Headscarves in the Public Square: Transnational Maternal Activism and Material Religious Practice among South Korean and Argentine Mothers of Political Victims

This paper examines how transnational Catholic mothers mobilized motherhood as material religion through the embodied practice of wearing headscarves in public protest—purple for South Korean Minkahyup mothers of political victims under authoritarian regimes and white for Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This paper unearths a historically significant moment of transnational encounter in June 1994 in South Korea, when Minkahyup invited the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo into solidarity activism in South Korea’s gwangjang (public square). I argue that the headscarves that the mothers wore in public protest functioned as portable “altars” of counter-memory: sensory, visible, and repeatable artifacts that resignified traditional motherhood into a moral vocation of political resistance, oriented toward justice, truth, and restoration of human dignity. In this paper, the headscarf is not a mere symbol but a lived religious practice that operates at the intersection of devotion, grief, and moral agency.