The Review of Korean Studies
- P-ISSN1229-0076
- E-ISSN2773-9351
- SCOPUS, ESCI
ISSN : 1229-0076
Gendered Korean Colonial Modernity: “Housewifization” of Korean Colonial Women and the Reconfiguration of Domestic Work
Abstract
This article looks at capitalist social change in colonial Korea from 1920 to 1937 and its impact on shifting nationalist discourse on women’s work and wifely domesticity. Particular attention is placed on historically appropriated gender roles accorded to Korean colonial women, especially those who were housewives in the domestic sphere. By methodologically setting the historical debate of the “wise mother and good wife” (hyeonmo yangcheo) as an analytical prism, this study deals with the question of how the Confucian patriarchal system collided with newly established social relations, and how this specific historical conjuncture conditioned the emergence of modern Korean female subjectivities. At another level, by way of analyzing the collision between Korean nationalist resolution of the “woman’s question” and the vision of highly educated Korean female intellectuals, this article ferrets out the substance and meaning of Korean female subjectivity constructed from colonial women’s working experiences and their double burden under the given modern patriarchal structure. This study also draws on the gendered implication of Korean colonial modernity, that is, not a fixed structure but a reconstitution of patriarchal relations, a process of de(con)structive constructiveness derived from continuous interactions among nationalism, colonialism, modernity and tradition relative to the making of “Koreanness” as an imagined fraternal community and a collective gendered national subject.
- keywords
- housewifization, modern creation of public and private spheres, domestic work, woman question, female subjectivity
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