Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper investigates how Black African women in South Korea construct narratives of “Africanness” and “Koreanness” in response to gendered racism. Framed as strategic essentialism, these everyday politics enable belonging while risking the re-essentialisation of fixed racialized identities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Black African women living as graduate students in South Korea navigate their racialized and gendered marginal position through identity constructions. Drawing on ethnographic research, it investigates how Black African women construct “Koreanness” to describe Koreans as reserved and emotionally unavailable toward them, while constituting “Africanness” as its opposite - expressive and sociable. This paper argues that these polarized identity constructions operate as strategic essentialism (Spivak 1988), through which women respond to gendered racism in Korea.

The analysis shows how silent racializing gazes and distancing pressure women to filter visible markers of Africanness and Blackness, such as natural hair and clothing. In the Korean context, where the ethnofiction of the nation as a culturally homogeneous society persists, Black African women are pressured to interpret exclusion as stemming from “cultural difference” rather than structural racism, shaping how “Koreanness” and “Africanness” are articulated.

Within these constraints, women construct narratives of “Africanness” that emphasize cultural expressiveness. While such constructions enable belonging and visibility, they are deeply ambivalent. They risk re-essentialising both African and Korean cultures as fixed, and may further reduce African cultures to music, and bodily expressiveness.

This paper contributes to the panel by expanding identity politics beyond organized political resistance to include everyday negotiations of racialized and gendered identity under conditions of limited political and legal recourse. It demonstrates how attempts to contest marginality can simultaneously reproduce fixed identity categories, and shows how framing these ambivalent constructions through strategic essentialism enables a more nuanced anthropological analysis.