Making, remaking, and unmaking of collective identities and democratization: democratic, labour, and women’s movements in South Korea and Taiwan
Date
2018-09-05
Authors
Kim, Chong Su
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Abstract
The present dissertation focuses on the role of collective identities of Taiwanese and South Korean social movements in democratic processes. Taiwan and South Korea took similar paths of rapid industrial development and democratic processes. Yet, democratization and democracy is understood as and linked closely with national-sovereignty in Taiwan but popular-sovereignty in South Korea. This study asks how differences in understanding democracy and in democratic practices are engendered and reproduced and what the role of collective identities of social movements in democratic processes is.
I answer these questions by exploring making, remaking, and unmaking of collective identities of Taiwanese and South Korean democratic, women's, and labour movements, and their role in democratization. I thereby show how Taiwanese and South Korean social movements differently contextualized the generalized and universal idea of democracy in democratization. First, I explore Taiwanese and South Korean developmental regimes as an ensemble of a form of political domination and socio-economic developmental alliances to show how they shaped identity fields or provided the potential for different collective identity construction.
Secondly, I analyze how Taiwanese and South Korean democratic movements developed ethno-national Taiwanese identity and popular-class identity through repeatedly revising identity narratives based on collective memories along the pre-transitional, transitional, and stabilizing democratic processes.
Thirdly, by tracing the construction of the collective identities of women’s and labour movements and their interactions with democratic movements throughout the democratic processes, my discussion answers the question of how Taiwanese and South Korean women’s and labour movements attained similar achievements in women’s and labour rights despite different surrounding conditions. Women’s and labour movements’ interactions with democratic movements expanded democratization centred on political citizenship to social citizenship, but simultaneously revealed the limit of this contextualized democratic process through challenges from groups at the margin with different identities.
Fourthly, alignment, realignment, and de-alignment of collective identities are investigated in this study through comparing multiple social movements. The analysis of collective identities between social movements shows how they aligned and realigned their identities with those of other movements along the democratic processes while the within-movement analysis reveals how marginalized groups de-aligned their identities from those of mainstream movements.
With this multi-level, cross-movement, and longitudinal comparision the present study makes a significant contribution to the studies on social movements, collective identity, democratization, and comparative studies on Taiwan and South Korea.
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Keywords
Collective Identity, Collective Memory, Democratization, Developmental Regime, Identity Work, Social Movements, Labour Movement, Women's Movement, South Korea, Taiwan, Interidentity, dangwai, chaeya, xiangtu, minjok, national sovereignty, popular sovereignty