Reconceptualizing nationality through a world-systems perspective: Intersectionality and the gendered experiences of female international students in South Korea

This article advances intersectionality by reconceptualizing nationality as a relational axis of inequality constituted through the capitalist world-system. While intersectionality has been extended to transnational, postcolonial and migration contexts, nationality has often remained conceptualized as a legal status or identity rather than as a position embedded within global political, economic and symbolic hierarchies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 20 female international students in South Korea, this study examines how gendered experiences are mediated by globally stratified understandings of national origin. The findings show that femininity is differentially interpreted through geopolitical standing, economic development and the symbolic prestige attached to participants’ countries of origin. National hierarchies shape how women’s bodies are evaluated, how inclusion and exclusion are experienced and how racialized and gendered expectations are enacted in everyday institutional and interpersonal interactions. Consequently, vulnerability and privilege are unevenly distributed among international students according to their world-systemic position rather than nationality alone. South Korea’s semi-peripheral position provides a theoretically generative case for examining how global hierarchies are reproduced and reconfigured beyond Western contexts. Methodologically, the article demonstrates how qualitative interviews can connect everyday experiences to broader structures of global inequality. By bringing intersectionality into dialogue with world-systems analysis, the study contributes to global sociology by theorizing nationality as a relational and historically structured dimension of intersectional inequality.