Abstract

This article examines how the Korean Yellow Journal Myeong-lang(Gaiety) commodified sexuality and analyzes the discourse structure of sexuality of the Journal in the 1960s. In the 1960s, focused on sexuality outside family system, Myeong-nang pursued profits by seeking after a sexuality commercialization strategy that prompted the public's curiosity about sex using such kind of articles including an affair, a prostitution, a premarital and extramarital affairs. Myeong-lang printed actively the Western trend of sexuality where signs of sexual openness regarded as evident. With deliberate misuse of Western examples such as the Kinsey report, together with deliberate misappropriation of the gender openness as a universal fact, Myeong-lang defined contemporary Korean society as a sex liberation one based on the Western model. Sexual articles in the journal had taken the form of discourse of education that male intellectuals uttered to female readers, and made sexuality of woman a subject of discipline. Articles on sex science in the journal defined male sex as a possessive and aggressive “sad instinct,” and the journal justified the contradictory sexual desire of male who desired both a virginity and a preoccupation relation with a woman. Myeong-lang extended the control of knowledge power outside of the family system with hierarchizing the sex difference by educating the sex of the woman as the sex that should conform to the desire of the male. In such a discourse structure, the magazine's sexual science accelerated the pornographic desire to see the reality of sexuality by searching for sexuality to the stage of contraction and expansion of muscle. By this way, the sexuality of a woman was typified and objectified in the overflow of sexual discourse. The women’s memoirs of the magazine, illuminating a woman’s life of the prostitution zone in the society, repeated similar stories in a homogeneous circuit binding women's desires with corruptions. These handwritings, which had a clear trail of editorship, proceeded in a careful arrangement of gaze to encourage men's curiosity and desire. The rapidly developing narrative had functioned as a sexual surrogate by expanding the scene of extramarital affairs. In the homogeneous narrative structure that satisfied the desire of pleasure while offsetting the guilt of men, the women's memoirs of Myeong-lang served to extend the control range of the knowledge power that constituted modernity. As the overflow of sexuality accelerated, the true experience and desire of women had to be deeply covered and silenced.