Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea by Jesook Song (review)

Abstract

The focus of the ethnography of Jesook Song’s Living on Your Own is a set of thirtyish young women residing in Seoul and Pusan with whom Song conducted research in 2005–7. They were unmarried by choice for a variety of reasons, and thus identified with the new category pihon yŏsŏng, which Song translates as “women unassociated with marriage,” rather than the more conventional mihon yŏsŏng, women not yet married. They tended to be underemployed, unstably employed, or poorly paid in some combination, and thus had had little opportunity to amass personal monetary capital. Despite this, they sought, against the considerable difficulties posed by South Korean social expectations and its system of rental housing, to live independently of their families. Furthermore, Song notes that some 90 percent of her participants were former student activists, a background that she associates with a particular generational experience prevalent at the moment of her research (5). This may be so, but this last biographical coordinate of Song’s interlocutors helps underscore a conceptual strategy of Living on Your Own that some readers, not least undergraduate readers, will need underscored: no, this is not a random sample of South Korean women, even of a certain age; yes, they are very specific people, but they are people whose situation and experiences epitomize or crystallize with unusual acuity a roster of contemporary social, ideological, and economic dynamics in South Korea and, to a degree, other world contexts. These dynamics include normative familialism and natalism, as expressed in the Korean expectation to marry as well as in legal and informal