Organizer: Seungsook Moon, Vassar College
Chair: Cynthia H. Enloe, Clark University
This panel focuses on particular ways in which states and the boundaries of nations are involved in the politics of maintenance and transformation of hierarchical social relations of gender and sexuality in South Korea, India and South Asian communities in United States. While households have been a crucial site of gender and sexual politics, the roles of states and national boundaries in this is no less significant in the contexts of economic development and increasing transnational migration in the late twentieth century. As the growing bodies of literature on nationalism and diaspora illuminate, in association with class and race, gender and sexuality have constituted an essential dimension of nation-building.
Individual presenters of this panel look into specific areas to analyze gender and sexual politics in national and transnational contexts. By examining women’s movement to reform the Equal Employment Law in South Korea, Moon’s paper analyzes how notions of gender equality and difference are articulated, obscured, and contested in relation to such critical social resources as employment. By exploring unintended consequences of population control policy in South Korea, Oum’s paper discusses limits of the state in exercising control over women’s bodies and their desire to deliver sons. By scrutinizing sex-education texts directed to middle-class women in postcolonial India, Puri’s paper examines the ways in which the state attempts to maintain normative notions of gender and sexuality. By discussing the politics of authenticity and national boundaries in immigrant South Asian communities in the United States, Das Gupta’s paper investigates the extent to which nation-building in the transnational context is informed by normative notions of gender and sexuality.
Struggle for Equality and Difference: Women’s Movement to Reform the Equal Employment Law in South Korea
Seungsook Moon, Vassar College
By focusing on the politics of reforming the Equal Employment Law (EEL), this paper examines the ways in which notions of gender equality and difference are articulated, obscured and contested by such diverse social actors as women’s associations, state bureaucrats, employers and political parties. The EEL was enacted in 1988 as the first showcase of emergent "women’s policy" conceived as an institutionalized mechanism to promote gender equality and women’s welfare. Reflecting paramountcy of the economy in newly industrialized South Korea, the EEL has been one of the most contested sites of political negotiation between women and the state.
Since its unexpected enactment by the ruling Democratic Justice Party as election bait, the women’s movement has attempted to revise the EEL and has faced strong resistance from the powerful Board of Economy and Finance, employers, and the Ministry of Labor. This ongoing negotiation provides a valuable case to analyze the seemingly paradoxical nature of the contemporary women’s movement—i.e., struggle for equality and difference. The present paper argues the following points. First, while women’s movement articulates equality in terms of equal pay for work of comparable worth, the EEL obscured this aspect of equality by reducing equality to identity. Second, while women’s movement demands recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace as a form of employment discrimination, other social actors disregard it as an issue integral to equal employment by contesting that such recognition assumes sexual difference, and this and sexual equality are mutually exclusive.
Negotiating the State’s Control: Unintended Consequences of "Successful" Population Control in South Korea
Young-Rae Oum, Clark University
Viewing women’s unchecked fertility as a negative factor impeding national modernization through economic growth, the South Korean state had implemented population control policy from the 1960s to the 1980s. Adopting the neo-Malthusian view on population, it had utilized persistent and aggressive campaigns which were fully supported by affordable medical services and lax enforcement of anti-abortion law. As a result, it has altered people’s attitudes toward reproductive behavior and family structure. Moreover, it achieved "successfully" its goal of reducing the fertility rate below the maintenance level by the end of the 1980s, and finally seemed to recognize no further need for population control.
This apparent "success" of population control in South Korea provides an important case study which allows us to reflect upon the relationship between the state and women in the area of politics of women’s body and sexuality. In the name of family planning policy, the state intruded upon what is considered to be an extremely personal and private area. Yet, its power to intervene in women’s lives is more limited than what is apparent from changing people’s perception and birth control practices. While the South Korean state successfully controlled population growth, it failed to control people’s desire to have a certain type of family. The result is skewed sex-ratio among the birth cohorts of the 1970s and thereafter. Further implications of this sex-ratio imbalance for women’s status and gender relations in South Korean society are discussed in this paper.
Challenging the Commonplace: Sex-Education Texts and Middle-Class Women in Postcolonial India
Jyoti Puri, Simmons College
Broadly put, this paper focuses on the inherent tensions between the state’s liberal policies on gender and sexuality and the regulation of urban, middle-class women’s gendered bodies and sexualities in post-colonial India. Nowhere are the attempts at regulating middle-class women more obvious than the widely disseminated, state-sponsored educational literatures on aspects of gender and sexuality. Addressing a range of issues associated with puberty, adolescence, and young adulthood—e.g., menarche, early menstruation, sexual desire, sexual intercourse, sexually transmitted diseases, marriage and motherhood—these texts are premised on the assumption that factual information will help alleviate anxieties related to sexual development for adolescents.
However, analyzing the information from the viewpoint of middle-class women makes clear that under the guise of educating adolescents on matters of gender and sexual development, these texts prescribe social norms, reinforce forms of social controls, and regurgitate pervasive social inequities. Specifically, these texts normalize matters of sexual respectability, marriage and motherhood in women’s lives. Especially when addressing issues of menarche and puberty among girls, the texts reinforce mechanisms of social control that rely on self-surveillance of the female body and its sexual respectability. From a critical feminist viewpoint, what is most disputable about these texts is how they are riddled by the hierarchies of gender, (hetero)sexualities, and nationalisms within a transnational cultural context in their deceptively commonplace discussions on matters of gender and sexual development in the lives of young middle-class women.
Crossing Borders, Consolidating Nations: the Politics of Gender and Sexuality in South Asian Communities in the United States
Monisha Das Gupta, Syracuse University
This paper examines nation-building, and interventions in those efforts within the South Asian immigrant community in the United States. Nation-identified immigrant associations take it upon themselves to celebrate nationhood in a diasporic context by naming culture and tradition. Defining women’s role in the family and nation, and enforcing heterosexuality are central to this project. New York City’s India Day and Pakistan Day parades celebrating the nations’ independence represent potent and public moments at which invoking the nation also involves what is authentically "Indian" or "Pakistani." The politics of authenticity deployed by these organizations constructs an ideal nation that depends on the active disinheritance of battered women, lesbian and gay South Asians, and working class South Asians. The routine exclusion from these events of organizations that advocate these immigrants’ rights and make their realities visible, thus, serves to police symbolic borders through the definition of who is a worthy national and who is not. Social change-oriented organizations, which are in the process of crafting a transnational "South Asian" identity, contest these articulations of masculine, heterosexist, and elitist nationalism. In doing so, they underline the reality of nation-building as well as the potential for resistances built across borders.