Beyond political citizenship: marriage migrant women’s voting practices in South Korea

This study examined the voting practices of Filipina marriage migrants in South Korea. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 66 women, we examine marriage migrant women’s voting through the lens of cultural and performative citizenship. We focus on the gendered and ethnicized integration of marriage migrants into Korean families and in the larger society and how their marginalised social position shapes the women’s voting practices. We identified three voting patterns–dependent, independent, and transitioned–that vary in their degrees of cultural and performative citizenship. We also unpack the characteristics or factors associated with each voting pattern that facilitated marriage migrants’ ability to engage in performative citizenship; that is, to contest their marginalised status and exercise greater autonomy in their candidate choices. Our findings illustrate how viewing immigrant voting through the perspectives of cultural and performative citizenship provides nuanced insights about the meaning and practice of voting beyond its intrinsic function of political representation.