Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism

by Kim,Elaine H.; Kim,Elaine H.

• ISBN13: 9780415915052
• ISBN10: 0415915058
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-11-05
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Dangerous Womenaddresses the themes of Korean nationalism and gender construction, as well as various issues related to the colonialization and decolonialization of the Koreannation. Leading scholars discuss how Korea, as a result of years of foreign domination, can still be seen as an "imaginary" and "gendered" nation--as a metaphor, even, for Korean women both there and abroad. Together, these essays explore the troubled category of "woman," placing it in the specific context of a marginalized and colonized nation. Yet Korean women are not configured here merely as metaphors for an emasculated and enfantilized "homeland." They are also shown to be by-products of a problematic gender construction that originates in Korea, and extends even today to Korean communities beyond Asia. Representations of Korean women still attempt to confine them to the status of either mother or prostitute:Dangerous Womenrectifies that construction, offering a feminist interventionthat might recuperate womanhood.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
1. Introduction	1	(8)
Elaine H. Kim
Chungmoo Choi
2. Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea	9	(24)
Chungmoo Choi
3. Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea	33	(34)
Seungsook Moon
4. Men's Talk: A Korean American View of South Korean Constructions of Women, Gender, and Masculinity	67	(52)
Elaine H. Kim
5. Kindred Distance	119	(4)
Photo Essay by Yong Soon Min
6. Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Silencing	123	(18)
Hyunah Yang
7. Prostitute Bodies and Gendered States in U.S.-Korea Relations	141	(34)
Katharine H. S. Moon
8. Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: Images of Working-Class Women in Popular and Radical Texts	175	(28)
Hyun Sook Kim
9. Working Women and the Ontology of the Collective Subject: (Post) Coloniality and the Representation of Female Subjectivities in Hyon Ki-yong's Paramt'anun som (Island in the Wind)	203	(20)
You-me Park
10. Mother Load	223	(6)
Photo Essay by Yong Soon Min
11. Ideals of Liberation: Korean Women in Manchuria	229	(20)
Hyun Ok Park
12. Re-membering Home	249	(42)
Hyun Yi Kang
13. A Peculiar Sensation: A Personal Genealogy of Korean American Women's Cinema	291	(32)
Helen Lee
14. Contributors' Notes	323