Media, Culture & Society

The border-crossing of habitus:

33(3) 415­–431
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
media consumption, motives, sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0163443710394901
and reading strategies among mcs.sagepub.com

Asian immigrant women in

South Korea

Tae-Il Yoon, Kyung-Hee Kim and

Han-Jin Eom
Hallym University, Republic of Korea

Abstract
Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and habitus, this study investigates
media consumption, motives of media use, and reading strategies among Asian
immigrant women in South Korea. The interview data from this study reveal that
the total sum of media consumption among Asian immigrant informants tends to
increase after immigration and that their media consumption can be regarded as
omnivorous in style. Acquiring the host cultural capital and maintaining the home
cultural capital are the major drives for their media use, resulting in three motives:
the need for adaptation, the need for ethnic affirmation, and the need for relaxation.
In response to the multicultural representation of the host media, the immigrant
informants employ various reading strategies, such as empathetic reading, critical
reading, distantiated reading, and avoidance of reading. The findings are discussed
in light of the dialectic of habitus, the possibilities of multicultural capital, and the
necessity for media education.

Keywords
Asian diaspora, cultural capital, habitus, media reading, multiculturalism, new immigrants

Recent years have witnessed rapid globalization and the resulting emergence of what are
called the ‘new immigrants’ at a global level (De Charentenay, 2006). In contrast to the

Corresponding author:
Tae-Il Yoon, 39, Hallymdaehak-gil Chuncheon, Gangwon-Do 200-702 Republic of Korea.
Email: icarus44@hallym.ac.kr
416 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

old immigration pattern in which people moved from peripheral countries (e.g. in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America) to central countries (e.g. in Europe and North America), one
distinguishing feature of the new immigration is the intra-regional (e.g. within the Asian
region) interchange of population, especially that of women, resulting in the ‘feminiza-
tion of immigration’ (Kim M, 2007). As a phenomenon of the recent movement of popu-
lation within the Asian region, many women from various Asian countries (e.g. Vietnam,
China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, etc.) have immigrated into South Korea for marriage with
underprivileged rural men. These married immigrant women living in rural areas and (il)
legal immigrant laborers staying in the (sub)urban areas have dramatically changed the
ethnoscape of South Korea, which had long been so racially homogeneous that boasting
of so-called pureblooded heritage was commonplace. As Korean society is steadily mov-
ing toward a multicultural society, the host media have begun to touch on multicultural
issues, in which foreign residents appear as major characters (Kim S, 2009), and hence
public discourses have recently lauded multiculturalism; accordingly, the mass media are
becoming an important factor for both the immigrant minorities and the native majorities
in South Korea.
Despite the high prevalence of multicultural media involving these ‘new immigrants’
within the Asian region, few have attempted to investigate the media factors among
Asian diaspora experiences in an Asian country, in contrast to the voluminous scholar-
ship on the ‘old immigrants’ in North America and Europe (e.g. Alghasi, 2009; Durham,
2004; Jeffres, 2000; Peeters and D’Haenens, 2005; Reece and Palmgreen, 2000; Walker,
1999). It is, therefore, imperative to study how Asian diaspora women consume the
media, why they use them, and what strategies they take in reading the media texts. The
Asian immigrant women living in Korean rural areas provide a fascinating case for
the study of the media factors in Asian diaspora experiences, mainly because they are
positioned at the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, locality, and globalization
(Kim S, 2009).
The primary theoretical frame supporting this research is Bourdieu’s pair of socio-
logical concepts known as habitus and cultural capital. Bourdieu conceptualized habitus
as a durably installed set of dispositions that are acquired and socially constituted.
Habitus is one of the embodied states of cultural capital, and individuals practice with
habitus in specific social settings, described as fields (Bonnewitz, 2002; Bourdieu, 1986).
To gain insight into how media use and reading strategies figure into the negotiation of
the diaspora of Asian women, this study explores Asian immigrant women’s border-
crossing experiences among recent multicultural mediascapes through a series of inter-
views that brought the dynamic intersections of the local and the global to the surface.
Because this study is situated in the context of recent scholarship on global multicultural-
ism, habitus, and media, we will briefly review these literatures before offering an analy-
sis of the qualitative interview data, on which our findings are based.

Literature review
New immigrants and the multicultural situation in South Korea
The unprecedented movement of population, which has recently emerged as a conse-
quence of rapid globalization, tends to draw what is called ‘new immigrants’ into a
Yoon et al. 417

region (Bernard, 2002). While the pattern of old immigration was a unidirectional flow
from peripheral countries to central countries, the flows of recent immigration go both
ways, indeed in multiple directions, as diversity and intraregional interchange is enhanced
(Cohen, 2006). As new immigrants in the era of globalization stir up the heterogeneity in
race, class, and gender, as well as nationality within a country, multiculturalism has
emerged as a response to the aggravation of cultural heterogeneity in the process of
social integration. Although the meaning of multiculturalism has a broad spectrum such
as conservative, (left-)liberal, and critical multiculturalism, according to their political-
ideological positions, multiculturalism here refers to the recognition of race, ethnic, and
culture diversity within the demographics of a specified place (e.g. country, organization,
school, etc.), aiming for a society that extends an equitable status to distinct ethnic and
cultural groups (McLaren, 1994). Multiculturalism has been established as a major logic
for the integration of ethnic minorities in the Anglo-American world, especially in
Canada, since the 1970s; currently, it is diffusing through other countries with the estab-
lishment of organizations relevant to the multicultural phenomena by central and local
governments (Kastoryano, 2000).
The situation in South Korea is a noteworthy case showing recent trends of globaliza-
tion, new migrants, and multiculturalism. Despite the lack of a general precondition for
a multicultural society (i.e. a society aiming for an equitable status between mainstream
and minority groups), multicultural discourse is approved as a social norm for Korean
people who have been ambivalent about new immigrants. With the progress of globaliza-
tion, South Korea is experiencing a steady influx of new immigrants from various coun-
tries (mainly from Asian countries), which seems to be the first substantial immigration
since the formation of the modern nation-state. The number of Koreans marrying for-
eigners reached 36,200, which was 11 percent of the total (marrying) population in 2008.
There were 58,000 children of multicultural families in 2008, but the number surged to
more than 100,000 in 2009. In 2009, the number of foreign residents surpassed 1 million
for the first time, accounting for over 2 percent of the nation’s entire population (Do,
2009).
The ‘feminization of immigration’ phenomenon is especially evident, mainly due to
Asian immigrant women marrying Korean men in rural areas. The ratio of Korean rural
men marrying foreign women is reported to be high, around 40 percent. Most immigrant
women who have married Korean rural men have been scattered throughout remote
areas, such as the agricultural districts and mountain villages in the Gangwon province;
accordingly, the traditional, patriarchal family system and the natives’ parochial mentali-
ties in rural communities have aggravated the issue of married immigrant women, seen
as the superimposed problem of gender, class, race/ethnicity, nationality, locality, and
globalization.
Under such isolated and lonely conditions, it has been reported that the mass media,
especially television and the internet, function as a window (or conduit) through which
the immigrant women learn Korean culture and communicate with Korean society out-
side of their families (Kim K et al., 2009). In response to this social change, the Korean
host media have portrayed multicultural situations and have driven public campaigns to
proclaim multiculturalism as a social norm; as a consequence, the mythical narrative of
the pureblooded cultural heritage is unexpectedly changing into accentuation of multi-
culturalism (Kim S, 2009).
418 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

Cultural capital and habitus

Although identity has been a prevailing conceptual framework for multicultural studies
(e.g. Alghasi, 2009; Durham, 2004; Jeffres, 2000), it seems to be too abstract, broad, and
evasive to delineate the diaspora experiences of Asian immigrant women in South Korea,
whose duration of stay is too short to change their identity. By comparison, Bourdieu’s
sociological concepts can be a sound framework for grasping the media factor in the
quotidian lives of diaspora women caught in ‘a position betwixt and between’ (Kraidy,
1999: 457) the host and the home culture.
Bourdieu’s concept of capital is broader than the monetary notion of capital in eco-
nomics; capital is a generalized resource that can assume monetary and non-monetary,
as well as tangible and intangible, forms (Bonnewitz, 2002; Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu
has distinguished three general types of capital: economic, social, and cultural capitals.
Among these, our special interests are placed on cultural capital in three forms. Bourdieu
explained:

Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e. in the form of long-lasting
dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods
(pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of
theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a
form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational
qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed
to guarantee. (1986: 243)

The embodied state among these three forms of cultural capital is closely related to
habitus, a durably installed set of dispositions that are acquired and socially constituted
by all different forms of capital (Bonnewitz, 2002). Habitus consists of two components:
physical hexis as embodied disposition and ethos as practical rule/value. It is a mecha-
nism that both internalizes the externality and externalizes the internality. Habitus can
be both inherited by individuals’ family members (i.e. primitive habitus) and constituted
by socialization, mainly in the school (i.e. secondary habitus). Thus, habitus is a set of
permanent, but alterable dispositions, and an individual is a variation of class habitus (or
group habitus, in the broader context). Despite its changeability, habitus has inertia
resistant to the rapid change of social conditions; consequently, there is a lag of habitus
when individuals feel a clash between their habitus and their new surroundings
(Bourdieu, 1979). When individuals practice with habitus, they always do so in specific
social contexts or settings, which are defined as fields (Anheier et al., 1995; Wang,
2009).
Although Bourdieu’s sociological theory was originally conceptualized to explain the
intra-national situation (France, in particular) in the 1960s and 1970s, considering the
fact that his original ideas sprouted from his early ethnographic studies of African farm-
ers in Algeria (Bourdieu, 2003), his theories can go beyond the intra-national context. In
reality, the concepts of habitus and cultural capital have been applied to international and
multicultural situations, such as in Portuguese immigrant families in Brazil in the first
half of the 20th century (Siqueira, 2002), the case of Korean ESL (English as a second
Yoon et al. 419

language) students in Canada (Kim T, 2007), and the construction of the intercultural
communication model (Wang, 2009).
In addition, borrowing Putnam’s (2000) dichotomy of bonding and bridging social
capitals, the typology of cultural capital can be applied to a multicultural context. To
apply Putnam’s bonding and bridging social capital, maintaining cultural capital can be
construed as exclusive cultural capital of the home country that immigrants have already
established and want to maintain, whereas acquiring cultural capital may be seen as
inclusive cultural capital of the host country that immigrants need to acquire to adapt
themselves to new circumstances. In line with immigrants’ bonding and bridging social
capital (Peeters and D’Haenens, 2005), immigrants as border-crossers may accumulate
multicultural capital by both maintaining cultural capital of their home country and
acquiring cultural capital of the host country.

Media consumption, motives, and reading strategies

Numerous studies have found that the mass media play a critical role in facilitating the
cultural integration process in various diasporic contexts, such as the USA (Durham,
2004; Jeffres, 2000; Reece and Palmgreen, 2000; Walker, 1999; Yang et al., 2004),
Canada (Lee and Tse, 1994), Norway (Alghasi, 2009), the Netherlands (Peeters and
D’Haenens, 2005), Israel (Kama, 2008), and South Korea (Kim K et al., 2009). For the
total sum of media consumption among immigrants, there have been two alternative
hypotheses: the increase hypothesis based on the ‘need to be informed’ explanation and
the decrease hypothesis based on the ‘competing time’ explanation (Lee and Tse, 1994).
Also, the mass media are a form of objectified cultural capital and have a recursive
relation with cultural capital. Individuals’ social status, habitus, and thereby cultural taste
can influence their media use; in turn, individuals’ media use can also facilitate them to
accumulate cultural capital, especially in the embodied state. As a corollary of Bourdieu’s
sociology, higher-status people with more cultural capital are expected to have a taste for
highbrow culture, whereas lower-status people with less cultural capital are expected to
have a taste for lowbrow culture. The empirical investigation, however, supported the
omnivore/univore hypothesis (Peterson and Kern, 1996; Van Eijck, 2001). In other
words, higher-status people with more cultural capital tend to be more omnivorous (that
is, they like varying cultural contents including both highbrow and lowbrow) than lower-
status people with less cultural capital.
While the style of media consumption is influenced by cultural capital and habitus,
one of the major motives for media use may be to accumulate cultural capital. To use the
aforementioned distinction of maintaining and acquiring cultural capital in the multicul-
tural field, it can be inferred that two main motives for media use among the immigrants
are to maintain the cultural capital of their home country and to acquire cultural capital
of the host country. More specifically, previous studies have identified three motives for
internet use including information seeking, relaxation-entertainment, and social utility
among East Asian students in the USA (Ye, 2005), and four motives in viewing US tel-
evision, including the needs for acculturation, diversion, entertainment, and relaxation
among Chinese students (Yang et al., 2004).
420 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

Regarding media reading strategies, ever since Hall (1980) proposed his famous
trichotomy of decoding patterns (i.e. dominant, negotiated, and oppositional read-
ings), numerous scholars have reported that the polysemic qualities of media texts
could empower audiences to employ their own reading strategies (Condit, 1989; Grier
and Brumbaugh, 1999; Jensen, 1987; Moores, 1990; Morley, 1980; Roscoe et al.,
1995; Steiner, 1988). However, there are rhetorical limits of polysemy, in the sense
that the readers construct the meaning according to the strategies they employ by the
virtue of their participation in a specific interpretive community (Condit, 1989;
Steiner, 1988). Because the interpretive community members are more likely to share
similar habitus and cultural tastes, to use Bourdieu’s concept, it can be said that indi-
viduals’ cultural capital and habitus constrain their adoption of media reading strate-
gies. In the multicultural media field especially, the dominant group members who
have accumulated enough capital in a given field are more likely to employ the pres-
ervation strategies, whereas the immigrant group members with little capital tend to
use the resistance and subversion strategies. Thus, the oppositional reading can be
seen as a strategy of resistance and subversion in a multicultural media field (Steiner,
1988), given that the host media typically function as propaganda disseminating val-
ues, norms, ideology, and ‘mediated habitus’ (Couldry, 2004) of the host culture to the
immigrants.
In light of the above, this research tries to answer the following three questions:

(1) how do Asian immigrant women in South Korea consume the media of both the
host and the home countries?
(2) why do they use the media of both the host and the home countries? and
(3) what strategies do they adopt in reading multicultural portrayals in the host coun-
try’s media?

Then, findings from the analysis are discussed in light of the media role in the multicul-
tural field in which the habitus and cultural capital that were constituted in their home
country collide with that of the host country.

Method
This study employed qualitative methods to reveal the media issue in the diasporic expe-
riences of Asian immigrant women. In-depth interviews were conducted in groups and
individually to obtain richer responses. In contrast with quantitative methods that seek a
representative sample, the sampling strategies employed in a qualitative research strive
for the richness of information (Crabtree and Miller, 1999). The sampling occurred in an
iterative process that contributed to an emerging pattern of theoretical categories by
sometimes picking similar cases to gain sensitivity to the differences and by sometimes
choosing different cases to magnify the similarities, until saturation is reached (Glaser
and Strauss, 1967). Specifically, the current study employed a typical case sampling
(Crabtree and Miller, 1999).
The selection of informants took place in three areas located in the Gangwon Province:
Hongcheon County, Yanggu County, and Taebaek City, which are regarded as relatively
Yoon et al. 421

remote mountainous areas in South Korea. The researchers collected a pool of prospec-
tive interview participants by asking the married migrants service centers for help with
recruiting informants.
The interviews took place from 9 to 27 July 2008. In an effort to ensure a natural and
comfortable atmosphere, the interviews were conducted in places and at times of the
informants’ choice. The informants were organized in groups of two, three, or four. Our
samples were selected from married immigrant women and their families. The inter-
views of immigrant women were comprised of four group interviews and two individual
interviews. All of the 17 immigrant informants were from various Asian countries includ-
ing Japan, China, Mongolia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, and
Kazakhstan. With the exception of three informants, their stay in Korea had been more
than three years and most of the informants had children (see Table 1). Four of the eight
non-immigrant informants were children of the immigrant women, three were their
spouses, and one was a mother-in-law (see Table 2).
Each interview lasted from one and a half to two hours. Interviews were guided by a pro-
tocol that listed a series of unstructured questions in four parts: diaspora experiences, media
consumption, motives for media use, and responses to host media contents. These questions
served to provide the main direction for the interviews. The data analysis followed iterative
cycles that ranged from sorting, coding, and recoding the interview data to identify emerging
themes (‘organizing’), making theoretical linkages among the coded data (‘connecting’), and
reviewing the initial and subsequent analyses to search for alternative explanations for con-
firming/disconfirming evidence (‘corroborating’) (Crabtree and Miller, 1999).

Table 1. Key demographics of informants (married immigrant women)

Woman’s ID Home country Age Duration of stay in Korea Number of children

Group 1 Woman 1 Thailand 37 6 years 2

Woman 2 Thailand 33 6 years 2
Woman 3 Vietnam 33 1 year 1
Woman 4 Thailand 31 3 years 1
Group 2 Woman 5 China 42 9 years 3
Woman 6 The Philippines 31 6 years 2
Woman 7 Uzbekistan 25 4 years 1
Woman 8 Vietnam 22 2 years 1
Group 3 Woman 9 Mongolia 37 6 years 2
Woman 10 Uzbekistan 26 5 years 2
Woman 11 China 25 3 years 1
Group 4 Woman 12 Japan 43 13 years None
Woman 13 Kazakhstan 34 6 years 1
Woman 14 Vietnam 23 2 years 1
Woman 15 China 42 8 years 2
Individual 1 Woman 16 Japan 42 12 years 2
Individual 2 Woman 17 Thailand 38 11 years 3
422 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

Table 2. Key demographics of informants (married immigrant women’s families)

Family ID Age Occupation Married immigrant

woman’s home country

Group 1 Child 1 12 Elementary student Thailand

Child 2 10 Elementary student Thailand
Group 2 Child 3 9 Elementary student Japan
Child 4 9 Elementary student Japan
Group 3 Mother-in-law 68 Farmer Thailand
Spouse 1 46 Farmer Thailand
Individual 1 Spouse 2 44 Carpenter Japan
Individual 2 Spouse 3 39 Farmer Vietnam

Analysis
Diaspora experiences and media consumption
Diaspora experiences of immigrant woman informants are important as textual surround-
ings in which their media consumption, motives for media use, and reading strategies of
multicultural portrayals occur. Regardless of their various cultural backgrounds, three
themes emerged from the immigrant informants’ diaspora experiences: border-crossing,
culture-clashing, and code-switching. As Penaloza (1994) called his study of Mexican
immigrants in the USA atravesando fronteras (‘border crossings’ in English), the Asian
immigrant informants in this study were border-crossers in the literal sense of the term.
The informants’ border-crossing experiences were found to bring about a clash of cul-
tures between the host country and their home country. Also, they were found to negotiate
between their home culture and the host culture from day to day, resulting in quotidian
code-switching, as Haitian immigrants in the USA were found to do (Oswald, 1999).
The diaspora experiences of Asian immigrant informants can be interpreted in terms
of Bourdieu’s concepts. Considering that an individual is a variation of group habitus
(particularly, class habitus) from Bourdieu’s perspective, an immigrant informant cross-
ing the national border can be seen as habitus crossing the border. As a variation of
group habitus crossing the border, the immigrant informants were forced to enter a mul-
ticultural field in which their existing habitus clashed with the new social situation. The
clash between the existing habitus and the new host culture was observed even among
the Chosunjok immigrant informants, the second- or third-generation Korean-Chinese
who can speak Korean and share the same ethnic heritage with Koreans. A Chosunjok
informant has said the following:

Woman 5: Despite the similarities in customs and lifestyles, jesa [a family religious service for
the ancestors] is hard work and is very stressful. Not only that, [but] living with my mother-in-
law keeps me from going out whenever I want. Some economic problems can be tiring as well.
Before I got married and when I was still in China, I could earn money and spend it on my own.
Now the income is limited and only comes from my husband. This makes me save my household
money in such a rural area.
Yoon et al. 423

The informant’s previous way of thinking and acting collided with the Korean custom
for her everyday life. In this situation, the immigrant informants’ cultural capital of their
home country was belittled as inferior according to the imagined hierarchical power rela-
tion at the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nationality. In addition, the
immigrant informants’ marrying of underprivileged men in remote rural areas had little
cultural capital in their host countries. Thus, the informants needed to switch their host
and home cultural capitals and reconstruct multicultural capital and habitus.
The mass media were found to play a crucial role in these diaspora experiences.
Regarding the total sum of media consumption, the interview data seemed to put more
weight on the increase hypothesis, in the sense that the immigrant informants were
heavy users of both the host and the home country media.

Researcher: How often do you watch television?

Woman 11: From morning till evening, I turn on the television.
Researcher: Why do you turn on the TV all day long?
Woman 11: Because staying home alone is boring.
Researcher: How about you?
Woman 15: I often watch the television until dawn.

In the case of the host country media, the immigrant informants tended to spend most
of their spare time with Korean television, probably because their living conditions in
remote rural areas could provide them with very limited resources to fill their spare time.
Also, they remained heavy users of their home countries’ media, such as newspapers,
magazines, television dramas, movies, and popular music by visiting the internet sites
of their home countries. The Gangwon province, where the immigrant informants live,
is a particularly remote area even in Korea, so the internet is a crucial means for them to
connect with others.
Regarding the media consumption pattern, the immigrant informants were found to
use few Korean newspapers due to the difficulties of reading written words, especially
Hanja (Korean words written in Chinese characters). The television genre they consumed
was limited to melodramas, in spite of how heavily they watched Korean television pro-
grams. This shows that the consumption of host media was univorous in style (Peterson
and Kern, 1996; Van Eijck, 2001), probably because they had acquired little of the cul-
tural capital of the host country. However, considering that they also consumed various
media contents of their home country, it can be interpreted that they were omnivorous
consumers in that they consumed their home and host countries’ media. This omnivorous
consumption of the host and the home countries’ media, in turn, may produce multicul-
tural capital; that is, hybridized capital of both the host and the home culture.

Motives for media use

The immigrant informants were reported to consume the host and the home country
media omnivorously in order to acquire cultural capital of the host country and maintain
that of their home countries, resulting in accumulation of multicultural capital. As with
424 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

other immigrants in previous research (Yang et al., 2004; Ye, 2005), a closer look at the
media use among the immigrant informants reveals more specified motives for media
use: the need for adaptation, the need for ethnic affirmation, and the need for relaxation.
The need for adaptation is apparent in that the immigrant informants tended to use
the media to acquire Korean language, customs, norms, values, and cultural capital with
the intention of acculturating to the new circumstance of Korean society. The need for
adaptation is closely related to the use of informative contents in the Korean media,
such as news, documentaries, and educational programs. For them, even the consump-
tion of Korean melodramas is not just for entertainment, but rather for the acquisition of
Korean language, customs, and behavior. The relation between the adaptation motive
and the use of their home country media is inconsistent. The role of their home country
media in adapting to Korean society is positive for some immigrant informants (women
6 and 9), but negative for others (woman 5).

Researcher: Do you think that the Mongolian television news is helpful in adapting
to Korean society?
Woman 9: I think it is.
Researcher: How so? Can you elaborate?
Woman 9: I might forget Mongolian, if I kept using Korean only with other
Koreans. Mongolian words help me understand things more easily. It
is difficult for me to understand something in Korean. The Mongolian
sites are much easier.

The need for ethnic affirmation, which is related to maintaining cultural capital, moti-
vates the immigrant informants to use the media for the retention of their own identity
and their home culture. The use of internet sites that are based in their home country
helps them to fulfill this need. The immigrant informants in the interviews tended to use
the broadcasting programs or news via the internet to know what is going on in their
home country (woman 6), to not forget their native language (woman 9), or to keep in
touch with their families and old friends (woman 13).

Researcher: Do you use the internet frequently?

Woman 17: Yes, I search the internet often. In my spare time, I usually go to
Thailand sites and get news on what’s going on in Thailand.
Researcher: Frequent contact with Thailand via the internet may make you miss
your homeland, doesn’t it? Don’t you think that it may hinder you in
adapting to Korea?
Woman 17: No! I’m a Thai. If someone asks me something about Thailand, I
should be able to answer it. So, I want to keep myself informed about
my homeland and I also plan to keep my children informed.

The need for relaxation means that the immigrant informants tend to use the media just
for fun, relaxation, and filling their spare time. As border-crossers who struggle to sur-
vive in new circumstances, they may experience a high level of so-called acculturative
stress (Ye, 2005). Methods of relaxation to cope with acculturative stress are limited,
so the immigrants become heavy media users. Interestingly enough, the immigrant
Yoon et al. 425

informants in the study were reported to be more likely to use the Korean media than
their home country media for relaxation, probably because some immigrant informants
had already been familiar with Korean popular culture (so-called Hallyu, the Korean
Wave) prior to their coming to Korea. They enjoyed watching Korean television
dramas and movies almost daily, as is similar with Asian international students in
Korea (Kim K et al., 2009).

Researcher: Is there any Philippine drama that you regularly watch [via internet]?
Woman 6: Yes! But there are many Korean dramas these days. Well, Philippine
drama is not fun anymore.
Researcher: Then between the Philippine and Korean ones, which is more amusing
to you?
Woman 6: Korean drama is more amusing to me these days.
Researcher: Which drama do you feel free to watch while taking a rest?
Woman 6: Korean drama.
Woman 5: A Korean one.
Woman 7: Me, too.

As a whole, the need for adaptation did not exclude the use of the home country media,
whereas the need for relaxation was related more closely with the use of the host country
media. This phenomenon was in contrast to previous research findings, which indicated
that the immigrants tended to use their home country media for relaxation while using
the host country media to acculturate information.

Reading strategies for multicultural media representations

As mentioned before, the different cultural capital and habitus of the immigrant inform-
ants may lead them to adopt various media reading strategies. Of particular importance
in this regard is how they read multicultural representations in the host media.
Multicultural media representations here refer to movies, television dramas, entertain-
ment programs, news, and documents portraying multicultural situations in which immi-
grant women, foreign workers, or international students appear as major characters.
Some examples of television programs are: Love in Asia, Nice to Meet You, Golden
Bride, and The Beauties’ Chat.
Considering that South Korea is experiencing an unexpectedly rapid change from
homogeneity into racial/ethnic heterogeneity, there is a possibility that the host media
may represent multicultural issues in a mixed, contradictory manner. According to a
recent analysis of South Korean films portraying married immigrant women (Kim S,
2009), for instance, the media depicted married immigrant women as people who carried
out menial labor and reproduced disadvantaged social sectors serving the new nation-
building policies. Consequently, the immigrant informants may resist the preferred code
in the host media as a form of subversive strategy. The analysis of interview data revealed
four reading strategies among immigrant women and their family members: empathetic
reading, critical reading, distantiated reading, and avoidance of reading.
First of all, the empathetic reading takes place when the informants are so positively
absorbed in the multicultural representation in the media that they tend to identify
426 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

themselves as the people portrayed in the media. The informants said that they could
easily feel empathy and sympathy for the similar immigrant women portrayed in the
television programs. This was especially apparent in that almost all immigrant inform-
ants said that they have wept in the scenes where an immigrant woman living in Korea
met her mother living in her homeland.
Contrary to the empathetic reading strategy by which the immigrant informants posi-
tively evaluate multicultural representations in the host media, critical reading is the
negative response toward the multicultural media portrayals. Again, critical reading can
be divided into two types. One type is the critical reading of the multicultural portrayals
unrealistically idealized in the host media. This idealized representation calls forth an
unintended consequence as a necessity.

Woman 7: [While watching a happy multicultural family on the media.] Some

questions occur to me. The [immigrant] woman and her mother-in-law
are living happily together. Why not me? I think she [the immigrant
woman] married a good man. My mother-in-law always tells me women
from Vietnam, China, and Mongolia do well.
Woman 6: They [our mothers-in-law] tend to grumble at us. They say ‘Look at that
woman! Why can’t you do well like her?’

The other type is the critical reading of miserable representation in the host media. The
immigrant informants’ criticism concentrated on the stereotypical news stories that tended
to report Asian immigrant women as those who married Korean men for their money
and that tended to blame the immigrant wife when a Korean husband was deserted by
her. During the interview, one husband informant of a multicultural family criticized the
media portrayals that depicted the husbands as macho guys who lay violent hands on
their wives.

Husband 3: Television usually shows a husband as a drunken lout hitting his wife
… Such an embarrassing scene makes my wife angry. ‘That Korean
man is bad,’ she says, ‘how can he drink and beat a woman?’ For my
wife, she needs my help while cooking, because I’m a chef. Sometimes
we prepare meals together, so she is now good at cooking Korean
foods.
Researcher: So, you mean television needs to show more husbands like you.
Husband 3: Of course! More positive stories should be shown, instead of showing
only a drunken guy hitting his wife.

The third is the distantiated reading strategy by which the immigrant informants maintain
a psychological distance from media portrayals. Whether the informants identify the media
portrayals positively or criticize them negatively, they might feel acculturative stress,
because they have to cope with psychological burdens. As a countermeasure for the
stress, the informants choose to remain distant from the media by regarding the media
portrayals just as a text or a story constructed, not reality.
Yoon et al. 427

Researcher: What do you think about the women and families like you on
television? Do you think they are too happy?
Woman 15: Television tends to paint stories positively. Negative stories don’t
attract people. I guess the real story may be worse and harder than
what the television shows.
Woman 12: Some stories are happy, some are not. I think that’s television. I don’t
believe that all the television stories are real.
Researcher: You don’t believe television?
Woman 12: No, I don’t believe it. I just watch it for fun.

The last is the extreme strategy of distantiated reading — that is, avoidance of reading. Some
immigrant informants have said that they did not want to read the media touching on a mul-
ticultural issue, probably because they might be in a bad humor. This reaction pattern was
observed particularly among multicultural family members as well as immigrant women.

Researcher: Do you watch such programs frequently?

Woman 12: Not often… such programs remind me of my parents and hard times in
my homeland. They give me an uneasy feeling, so I do not watch them.
I don’t like them.
Researcher: Have you ever seen multicultural families like yours on television? If
so, how did they make you feel?
Child 2: I once watched Love in Asia with my mom. I thought that they were
similar to me, but I don’t want to watch it again.

The results from the analysis suggested that the immigrant informants’ reading strategies
for multicultural media portrayals reflected a broader spectrum than Hall’s (1980)
­original trichotomy. The immigrant informants possessing different habitus and cultural
capital may take different reading strategies according to the extent to which they accept
(or reject) the preferred meaning that is propagandized in the host media.

Discussion
Up to now, this study has investigated Asian immigrant women’s diaspora experiences,
media consumption, motives of media use, and reading strategies for multicultural por-
trayals in South Korea, which has long been proud of its racial homogeneity, but is now
perplexed by its rapid transformation into a multicultural society. Three major findings
from the analysis should be highlighted. First, the immigrant informants’ media con-
sumption shows Janus-faced characteristics in both univorous and omnivorous styles.
The immigrant informants with a little of the host country cultural capital consume the
restricted media contents, resulting in media use in a univorous style; at the same time,
they can be regarded as omnivorous media consumers, given that they consume various
media contents from their home country as well as the host media contents. This omnivo-
rous consumption of both the host and the home country media does not rule out
the possibility that they can accumulate multicultural capital. The accumulation of
428 Media, Culture & Society 33(3)

multicultural capital by acquiring cultural capital of the host country and by maintaining
that of their home country may be the major force in increasing the total sum of media
consumption.
Second, the relation between media use and its motives is more complicatedly hybrid-
ized at the intersection of local and global. The results from the analysis, contrary to
previous research, indicate that the immigrant informants may use their home country
media to adapt themselves to the new host country, and that they sometimes prefer
Korean TV melodramas to their own home media contents for rest and amusement. The
more important finding is the hybridization of local and global culture. Prior to their
arrival in South Korea, most immigrant informants have already been exposed to Korean
popular culture (so-called Hallyu), so they can easily enjoy (or even prefer) Korean tel-
evision programs after immigration to Korea. Furthermore, they have little difficulty in
using their own home country media contents (mainly via the internet) even in the moun-
tainous Gangwon province, one of the remotest areas in South Korea. This can be
regarded as a typical case of what Kraidy (1999) called glocalization, the complex local-
global interplay, in the mediascape.
Third, the immigrant informants’ readings of the host media show two contradictory
strategies of acceptance and resistance. In spite of the possibility that the immigrant
informants can do critical readings for media texts because their habitus and cultural
taste are different from those of the natives in the host country, their limited host country
cultural capital may constrain them from adopting a critical reading strategy, because
critical readings usually require more work from the readers than do other readings
(Condit, 1989; Rockler, 1999). This is similar to American college women’s responses in
regard to Beverly Hills, 90210, a television series which has been criticized as portraying
a patriarchal image of idealized young females (Rockler, 1999). Although most of these
college women, who had limited cultural knowledge and language for critical evaluation
of media texts, have superficially pointed out the lack of reality in the program, their
cursory criticism has constrained them from evaluating the ideology of the program at a
deeper level. They have said, “It’s just entertainment.” As with these American college
women, Asian immigrant women, too, repudiated the preferred meaning of multicultural
portrayals by criticizing their lack of reality and actively pursued pleasure; at the same
time, they also accepted the legitimacy of dominant ideology by approving it as mores of
media. They have said, “That’s television.” Their diasporic and fluid positions may force
them to negotiate between resistance and acceptance strategies.

The dialectic of habitus and its implications

What emerges from this findings-based discussion is the dialectic of habitus that is
crossing the border. It can be interpreted that the original concept of habitus itself
has an attribute of dialectical synthesis between two oppositions, such as in society-
individual, structure-action, physical hexis-mental ethos, internalization-externalization,
the inherited-the acquired, and the permanent-the changeable (Bonnewitz, 2002).
Considering Bourdieu’s proposition that an individual is a variation of group habitus,
a border-crossing immigrant informant can be seen as a personification of habitus that is
crossing the border. The border-crossing habitus, which is personified as an Asian immi-
grant woman in the multicultural media field, more clearly demonstrates its dialectical
Yoon et al. 429

nature by the interplay between the two oppositions, such as host country-home country,
maintaining-acquiring, univore-omnivore, the local-the global, acceptance-resistance,
and preservation-subversion. This dialectic of habitus leads to the possibilities of the
reconstruction of hybridized habitus, the formation of diaspora identity, and the accumu-
lation of blended multicultural capital. Given this dialectical process, the media can play
a beneficial role in realizing these possibilities.
Of particular interest in this regard is the necessity for multicultural media education
for both audiences and producers. For the immigrant audiences, media literacy education
is needed in order to provide the language and cultural capitals needed to read the host
media texts critically. A ‘newspapers in education’ (NIE) program especially may be
very helpful for the immigrant women, whose media consumption is limited to television
melodramas, to transform the style of their media consumption from univore to omni-
vore. For the media producers, multicultural education is needed to increase their sensi-
tivity to multicultural issues and to keep their political correctness in representing
multicultural situations. This study lays the foundation for multicultural media education
by offering basic information about Asian diaspora women’s media consumption, their
motives, and their reading strategies.
In addition to these practical implications, this study provides theoretical insights.
This study may be the first attempt to explore the media factors in Asian diaspora wom-
en’s experiences in terms of Bourdieu’s sociological concepts, such as habitus, cultural
capital, and fields. Moreover, it is hoped that this study will contribute to the body of
knowledge in related areas by shedding some light on how Hall’s decoding theory could
be linked with Bourdieu’s sociological concepts in the multicultural context.
This study is not without limitations. Although the current study has offered an initial
contribution to the literature concerning the relationship between the media and habitus
in Asian diaspora experiences, more research is needed. Future research efforts should be
extended to the empirical inspection of how the immigrant individuals’ habitus and cul-
tural tastes specifically influence their choice of media consumption style, their motives
for media use, and their reading strategies in various diasporic contexts.

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