Speculative Home-making: Women's Labour, Class Mobility, and Real Estate Investment in South Korea

Abstract.

Based on in-depth interviews of homeowners and discourse analysis of real estate-related publications, this research seeks to understand how South Korean women and men have transformed themselves as the active participants of the market through their speculative labour, and how they have become part of the production and transformation of social class in South Korea in the second half of the 20th century. Following the trajectory of their mobility to and within Seoul, I seek to illuminate how market logics—such as speculation—have become entrenched in everyday life, and how the dynamics of neighbourhood change interact with subject-making in gendered and classed ways in the process of urban expansion and class-formation in the case of South Korea.