In South Korea, heteronormative notions about a desirable middle-class life-course—offinancial stability, marriage, and childrearing––are being tested. Economic shifts following the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis have made it difficult, if not impossible, for many young people to participate in these processes. As large numbers of those in their 20s and 30s are experiencing underemployment and depend on immediate kin for shelter and finance, economic instability is contributing to precipitous declines in marriage and childbirth rates. As young people, regardless of their gender or sexuality, delay heteronormative markers of adulthood indefinitely, such instability is creating new ways for LGBTQ+ folk in their 20s and 30s to pass as “normal” in everyday life—especially to relatives, friends, co-workers, and employers. In the absence of basic legal protections, however, creating collective queer publics and politics is perilous, as exposure can bring about individualized social and economic discrimination. Existent theories of “precarity” describe how social and economic insecurity is leading to the disruption of anticipated futures and preventing young people from reaching the goalposts of heterosexual adulthood. Theorizations of “queer time” conversely cast the disruption of heteronormative life-processes as anti-normative and liberatory. Yet, my research suggests that this “queer” situation of precarity creates certain social and political possibilities for LGBTQ+ Koreans, even as it complicates their existing vulnerabilities. Building on 20 months of ethnographic research (2018-2021) with 4 activist groups and over 50 LGBTQ+ people in their 20s and 30s, this dissertation examines how queer Koreans craft sociality, politics, and futures within Korea’s post-millennial economic, social, and demographic transformations.

This ethnography illustrates how a wide range of stakeholders in Turkey participated in and contested the marketization of care for older adults during a time of political transformation and uncertainty. I approach state-led efforts to develop a model of care suitable for Turkey by analyzing the ways these models were negotiated through situated relationships of caregiving in two distinct sites: 1) municipal care programs for older adults and 2) skilled care work, which was being increasingly professionalized and subject to government regulation. This work asks two main sets of questions. First, how are models of care forged and negotiated? How do experts and state officials negotiate these models in relation to understandings of the family, state, and market? What key themes and elements of care are debated, what kinds of arrangements emerge from these discussions and which are excluded? Second, how do different stakeholders (such as families, older adults, caregivers, and local municipal officials) experience and participate in the formalization of care as a marketized service?

To investigate these questions, I engaged in 21 months of ethnographic research based in the cities of Istanbul and Eskişehir from 2014 through 2017 in networks of gerontological expertise, municipal care programs, and private homes. I found that technopolitical efforts to formalize care for older adults were fraught achievements forged through situated social and political relationships of caregiving. While the government rhetoric of sacred familialism emphasizes the duty of kin, government development efforts simultaneously forge the necessary infrastructure to marketize and formalize care as a private commodity that will benefit the national economy. This ethnography widens anthropological understandings of care beyond social reproduction by emphasizing care as comprised of complex technopolitical processes that marketize care in a global context, processes characterized by negotiations of access, responsibility, domestic arrangements, financing, scale of administration, and professionalization. Moreover, it reveals the importance of municipal programs of care and assistance in the creation and maintenance of political authority and legitimacy in a time of political transformation and turmoil.

Political cultures of the contemporary U.S. left have become a target of shared conservative and liberal ire. Critics charge that a putative hyper-focus on identity-based claims has rendered a left bereft of concrete and coherent political platforms. Based on mischaracterization of the Black feminist concept of “identity politics” as one oriented towards purity and narrow essentialisms, these critiques compound with others levied against the putative impracticality of abolitionist political work. Abolitionist activists and scholars have been refuting liberal contestations of this sort for the better part of a century and a half. Yet the mainstreaming of calls to #AbolishICE in the midst of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign against immigrant rights, or to #DefundthePolice in the uprisings that followed George Floyd’s murder have intensified these claims and increasingly brought them into public view.Within these debates, Korean and other Asian Americans occupy a particularly vexed role. Korean Americans in particular and Asian American in general are among the fastest growing undocumented communities in the U.S. A shared sense of exclusion from Latinx-centered discourses about undocumented migration have created opportunities for undocumented Black and Asian Americans to engage in new forms of coalition-building. Given that Asian American model minoritization have been historically mobilized to delegitimize Black resistance and oppression however, the contentious nature of this coalition work is amplified in the context of shifting discourses about activism and racialized identity. Through five years of ethnographic research with undocumented Korean and other Asian Americans, this dissertation complicates popularized and polarized debates about the role of racialized identity and abolitionist orientations to activism in mediating shifting political cultures of the contemporary U.S. left. In examining how these activists articulate an abolitionist vision of immigrant justice and navigate coalition work with Black counterparts, I document more broadly the strategic and affective challenges of imagining a politics predicated upon the impossibility of resolution or legibility within the epistemological enclosure of “progress.” Building on the work of radical Black and women of color feminists, I show that uncertainty, impurity, and contradiction is a locus of possibility rather than a sign of demise in transformative immigrant and racial justice work.

Based on over 25 and a half months of multi-sited transnational ethnographic fieldwork between California and Cambodia, “Life and Death After America: Deportee Transnationalism Among Cambodian American Refugees” traces the deportation process for Cambodian American refugees who were granted lawful permanent residency (LPR) status in the United States. To date, 757 Cambodian American refugees with LPR status have been deported to Cambodia, and approximately 2,000 more face final removal. These “deportable refugees” (Zelnick 2018) were either born in refugee camps, or left Cambodia as infants due to the terror of the Pol Pot regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and under whom the Khmer Rouge killed approximately two million Cambodians, and displaced millions more. Cambodian American refugees lose their LPR status upon conviction of various crimes, and are deported after completing their sentences in US prisons, due to a confluence of laws passed in 1996 by President Clinton, Cambodia’s Law on Nationality (Kingdom of Cambodia 1996) that created the conditions for forced citizenship through jus sanguinis (citizenship by blood), as well as a Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Cambodia (United States Government and Royal Government of Cambodia 2000) that necessitates the deportation of each country’s nationals. Drawing together the fields of the legal anthropology, transnational migration and deportation, critical refugee studies, and Asian American studies, I challenge extant binaries of migrant il/legality and refugee “deservingness” while simultaneously destabilizing ideas about diasporic belonging, US militarism, and the homeland. To do this, I frame my dissertation around “deportee transnationalism” to critically analyze deportee and deportable refugee lifeworlds. Deportee transnationalism encompasses the processes by which deportation creates ongoing transnational circuits between the United States and Cambodia, generates diasporic imaginaries, and reproduces state violence. Thus, contrary to conventional understandings of deportation, it is not a finite and final event, but is constituted by a set of multiple and unfolding processes, including belonging, return, removal, and documentation. By examining these processes, I demonstrate that deportee transnationalism reflects new understandings of the operations of US imperialism, state violence, and refugee resettlement, while simultaneously calling into question ideas about home, ethnicity, and kinship. Ultimately, I argue that deportee transnationalism reveals the sociopolitical and legal complexities surrounding declining liberal humanitarianism’s acceptance of refugees, alongside the expansion of the US deportation regime.