Session 29: Authoritarian Legacies and Democratic Fortunes: Negotiating Gender in Post-Authoritarian Social Movements in South Korea

Organizer and Chair: Jong Bum Kwon, New York University

Discussant: Nancy Abelmann, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Keywords: South Korea, gender, anthropology, sociology, social movements, labor movements.

The dual processes of democratic consolidation and globalization (social, cultural and economic transnational flows) have rekindled Korean civil society and have opened new spaces for the construction as well as contestation of new gender identities and subjectivities. The gendered character of social movements has changed. Social movements have become less dominated by grand ideological pursuits that have historically subsumed the experience and interests of women. The increasing prominence of women’s social, cultural, and political interests in contemporary movements offers the promise of greater women’s participation in heretofore foreclosed domains of society with the attendant reconfiguration of "traditional" patriarchal norms. Nevertheless, the results have been decidedly mixed as we see the tenacity of gender inequality and hierarchy within Korean society as a whole and within the ostensibly progressive movements themselves.

The persistence of inequality has been normatively explained away as the obstinate legacy of Confucianism. The papers in this panel challenge this ahistorical assumption and provide ethnographically informed analyses of the negotiation of gender within a diverse range of social movements. The papers as a whole reveal a critical gendered dynamic: the convergence and contestation of the legacy of male-centered forms of organization and identity formation, characteristic of the authoritarian period; discourses of the "universal," such as democracy and modernity; and discourses of interests specific to Korean women. Social movements are crucial sites in the contestation, reproduction and dissemination of gendered identities, and demonstrate the centrality of gender in constructing notions of democracy, progressive politics and modernity in Korea.

Critiquing Gendered Social Movements: Repositioning Women in Activist Subcultures in South Korea

Young-A Park, Harvard University

How does gender figure in the refashioning and reorganization of social movements in post-authoritarian South Korean society? I answer this question by analyzing the narratives of female documentary filmmakers who are recent recruits to activism-oriented film groups. Those organizations claim their roots in the 1980s film activism that regarded the camera as a means of radical social change. The militancy of the 1980s activist filmmakers, who declared their cameras to be guns shooting 24 bullets a second, mimicked military-authoritarian state. With the onset of civilian rule, however, the identity of these film groups has been less defined by their militant ideology. The film groups are now flourishing in an environment where state sponsorship and elite-institutional recognition have been awarded for the first time to alternative/ independent films. These new resources are distributed in ways that contradict the communal movement subculture, which has been based on charismatic male leadership and mentoring. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic research from 2000 to 2002 in Seoul, Korea, I look at the ways in which female filmmakers appropriate, critique, and question the existing male-centered social movement. Through their critical perspective, practice, and films, female filmmakers carve out spaces for their voices in the movement subculture, which has been represented as progressive, righteous, androgynous, and thus unmarked. I investigate the ways in which the female filmmakers render the Korean social movement gendered, particular, and marked.

Women United: Gender as a Gesture of Solidarity in and around Korean Feminism

Rebecca N. Ruhlen, University of Washington

The idea of gender in Korean feminism often consists of the strategic deployment of solidarity through shared womanhood. The Third East Asian Women’s NGO Forum, held in Mongolia in 1998, included participants from various women’s movements from across the region including Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Hong Kong. Where political, societal, and economic factors sometimes divided the delegations, gender united them. In both public and private discourse, my informants suggested that various experiences, such as sexual discrimination, aging, and motherhood, were universal aspects of womanhood. This paper will explore the theoretical and practical implications of strategically deploying "womanhood" as a universal experience.

Gendered Scripts and Institutionalized Fissures: The Politics of Non-Standard Employment in the South Korean Labor Movement

Jennifer Jihye Chun, University of California, Berkeley

The drive for labor market flexibility over the past decade has dramatically re-sculpted the employment landscape in South Korea. Stable, full-time jobs under a single employer have become a relic of a bygone era. Today, the overwhelming proportion of workers can expect to find themselves employed under highly insecure, low-paid, non-standard (bijungyujik) employment arrangements. Unions have attempted to organize the rapidly growing non-standard workforce, particularly women and other socially marginalized sectors of the workforce. However, their efforts are plagued by the gendered legacies of the past. This paper argues that struggles to organize low-wage, non-standard women workers have fueled two divergent trajectories. First, contested politics over the relationship between gender and organizing strategies have created an institutional fissure in the terrain of unionism. Since 1999, women’s trade unions have formed independent organizations, apart from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, for the sole purpose of organizing non-standard women workers. Second, debates over the eradication of non-standard employment versus the elimination of discrimination among non-standard workers reflect highly gendered scripts, with democratic trade unions associated with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions arguing for the former and independent women’s trade unions such as the National Korean Women’s Trade Union arguing for the latter. My paper investigates struggles to organize women janitors by the independent Korean Women’s Trade Union and the Seoul branch of the KCTU between 1999 and 2001 to understand how non-standard employment fuels divergent trajectories of union organizing in concrete localities.

Making Strong Men: Unemployed Workers’ Wives and Reshaping Democratic Unionism

Jong Bum Kwon, New York University

In the turbulent wake of the mass dismissals at Daewoo Motor (2001), approximately 400 men left their homes. This movement mirrored the phenomenon of recently unemployed men leaving their homes during the Asian Financial Crisis (1997). It was widely interpreted that men were abandoning their homes due to a "crisis of masculinity," of bowed and cowed husbands and fathers too ashamed to face their families. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with laid-off Daewoo autoworkers and their wives, my paper examines this crisis of masculinity and the role of their wives in sustaining and making men’s gender identities. One of the aims of this paper is to examine how women are critical to the making of men and masculinity in Korea and how this process is understood and performed in the context of widespread unemployment and the historically male-dominated labor movement. This paper challenges the notion that women, who are identified with the "domestic" sphere, inhibit men’s class consciousness and collective action in the "public" sphere. Furthermore, through my analysis of the role of workers’ wives in the labor movement, my paper demonstrates that their pronounced presence in labor struggles in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis (1997)—as active combatants against riot police and as surrogate representatives of the family in the public sphere—reveal a profound tension between the transformation and preservation of normative gender identities in working-class homes and in the democratic labor movement.