The role and status of women in North Korea have changed in recent years. Reports suggest that women, more than men, have become active players in emerging capitalist processes, particularly those centered on local markets, thus creating new opportunities for themselves and new challenges for the regime.

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International labor mobility holds the promise that one can become a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. But this interpretation of mobility rarely features in research and media focused on Asian women who travel and engage in sex work. In both arenas, the dominant narrative is that migrant sex workers are poor, the victims of sex trafficking, and pose a risk to public health. This narrative is laced with Orientalist overtones of the Asian sex worker as the alluringly exotic ‘other’, passive and particularly vulnerable, and in need of rescue. However, the interviews of 11 Korean women sex workers based in Sydney, Australia, challenge this narrative. These women engaged in a transnational quest to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world, albeit making logical choices from structurally limited options shaped by their multiple identities as women, sex workers, and Korean, and their relative precarious position in the Australian labor market. Their stories highlight how migration and work can be an agentic process of self-expression and self-actualization of identity. This identity has emerged against the backdrop of shifting meanings and practices of social reproduction in Korea, a country that has experienced a highly compressed transition from developing, to modern capitalist state. Theoretically, the article draws on post-colonial feminist theory to shed light into the conflicting views on migrant sex workers in existing research, by focusing on the women’s voices, which have been neglected or silenced.

Based on assumed common ethnicity, language and culture, South Korea is believed to be the best country for North Korean defectors to restart their lives. This is, however, not necessarily the case. Since the mid-2000s, 2000 to 3000 North Koreans have allegedly settled in the UK, Canada, the US, Australia and EU countries. Despite this trend and its broader implications, the onward migration process of North Korean refugees, together with their motivations and lived experiences, remain poorly addressed in academic research. Drawing from the unique experience of North Korean refugees’ onward movement to Australia, the paper suggests that discarding a North Korean identity and habitus and gaining cosmopolitan habitus are the main reasons behind North Korean defectors’ onward migration. The paper is the first empirical study on North Korean refugees resettled in Australia to adopt habitus as a theoretical framework, and thus provides new insight into migration studies.

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