She Sells, He Guards: The Gendered Family Economy in Post-Famine North Korea

This article examines the paradoxical gender dynamics embedded in North Korea's informal family economy following the country's post-famine marketization.Through in-depth interviews with North Korean defectors, including 13 women and 3 men who had engaged in informal market activities, the study investigates how women became primary income earners by sustaining family-based market activities in the absence of a functioning state infrastructure.Far from dismantling patriarchal norms, these gendered survival practices reproduce traditional hierarchies.Women's caregiving, emotional, and income-generating labor is symbolically converted to elevate male prestige within both the household and society.The study critiques optimistic interpretations of informal economies as empowering, arguing instead that they are sites of symbolic and material exploitation for women.It expands on the concept of "family strategy" by analyzing how gendered labor and resource distribution are perpetuated within kinship structures, including fictive kinship networks formed as substitutes for absent institutions.Ultimately, the informal economy in North Korea functions as a shadow infrastructure that privatizes social responsibility onto women, while maintaining the symbolic authority of men.The article contributes to feminist political economy by theorizing North Korea's informal economy not as a space of autonomy, but as a gendered structure that reproduces power under the guise of resilience and adaptation.