여자들의 공간과 자본:지구화시대 한국사회의 여성적 빈곤과 공간적 대응

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to see the relationship between capital and the female space to reconsider the female poverty. The female poverty, which is different from the ‘feminization of poverty' and the ‘globalization of poverty', is being reproduced in the age of globalization. In the global age, Korean society is also not free from the effect of globalization. Capital is reproducing the female poverty by spatializing women in the globalized space of the movement of product, capital, and labour. Capital's way of spatialization is through gendering and sexualizing, and it reproduces and restructures the previous gendered and sexualized space of women. The way to reproduce the gendered and sexualized space is through the space-division of home, sex-service places, and working places and through the labor-division of domestic labour, sex-service labour and irregular labour. These divisions are restructured by the division of nation and race. The idealization of the domestic labour and the prostitution of the sex-service labour are related to the gendering and sexualizing of the women's labour in the wage labour space. Women, taking the so-called ‘female job', become the subject of capital by becoming a low-paid worker and hour-paid worker. Women, through capital's classification, hierarchy and differentiation, are placed and replaced in different social spaces: domestic labour space, sex-service space,. irregular female job space, and migrant labour space. The reason to analyse the capital's spatialization of women is to seek the way to be out of the female poverty formed by the conspiracy or collaboration of capital and patriarchy. Thus women is structured into the space, however, women in individual level or in collective level can become agents of choosing space, too. Women can be agents to come out of the divided female spaces and create alternative spaces. To come out from the structured space is not easy, but recognizing the division and differentiation, women can start to think about the patriarchal capital's conspiracy and to attempt to create a new space. So far, the alternative spaces created by the women's activism have presented good examples. But in the age of globalization, women's activism requires a different apporach to the creation of the alternative spaces: spaces crossing the female division and spaces crossing the boundaries of nation, race, and class by refusing the capital's way of gendering and sexualizing.