Organizer and Chair: Shu-mei Shih, University of
California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Chungmoo Choi, University of California, Irvine
This panel proposes to examine the intricate relationship between gender and modernity in Korean literature and cinema. As scholars have noted, the experience of modernity often produces new gender roles and relationships, which in turn constitute the modern.
In the context of colonial Korea and after, how are gender issues articulated vis-à-vis modernity? What new gender roles are produced and what others are supplanted? Susie Kim’s "Gender, Yuhaksaeng and Korean Subjectivities" investigates how transnational subjectivities are produced through the experience of studying abroad, and how these transnational subjectivities have a strongly gendered dimension, as seen in Yi Injik’s 1906 novel Hyul ui nu. Kelly Jeong’s "Gender and Modernity in Mansejon" traces the ambiguous emergence of the category of the New Woman in this Yom Sang-sob novel from 1924. By analyzing the ways in which the New Woman straddles between the realm of colonial modernity and the traditional sphere, Jeong reads her representation in terms of the male author’s position within the colonial order. Kyung Hyun Kim’s "Where is Papa in Chang Son-u Films?" takes the central issue to the postcolonial context and examines the seeming absence of the patriarchal voice in the films of Chang Son-u. Like S. Kim and Jeong’s approach to the novels then, this paper situates the films within their social context to illuminate how modernity is always articulated within a gendered nexus of relationships, be it the construction of transnational subjectivity for a woman, the representation of the New Woman by a male author, or the waning patriarchal voice in New Korean Cinema.
Gender, Yuhaksaeng and Korean Subjectivities
Susie Jie Young Kim, University of California, Los AngelesThe appearance of Yi Injik’s Hyôl ûi nu in 1906 coincides with a period of growing traffic around Korea’s borders. Although this was not Korea’s first experience of dealing with the gaze of others, the forced opening of its ports in 1876 intensified the flow of traffic from "the outside." However, this traffic was not merely uni-directional and limited to the outside flowing in. For instance, yuhaksaeng ("students studying abroad") sought out new tools with which to negotiate a changing Korean landscape in their transnational experiences. Writers such as Yi Injik translated the yuhaksaeng experience into the literary space as subjectivities within Korea’s space were being continually rearticulated and reconstructed through these newly opened channels of cultural transit. Reflecting on the broader implication of the transnational aspect of Korea’s experience of modernity, this paper examines the construct of yuhaksaeng in two texts by Yi Injik, Hyôl ûi nu (1906) and Ûnsaegye (1908), with a particular focus on the construct of female yuhaksaeng. In the semi-colonial/colonial space of Yi Injik’s texts, however, the transnational subject is constructed through a narrative in which yuhaksaeng go abroad and acquire "new" knowledge for the purpose of returning to Korea. In this way, the transnationalized modern intellectual participates in the nation-building process with this newly acquired cultural capital. Moreover, the articulation of transnational subjectivities in these texts are configured along gender lines with female students enjoying particular mobility in the yuhaksaeng experience in comparison with their male counterparts.
Gender and Modernity in Mansejon
Kelly Jeong, University of California, Los AngelesThis paper will discuss the Korean novel Mansejon (before the 3.1 Declaration of Independence, 1924) by Yom Sang-sob (1897–1963) to examine a complex colonial predicament narrated through an intellectual’s perspective. This famous novel is a text in which practically every detail seems to symbolically represent the socio-political landscape of the colonized Korea. Here I use "western" theories in order to get a clearer picture of the historico-political and literary issues embedded in Yom’s novel.
This essay will mainly focus on the female protagonist who straddles two disparate worlds. Her positionality in relation to colonial modernity shows how her experiences in such modernity create and change her, even while she is thoroughly implicated in the old ideologies of the fallen fatherland.
The female protagonist positions herself between two opposing ideologies, utilizing the space created by the schism and disparity between the ideal and reality, not necessarily represented by nor coinciding with, the new (colonial modernity) and the old, in order to survive both. Ultimately there emerges a portrait of the New Woman, a profoundly ambivalent figure who is unable and often even unwilling to take actions that will have impact beyond her private life, although she recognizes the colonial oppression surrounding and imposed on herself. Finally this inability to act finds a route of expression in the discussion of literature within the novel, drawing attention to the author’s own position in "without," or in the real life of colonial order.
Where’s Papa in Chang Sôn-u Films?
Kyung Hyun Kim, University of California, IrvineOne of the striking differences between the films from the Golden Age of Korean Cinema (1960s) and the ones produced during the New Korean Cinema period (late 1980s to the present) is the superabundance of family in the former period and its absence in the latter one. If many of the films from the ‘60s figured the volatility of the society through the intergenerational tensions in the family, the more recent films from Korea erase any trace of family in their plots. This erasure of family is particularly notable in the films with contemporary settings, as many popular hits of the 90s—"Marriage Story" (1991), "Blue in You" (1992) and even the most recent "Swiri" (1999)—continue to create characters that have their families blotted out.
In this proposed paper, I come to terms with the New Korean Cinema’s mysterious refusal to engage with the subject matter of contemporary family and subsequently fatherhood. This reluctance is mystifying since, in the context of any given national cinema movements, patriarchic figures are popularly depicted as a loathing authoritarian subject that anchors both social disenchantment and protest. Focusing on the films directed by Chang Sôn-u, "Lovers in Woomuk-baemi" (1989), "The Road to the Racetrack" (1991), "To You, From Me" (1994), and "A Petal" (1996), I try to locate and analyze the patriarchic discourses that are seemingly missing in his films. The essay will employ the terms and theories of Lacanian psychoanalysis and will refashion the troubled masculinity and its desire to mask its anxiety. Not only will this reading hopefully render a better understanding of the shifting characteristics of masculinity in Korea, but it will also rethink the meanings of gender and desire in film aesthetics.