In this book project, I examine how Korean activist mothers of young adults with developmental disabilities redefine their social identities while envisioning alternative care arrangements through disability rights and policy reform. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative analysis of archival materials from 2010 to 2021, this project traces (a) how mothers of disabled children are silenced—not through absence, but through structural misrecognition and the illusion of democratic dialogue, and (b) how they resist their epistemic erasure through multiple levels of symbolic performance, including everyday interactions, collective rituals, and public protest.
 

In Part One, I introduce the concept of hermeneutical brokerage—a condition in which speakers’ narratives are structurally filtered or redirected in the course of communication due to a profound asymmetry in symbolic resources between listeners and speakers, as well as the oversimplification of the speakers’ multiple social identities. Building on this framework, I analyze legal and moral discourses surrounding the lives of mothers of disabled children, delineating the symbolic webs that sustain mothers’ disabling realities, excluding them from social and political participation while governing their affective and psychic lives.

In Part Two, I examine how some mothers make themselves reappear through layered symbolic performances. While tracing their trajectories toward becoming disability activists, I explore how mothers, at some times intentionally, and at other times unintentionally, transgress the maternal roles ascribed to their bodies. Through these acts, I argue, mothers engage in ontological resistance: embodied interventions that reclaim visibility and social presence. By mobilizing their maternal bodies, mothers expand their performances of abling—an active process of reclaiming agency and resisting structural symbolic violence.

In doing so, this project echoes the voices of activist mothers in Korea to argue for reimagining the welfare state as a caring state—one that not only distributes services but also listens with epistemic humility, recognizes complex and situated social identities, and affirms the political value of care. Moreover, it highlights the crucial role of everyday practices in enabling marginalized actors to mobilize for change.