Session 176: Socialist Feminism in East Asia

Organizer and Chair: Sunyoung Park, University of Michigan

Discussant: Ming Dong Gu, Rhodes College

Keywords: women and nation, modern Asian feminism, East Asian literature and film, socialist culture.

Few people today would argue that socialist feminism represents a stable theoretical position. Yet, despite its subordination of gender issues to class struggles, socialist feminism enjoyed extensive popularity among East Asian women intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. This panel examines, through the analysis of cultural products, the discursive strengths and limits of socialist feminism in asserting women’s interests in the social and cultural context of imperialism and nationalism. Of the three panelists, Sunyoung Park will discuss women’s proletarian literature in 1930s Korea in light of the ambivalent consequences of Japanese imperialism on the condition of Korean women. Miseli Jeon will offer a comparative study of Japanese and Korean socialist feminist writers, focusing on the precarious balancing of their commitments to a class-oriented ideological outlook and their individual subjectivities. Qiliang He will investigate the nationalist reappropriation of socialist feminism in post-revolutionary China through an analysis of representations of Chinese and North Korean women in Chinese films on the Korean War. Together, the papers will provide a multi-layered inquiry into the discursive functions of socialist feminism, arguing for the vital relevance of this issue to current theoretical reflections on feminism as a global, internationalist movement.

Feminizing the Brothers: Gender Representations in Chinese Korea War Films, 1955–1966

Qiliang He, University of Minnesota

This paper studies the representations of gender and gender relationship in a dozen Chinese Korean War films made between 1955 and 1965. These films display a clear gender division of labor between the Chinese and the (North) Koreans. The Chinese of both genders are usually portrayed as anti-imperialist heroes whereas the Koreans are largely female civilians who assisted Chinese heroes. Almost all these films highlight the femininity of Korean women who wear "traditional" Korean long robes and are expert at Korean dances. In contrast, Chinese women, who dressed up almost the same as their male compatriots, are painted as revolutionaries whose femininity has been neutralized (or masculinized).

As such, Chinese filmmakers construct a series of dichotomies of China/Korea, masculine/feminine, and revolutionary progressive/traditional. The gender relationship represented in these films exemplifies the deployment of Chinese socialist feminism—communist government’s effort to redefine femininity as a part of its larger project of social reform—in the international context, namely, while China’s socialist feminism entailed overriding Chinese women’s femininity, it ironically stressed "traditional" femininity for the Korean counterparts. In other words, Chinese socialist feminist discourse of redefining femininity has its limits in that it does not apply to the Korean counterparts. By delving into Chinese Korean War films, this paper seeks to explore how Chinese nationalism reshapes socialist feminism that China (masculinity)/North Korea (femininity) dichotomies has metaphorically illustrated.

Writing with One’s Body: Two (Japanese and Korean) Leftist Women Writers

Miseli Jeon, University of British Columbia

While, in the West, the emergence of socialism came long after that of individualism, both ideologies were introduced to East Asia around the same time. I argue that some socialist feminist writers like Hirabayashi Taiko and Kang Kyŏng-ae faced a dilemma between the socialist mandate of class solidarity and their need to assert their individualities. At the core of this dilemma lay the persistent patriarchal and increasingly logocentric worldview among the leaders of Korean and Japanese socialist movements. As a way of coping with the dilemma, these two writers adopted a narrative strategy that has been described as "writing with one’s body." They took pains to depict the social experiences that women lived through their bodies, triply bound by nationalist, colonialist, and socialist patriarchy. Hirabayashi’s "Azakeru" (Self-Mockery; 1926; tr. 1987) and "Serytshitsu nite" (In the Charity Ward; 1927), and Kang’s Ingan munje (The Human Problem; 1934) and "Sogŭm" (Salt; 1934) are good examples of such depiction. I will demonstrate, using the feminist theories proposed by Luce Irigaray, Kathleen Marks, and Gayatri Spivak, how the two writers’ narrative strategy allows their female protagonists to gain subjectivity and self-agency. Simultaneously, I will emphasize dissimilar dimensions in their approaches to, and the ultimate purposes served by, the adoption of the strategy. The dissimilarity stems not only from the pre-World War II political context in which the imperial Japan and Korea as its colony were situated, but also from the distinction between the two cultures. I will elucidate the cultural distinction by introducing two traditional sensibilities, urami in Japan and han in Korea.

Vindicating the Rights of Colonial Maids: Kang Kyŏngae’s Portrayal of Korean Proletarian Women in the 1930s

Sunyoung Park, University of Michigan

Kang Kyŏngae’s proletarian stories present the only fully developed representations of lower-class Korean women by a woman writer in the colonial period. Yet, because she prioritized class struggle over gender conflict, her writings are often regarded non-feminist. In this paper, I will argue that such a narrow definition of feminist literature does not reflect the reality of feminist literary practice in colonial society and thus needs to be revised. In its nineteenth-century European origin, the feminist called for women’s achievement of equal social status with men. When adopted into colonial society, the same discourse had its primary significance in liberating native women from the oppressive traditional social order and encouraging their emulation not of colonial men but of the "free" women of the West. As colonial women intellectuals came to be aware of the hidden racist and elitist bias in liberal feminism and of the uneven consequences of colonial modernization on the different classes of Korean women, many chose to combine their fight against gender discrimination with a struggle against the imperial exploitation of lower-class women laborers. The early 1930s emergence of leftist women writers reflected the ideological reorientation among Korean feminist activists as well as the increase of the gendered publication space in the patriarchal Korean literary world. I will discuss Kang’s literary works as representative examples of 1930s women’s testimonial literature of the predicaments of the colonial proletariat.