This article focuses on migrant women’s im/mobilities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, with a case study of Mongolians in South Korea. An ethnographic study in 2021 and 2022 of 30 Mongolian women participants showed that they were both mobile and immobile, with their different trajectories of movement within their communities largely shaped by gender, economic precarity, and marginalised status. They drew maps of their communities which illuminated unmarked routes within this migrant destination. Interview narratives supplemented these maps and revealed
timescales of critical incidences surrounding the participants’ migrations and mobilities. An analysis of the participant data illuminated gendered detours of migrant women. Such detours reflect migrant women’s marginalised livelihoods in host societies as well as geopolitical imbalances between global south and global north countries. Through this novel methodological approach, it was possible to see and know the worlds of migrant women on the move, many of whom are otherwise invisible and in places that are unrecognisable to non-migrants. Studying the desires and dislocations of migrant women in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic contributes to the burgeoning research on migration and im/mobilities and furthermore engages the concept of gendered detours.