Organizer and Chair: Michael Robinson, Indiana University

Jin-kyung Park, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

This paper examines the medical investigation of female bodies and reproduction in colonial Korea (1910-1945). The Japanese imperial regime identified Koreans as valuable human resources (jinteki shigen), especially as part of the vitally-needed industrial and military labor power in the expansion of its colonial holdings farther into South and Northeast Asia. Under these circumstances, Korean women’s bodies and reproductive lives became subjected to a flurry of colonial medical studies in an effort to propagate, scientifically and systematically, healthy colonial subjects.

In this paper, I am interested in exploring how the reproductive lives of Korean women were problematized, interrogated, and represented by Japanese imperial medical power by focusing on a medical research project conducted by Chosen Noson Shakai Eisei Chosakai (Investigative Committee on Social Hygiene in Rural Korea). The Investigative Committee, under the direction of the prominent physician Teruoka Kido at the Institute of Kurasiki Labor Science, was composed of medical students at the Tokyo Imperial University. In July 1936, these Committee members, approaching their research as part of broader studies on population, carried out survey research on female reproductive physiology in Tali, a rural village in the province of Gyongsangnamdo situated in the southern part of Korea. They interrogated 157 married women’s experiences about, for instance, menstruation, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, and lactating, which the Committee defined as crucial characteristics of female reproductive physiology. By critically examining the Committee’s final reports, I will illustrate how Korean women’s reproductive physiology and activities became mapped onto colonial biomedical discourse and how this biomedical investigation was linked to the Japanese imperial management of colonial subjects in Korea.

Catherine Youngkyung Ryu, Michigan State University

This paper delineates the political implications of "Wings" (1936) by Yi Sang whose life and work have come to embody the esprit of the modernist movement in colonial Korea in the 1930s. A wide range of critical approaches has been employed to analyze this tale of an unusual couple, the good-for-nothing whiny pimp-intellectual husband and his wage-earning prostitute-wife. The existing discourse, however, is predicated on the assumed validity of the husband-cum-narrator’s self-professed ignorance about the provenance of the money his wife gives him. What differentiates one interpretation of the story from another depends largely on the metaphorical significance attached to the husband’s self-awakening through his gradual discovery of the true nature of his wife’s profession and its link to money. This paper focuses instead on the first-person narrator’s relation to Language itself. I contend that his self-parading as the emasculated and infantilized husband vis-à-vis his domineering wife is a rhetorical maneuver pointedly aimed at problematizing the symbolic, to borrow the Lacanian conceptualization of the relation between Subjectivity and Language. By articulating the colonial order implicit in "Wings" through the Lacanian notion of the symbolic, I argue that the narrator’s dramatic positioning of himself as a fully constituted linguistic subject, although shortchanged in the realm of the symbolic, ultimately challenges and subverts the Colonial Other. This paper thus contributes to the ongoing critical discourse on how to re-assess Korea’s colonial legacy, which has been understood mainly in terms of Korea’s emasculated status vis-à-vis the colonizer Japan.

Bongsoo Park, University of Minnesota

This paper explores the intersection of sex, race and citizenship by examining congressional and institutional discourses about "G.I. babies," born out of sexual relations between U.S. military men in South Korea and Korean women since the 1950s. Using unexplored materials such as correspondence between Korean government and U.S. welfare institutions about intercountry adoptions, my project explains the construction of rights of citizenship and racial identity in the U.S. and Korea. My work explains the critical link between illicit sex, race and citizenship in the transnational context by tracing the emergence and expansion of the state’s interests in immigration and racialization of the mixed-race during the second half of the 20th century. By situating welfare institutions and the state at the heart of technologies of power, my project provides a new understanding of why and how intimate sites—where sexual encounters between Korean women and the servicemen occurred—became a vital tool that enabled the state to determine who should, or should not, be accorded citizenship. It is in the disarray of racial mixing in a private sphere that the definition of citizenship is defined and the boundaries of imagined communities are reinforced. Weaving a set of associations among beliefs about sexual morality, racial mixing, and the respectability and moral leadership of the U.S. in the Pacific region, my work offers theoretical innovations to the study of sex, the mixed-race and citizenship by linking the larger dimensions of U.S. empire and the intimate domains of its implementation.