Organizer: Elyssa M. Faison, University of Oklahoma

Chair & Discussant: Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History

The four papers that make up this panel explore the complex negotiations of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in the construction of working-class subjectivities in twentieth century Korea and Japan. Paper One examines labor management policies adopted in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s to discipline immigrant female Korean textile workers. Where this first paper relies official documents to better understand the experiences of a largely illiterate Korean migrant population, Paper Two analyzes the autobiographies of female factory workers in 1970s and 1980s South Korea. These women used their literacy to express aspects of their sexuality and working class life that often worked against prevailing ideologies of chastity and filial piety. Paper Three presents a case study of a female Korean union leader active in the 1980s in the male-dominated shipbuilding industry to assess how gendered ideas of work were both contested and reinforced by her anomalous position within the union hierarchy. Paper Four also explores gender dynamics in the late-twentieth century Korean union movement. But instead of focusing on female unionists, it interrogates the dynamics and definition of "family" that informed working class notions of masculinity among male unionists who identified as husbands and breadwinners. These four papers are all part of a book project in progress on the topic of gender and labor in Korea and Japan.

Elyssa M. Faison, University of Oklahoma

In the 1920s, a number of textile mills in Japan began to employ increasingly large numbers of Korean women and girls. Partly this move was tied to wage-cutting strategies involved in the process of rationalization, and as such reflected the globalization of Japan’s capitalist system and the importance and practical effect of imperialist policy to Japanese industry. But it also signaled a corporate strategy for pre-empting labor conflict associated with the better organized and more demanding workers who came from Japan’s countryside. Korean assimilationist organizations in Japan, textile factory managers and labor unions all privileged ethnicity over gender in their management of Korean women workers, in stark contrast to the way Japanese workers were defined and disciplined almost exclusively as women. In this essay I offer a detailed analysis of how ethnicity functioned in the construction of various "womanhoods" (Japanese and colonial) in the textile industry, and how the taxonomies of race, class and gender produced through colonial policy and ideology were vital to such constructions.

Ruth Barraclough, University of Minnesota

In the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea, government and business together constructed an industrial society based on the romanticising of productivity

Diligence and self-sacrifice were celebrated as the adornments of young factory girls. Yet in the stories of factory girls themselves, romance was a deeply contested area. This paper explores romance in the autobiographies of three factory women who wrote of self and society in this era of great economic, social and sexual upheaval. I examine how these authors used autobiography, the genre of self-representation, to imprint their voice on their times. Their books related the intimate effect of the class divide, and they critiqued their society in tales of their hard-won education, their longing for cultural literacy, and their doomed love affairs with males from higher classes. Based in tiny slum lodgings in Mansôk-dong or Kuro-dong, these authors ventured into metropolitan life and discovered true friendship, education and romance; and unravelled the prevailing ideologies that mediated their lives.

Hwasook B. Nam, University of Utah

This paper examines the changing sexual division of labor and gender politics at a male-dominated shipyard in South Korea, the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC). It explores how gender informed solidarity at this yard, whose union is one of the most militant unions on today’s South Korean labor scene. In studying the role of gender in shaping workers’ subjectivity and agency in South Korea, scholarly attention has focused on women workers in female-dominated industries. Little explored are changing gender relations in male-dominated industries and how they helped shape shop floor politics.

At the KSEC yard, where the male breadwinner norm was entrenched and the union movement revolved around demands for a family living wage, a small number of women workers over time managed to break into the skilled male jobs of welding and metal cutting. I ask how workers and managers tried to reformulate their understanding of sexual differences and the proper roles of married and unmarried women when changing economic situations compelled the intrusion of women into shipyard production work. I also ask how women workers negotiated their way through a male-centered shipyard work culture and constructed new meanings about their work. In 1986, one of the women welders at the KSEC yard played a key role in igniting the movement to democratize the union. The paper follows her story to illuminate how gender informed the dynamics behind solidarity formation and her emergence as a labor leader at the yard.

Jong Bum Kwon, UCLA

Widespread economic insecurity and unprecedented mass dismissals in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis (1997) ignited fierce labor mobilization and retaliation in South Korea. Male unionized workers in the heavy industry sector have been both heralded and vilified for their militancy. In the labor movement, those workers stand as the embodiment of militant "class-consciousness." Based on eighteen months of fieldwork with laid-off Daewoo autoworkers and their wives (2001-2002), this paper demonstrates that men do not fight because of "class consciousness" but because of their desire to reclaim a class inflected masculinity lost by unemployment – a respectable class identity understood as being good providers, good fathers and husbands. In fact, men adamantly dis-identified with militant labor. Instead, men described their experience of being laid-off as being made "homeless." "Homelessness" was a deeply embodied metaphor that signified not only the loss of their jobs but also their claim to a moral, masculine self. In my analysis, I examine the complex articulation of class and gender in the construction of hegemonic masculinity and the "crisis" of their disarticulation for relatively privileged male industrial workers. Furthermore, I embed my analysis of gender in the reconfiguration of class politics in the wake of the financial crisis, in particular, the declining moral authority of the labor movement. My paper, then, investigates the complex negotiation of gender and class identities during Korea’s contentious transformation to a neoliberal economy as it played out in the Daewoo Struggle.