing constraints on the everyday life of immigrant women, which is contrary to the original intent of improving immigrant women’s lives. This paradox occurred due to the fact that they address immigrant women’s acts in instrumental, institutional, and material terms, ignoring their cultural dimension. According to this, immigrant women are represented as follows: instrumental beings who use marriage as a ‘means’ to achieve their economic ends; passive beings determined by ‘institutions’ such as the state’s policies and its agents(brokers); and sexual commodities sold to Korea by ‘material constraints’ of gendered division of labor in global capitalism. There is a need to supplement this one-sided approach with a cultural sociology’s approach toward immigrant women’s acts. First of all, epistemological and methodological projects are required to take the multi-dimensionality of immigrant women’s acts into consideration. More fundamentally, an ethical program is necessary to revive the deprived dignity of immigrant women as human beings and give the dignity back to them. Concretely, this paper examines the neo-liberal globalization as the cultural condition for the last romantic love; it also represents immigrant women as actors who, using the global framework, elect to undergo international marriage under this condition. It also discusses the methodological issues of cultural sociology’s approach and necessarily accompanying ethical issues. The purpose of this discussion is to share methodological and ethical issues encountered during this research with other researchers in the field of Korean sociology, thereby making these issues public.