Geopolitical femininity and semi-peripheral everyday bordering: female international students in South Korea

International student mobility is increasingly shaped by social relations that extend beyond universities into workplaces, housing, public spaces and everyday encounters. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with female international students in South Korea, this article examines how everyday bordering is experienced through gendered, racialized, religious and geopolitical relations. Bringing together situated intersectionality, everyday bordering and feminist geopolitics, I develop the concept of geopolitical femininity to explain how femininity becomes a medium through which geopolitical hierarchies are embodied, interpreted and negotiated. The analysis identifies three interconnected processes: the regulation of embodied respectability through appearance, comportment and affect; the reproduction of national and racial hierarchies through everyday social evaluation; and the gendered management of religious visibility in workplaces, universities and public spaces. The findings show that an intersectional approach is necessary for identifying how gender, nationality, race and religion are mutually constituted, while a geopolitical framing reveals why these intersections acquire different meanings according to actors’ perceived positions within global hierarchies. South Korea’s semi-peripheral position is therefore significant not simply as national context but as a condition shaping how foreign women are differentially valued and governed. The article argues that geopolitical femininity extends analyses of everyday bordering by connecting intimate encounters to historically produced geopolitical relations without reducing gendered experience to a single axis of inequality.