Postpartum care and motherhood in contemporary South Korea : a study on sanhujoriwons

Abstract

The rapidly shifting contours of South Korea’s social and political landscape have resulted in transformations in the knowledges and practices of postpartum care in the country. One of the key changes that have occurred is the shift from private to institutionalized postpartum care in the late 1990s through the establishment of commercial postpartum care centers, called sanhujoriwons (산후 조리원). Given that the purpose of postpartum care is to restore women’s physical, psychological, and social functions to their pre-pregnancy state, the discussions surrounding this period offers a strategic entry point to observe the existing knowledges on contemporary South Korean women’s reproductive health and, by extension, motherhood ideologies. In dominant discourse, women’s personal narratives of their experiences with reproductive health have largely been ignored in favor of generalizations within a biomedical framework. Within this perspective, women are often seen as being passively subjected to medical authorities and institutions that determine the normative knowledges, practices, and values regarding childbirth and motherhood. The research aims to unsettle this discourse by revealing how, within the liminal space of the sanhujoriwon, women are able to exercise agency in their interactions with the various facilities and technologies of the center in order to co-produce reproductive knowledges and understandings of motherhood. The researcher engaged in episodic fieldwork in the Gyeonggi province of South Korea in 2018 for an approximate total of four months, and conducted semi-structured interviews with former women clients of sanhujoriwons. The researcher also employs textual analysis to trace the history of postpartum care and motherhood ideologies in Korea. This study has two primary findings: First, that a key ideology of motherhood that is constructed within sanhujoriwons is the narrative of the ‘willful mother’, which fosters a sense of guilt among the mothers that encounter and absorb it. Second, that women are not passively subjected to the the reproductive knowledges and motherhood ideologies (such as ‘willful mother’) that they encounter within the sanhujoriwon. Rather, women can exercise agency in the way they creatively perceive, and utilize to their benefits, new affordances in the technologies they interact with at the centers. These engagements constitute a co-production process of reproductive knowledge and understandings of motherhood, both in the mothers themselves and within the sanhujoriwon.