As Korean society turns into an aging society, the elderly are becoming one of the new social risk bearers due to the lack of an adequate care system. This paper deals with the experiences of elderly women who are transitioning from care giving to care receiving, representing the last phase of the gendered circuit of caring. Approaching the issue from a feminist perspective, this ethnography of the elderly reveals the perplexing position of Korean women, in particular, elderly women, and shows that Korean elderly women are the locus of contradictions and dilemmas that arise when the family, the state and the market contest, upon which the assumptions of intimacy and reciprocity, male breadwinner ideology and ideal independent elderly discourse are nested.

This paper discusses the flexibility and vulnerability of families experiencing "economic crisis" under global regulation. In particular, delayed marriages have increased considerably, and the fertility rate dropped to an unprecedented level in a very short time. The statistics for this period regarding family formation and values challenges the industrialization thesis for family change to reappraise the impact of globalization on families in the era of a global capitalist economy. In addition to statistical data, "transnational" families-the example of so-called gireogi (wild geese) families and "bride import" families-are brought in to reveal the changing dynamics of Korean families in globalization. The existence of these different types of global families, whether transnational or interracial, serves to strip off the veil of the romanticized notion of the strong "East Asian family." Furthermore, the findings raise the question of how flexible and malleable families can be in the face of the "flexible economy" of globalization.

This paper explores the fundamental principles and mechanisms of the patriarchal order that facilitate the production of gender inequality in contemporary Korea. Instead of focusing on the external forces such as the industrialization or globalization, it pays attention to internal ones, examining how they interact to generate gender inequality in specific historical context. The ideology of the male breadwinner has worked very closely with the state, global capital, and class ideology in various and subtle ways. Women were included in rapid industrialization as cheap labor, while they were forced out of the workforce during the financial crisis because they were not regarded as primary breadwinners.Patrilineality is another generative mechanism that facilitates the production and maintenance of gender inequality. Hojuje (family-head system), the concentrated representation of patrilineality, has institutionalized women to relegation as second-class citizens. The paper concludes that gender inequality cannot be mitigated unless gender politics directly intervene to tackle the fundamental principles of patriarchal order.