Abstract

This study aimed to examine poetic responses shown in Korean poems in the 1980s through the aspects of gender division and particularly selected Kim Hye-soon’s and Hwang Ji-woo’s poems as research subjects. Not only did these two poets make their debuts in the same age, in 1979 and in 1980 respectively, but published books of po-ems in almost the same order thereafter. However, they were never considered at the same time under the periodical category of the 1980s. Especially, Kim Hye-soon was discussed as a poet writing destructing poems even under the category of ‘Women’s Poetry’, but her poems were not discussed under the category equivalent to ‘Destructing Poetry’ of Hwang Ji-woo as a contemporary poet destructing the existing form of poetry. Besides, they were both positioned somewhat far from Minjung (people) poetry in common, but their poetic achievements and signifying works were categorized differently depending on gender. Kim Hye-soon’s poems were understood as a concept of ‘women’s poetry’ that gender representation was directly specified, while Hwang Jiwoo’s poems were defined as ‘destructing poetry’ that was gender-neutral, and such asymmetry itself shows how complex the gender concept was in terms of research on Korean poems. There are more researches actively conducting on Korean poems in the 1980s these days than ever, but this study discovered that no one discussed these two poets’ poems based on ‘what was like in the 1980s’ together and judged that such a phenomenon itself was a part of ‘what was like in the 1980s’. Thus, this study intended to comprehend the complex relationship between these two poets’ poems published in the 1980s as the concept of ‘Double Bind’ developed by Gayatri Spivak.