Abstract

Understanding the configuration and dispatch of women's issues in Korea in the early stages of the institutionalization of Korean Women's Studies is a necessary process for undertaking a genealogical investigation of the Korean Women's Studies academic movement. This paper looks at whether the act of translation gave form and language to issues of intellectual production and women's issues, becoming a part of the Zeitgeist of the period, and also if the texts introduced in the period served as a foundation and resource for the construction of institutionalized Women's Studies as well as for divisions in the women's movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The core texts chosen for this study are all 'anthologies'. The three books selected are The Challenge of Women’s Culture(1975); The Reality and the Theory of Women's Liberation(1979) edited by Yi Hyojae; and Women Society Philosophy(1979) from Korea Women Institute at Ewha Womans University. By looking at the positionalities and fields of specialization of the co-writers and translators participating in the publication of the anthologies, this paper looks at how the early construction stage of Women's Studies, the stage that guided the development of Women's Studies as interdisciplinary research, was configured as a field, at the same time ascertaining the realities of Korea during the age of Park Chung-hee's developmental dictatorial regime, in which system and discourse were intertwined, and parse the effects achieved by those researchers (agents) on women's issues, through analysis of their translation projects, one aspect of many academic praxis mobilized to overcome contradictions within those realities. What kind of academic-historical meanings and historicities were created as a result? What kind of institutional and theoretical dependencies were thenceforth created by these early projects by the first generation "constructors" who took a central role in the process of institutionalizing Korean Women's Studies? The paper will consider the problem of how these responded to 1980s criticism, in which generation and class intersected, with respect to the postcoloniality of Women's Studies knowledge.