Description
How do small acts in everyday life reshape wider political order, how does that change across contexts? Using Korea, an experimental site for rethinking recognition rules,as a vantage point, I read five autobiographies by North Korean women through the lens of identity as repeated social practice, comparing how those practices work in North Korea and after settlement in South Korea.
In North Korea, women maintain a sense of self by interpreting norms flexibly and carefully mobilising informal networks. These quiet practices create micro-orders and shadow recognition, yet under repression and limited channels for expression, their effects remain local and seldom change formal rules.
After migration, capacity expands, and categories are renegotiated: women learn institutional literacy, widen roles in community, and move into writing and public speaking, carrying private experience into shared narratives. Institutional and cultural support can open doors yet sometimes re-fix the “defector” label; authors counter by foregrounding multi-layered selves as professionals, community leaders, or writers. Everyday practices accumulate into local recognition and open public/institutional channels, shifting recognition rules in ways that indirectly reconfigure order over time. The analysis shows that politics is made where everyday life, discourse, and institutions meet, and that the same actors’ capacity to reshape order is contextually-conditional.
