ABSTRACT This study examines how outsourcing household care in modern South Korea has shaped gendered migration from both rural areas and abroad. To clarify the interplay between macro‐level power and individual lives—an aspect often treated piecemeal in earlier research—it introduces the concept of circular carescapes. This notion captures the looping assemblages in which care needs, labour mobility, and governance continually re‐create one another, shaping everyday life and policy across borders. The analysis follows gendered migration for care work through two phases of Korea's recent history. During the first phase of industrialisation and urbanisation, female rural‐to‐urban migrant care workers, known as sikmo (kitchen maids), emerged, and conflicts between employers and sikmo spurred national and local governments to professionalise the job market. The second phase, beginning in the 1990s, saw the arrival of care workers from abroad—particularly of Korean Chinese ( Joseonjok ), whose ancestors migrated from the Korean Peninsula to China in the premodern era—enabled by visa revisions that relaxed restrictions on other foreign workers. By analysing digitised newspapers and online postings, the study reconstructs the public sentiments, policies, and migration dynamics that formed the carescapes of each period.
Park et al. (Wed,) studied this question.