• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.175-209
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• 2020

This paper examines how the cinematic representation of the Japanese military "comfort women" stimulates 'imagination' in the realm of everyday life and in the memory of the masses, creating a common awareness and affect. The history of the Japanese military "comfort women" was hidden for a long time, and it was not until the 1990s that it entered the field of public recognition. Such a transition can be attributed to the external and internal chronopolitics that made possible the testimony of the victims and the discourse of the "comfort women" issue. It shows the peculiar status of the comfort women history as 'politics of time'. In the same vein, the cinematic representations of the Japanese military "comfort women" can be found in similar chronopolitics. The 'comfort women' films have shown the dual time frame of the continuity and discontinuity of the 'silence'. In Korean film history, the chronotope of the reproduction of "comfort women" can be divided into four phases: 1) the fictional representations of "comfort women" before the 1990s 2) documentaries in the late 1990s as the work of testimony and history writing, 3) melodramatic transformation in the feature films in the 2000s, and 4) the diffusion of media and categories. The purpose of this article is to focus on the first phase and the third phase in which the issue of 'comfort women' is represented in the category of popular fiction films. While the "comfort women" representations before 1990 were strictly adhering to the framework of commercial movies and pursued the sexual exploitation of "comfort women" history, the recent films since the 2000s are experimenting with various attempts in the style of popular imagination. Especially, the emergence of 'comfort women' feature films in the 2000s, such as Spirit's Homecoming, I Can Speak, and Herstory, raise various questions as to whether we are "properly" aware of issues and how to remember and present the "cultural memory" of comfort women. Also, focusing on the cinematic representation strategies of the 2000s "comfort women", this article discusses the popular politics of melodrama, the representation of victims and violence, and the feature of 'comfort women' as meta-memory. As a melodramatic imagination and meta-memory for the historical trauma, the "comfort women" drama shows the historical, political, and aesthetic gateways to which the "comfort women" problem must pass. As we have seen in recent fiction films, the issue of "comfort women" goes beyond transnational relations between Korea and Japan; it demands a postcolonial task to dismantle the old colonial structure and explores a transnational project in which women's movements and human rights movements are linked internationally.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.599-619
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• 2008

Korean peninsula has a long history and a geopolitical location as a buffer tone, which has provided the conditions for cultural dynamism and diversity across space and time. The changing processes of place names in Korea is considered to be better suited to the study on cultural politics that is interested in the culture wars over the meaning of culture among different social subjects. In order to ensure the legitimacy of cultural politics for the study of place names in Korea, this study attempts to make a theoretical construction based on the concepts of place identity, territorial contestation, and the politics of scale. Cultural and linguistic theories to be best applied to the study of place names in Korea are the theories on Angehm's and Castells' identity, $P{\hat{e}}cheux's$ identification, Hall's decoding, and Voloshinov's ideological sign. Power relations involved in the inclusion and exclusion are necessarily concerned with the process of constructing a place identity or territorial identity by means of a place name, which represents identity and ideology of a social subject. In the examination of this process, it is necessary to take the elements of identity, ideology and power relations into consideration. In this study, therefore, the politics of scale is experimented for its applicability in the study of place name in Korea, which is expected to accommodate concepts of boundary, territory, territoriality and territorialization. In the end, it is suggested in this study that a series of basic and interdisciplinary studies on the cultural politics of place names in a range of area should be undertaken along with the enough theoretical knowledge of cultural politics.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.10
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• pp.472-485
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• 2014

This study focuses on the news making system of the prime time news of PSB in Korean society, where the presence of ethnic minorities is increasing rapidly. Although the World Wide Web has become one of the most attractive media over the last decade, Korean PSB, Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), still remains the most popular and influential medium. Therefore, the process of analyzing news making system of ethnic minorities in Korean society represented in Korean PSB as a social construction is meaningful in that it provides an important key to understand the cultural and political background and characteristics of society. For this purpose, the article tries to understand news making process when producing news related to ethnic minorities in the Korean society such as migrant workers, married migrant women and mixed-heritage children of multicultural families by interview with ten reporters in KBS. As a result, most KBS reporters had stereotypes towards multiculturalism and migrants and news reports relating to ethnic minorities are usually produced routinely, using a set of rules that have become part of KBS culture.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.43
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• pp.229-261
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• 2021

On the musical stage in 2019, there were many works depicting the Japanese colonial period. This is due to 2019 the timeliness of the March 1st Movement and the centennial of the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. The way of remembering and commemorating historical facts reflects the power relationship between memory subjects and the time, namely the politics of memory. Until now, stage dramas dealing with the era of Japanese rule have focused on the commemoration of modern national and national defense, including feelings of misfortune and respect for patriots. This study analyzed the metaphor of the memorials emphasized to the audience in the commemorative musicals Shingheung Military School, Ku: Songs of the Goblin, and Watch which were performed in 2019, and looked at how to adjust memories and memorials. The above works highlight the narratives of ordinary people as well as those recorded against the backdrop of the Manchurian Independence Movement and Hongkou Park, expanding the object of the commemoration. Through this, active armed resistance efforts, self-reflection and reflection were highlighted. The case of Shingheung Military School revealed the earnestness of ordinary people who led the independence movement through the movement of central figures. Ku: Songs of the Goblin revises memories by reproducing forgotten objects and apologizing through time slip. Watch has strengthened the spectacles of facilities through documentary techniques such as photography, news reels, and newspaper articles, but it also reveals limitations limited to records. In the 3.1 Movement and the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, devices that actively reveal that the "people's movement" is connected to the present. To this end, the official records reflected the newly produced values and memories and devoted themselves to the daily lives and emotions of the crowd. In addition, both empirical consideration and calligraphy were utilized to increase reliability. These attempts are meaningful in that they have achieved the achievement of forming contemporary empathy.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.27-51
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• 2014

Doris Lessing describes a band of revolutionaries who become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence in The Good Terrorist. Alice Mellings who is from a middle-class family has organized a squat house in London and seems capable of controlling everyone around her and anything about the house. She is seemingly like a housekeeper or a breadwinner. She also likes to be on the battlefront, for instance, demonstrating, picketing and spray-painting slogans. Such is able to easily exploit the others and she increasingly becomes the leader in the house. Recently some critics have focused on the political and social roles of the protagonist who represents a voice of terrorists in the 1980s England. Based on this, The Good Terrorist is read with the concept of the subject of feminism that Gillian Rose adopts in order to show that this subject tries to avoid the exclusion of the master subject. This subject imagines spaces which are not structured through masculinist claims to exhaustiveness. Alice as the subject of feminism shows different roles; she extorts or steals money for the maintenance of the house from her affluent parents; she spends all her time cleaning, fixing, decorating the deserted house; and she looks after the official affairs related to the house with her skills and experiences. She is systematically in charge of the house and sits at the head of the table in the kitchen. But when their activities turn into disaster and their plans fail, Alice willingly decides to close down the house after ousting the members. Here in her extorted gaze it is revealed that she takes control over the working class members of the house who are unable to lead a revolution because of their own problems and thereby the working class are dominated by the middle class. That is, the place is paradoxically recreated based on class differences, which the revolutionaries try to break. By representing the deconstruction and recreation of the place through squat houses, Lessing reveals her implicit feminism in which a new place should be produced crossing the principle of the dichotomy of gender and class.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.73-109
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• 2010

The cultural pluralism on which more and more emphasis is put in the globalized cultural environment, takes local identity as a crucial index for the cultural exchange on the global level, but at the same time it results in transforming individual regions/places into a homogeneous space, as it forces the local identity itself to fit into the standardized global perspective. In this context I focus on two art projects that are related to 'Dongducheon', a town that houses the U. S. Second Infantry Division. These projects attract specific attention due to the fact that Dongducheon is a significant place with very 'thick' cultural identity: it reveals that modernization in Korea took place in intersection of nationalism, patriarchy and gender/sexuality postcolonial (military) culture. With these two Dongducheon related art projects (Donglyung Kim) and (Eunyoung Jeong) as excellent examples of site-specific art practice, this paper asks what it means to keep the historicity of disappearing local space/place in the global era. And how is it possible to 'represent' an extremely gendered/sexualized place like Dongducheon. This should be examined from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Since emancipation from Japanese occupation Dongducheon has been an island or an outside space in the nation-state Korea. This becomes more complicated, as now mostly women from the Philippines or former Soviet countries are working in the nightclubs in Doungducheon. and are feminist activist experiments to make the place with its residents to be seen and heard in proper a way of mourning, recognition and communication. shows the 'new' kijich'on women as those who are daring to be on an 'Odyssey' for a better life as they run everyday life in Dongducheon, working in clubs, doing laundry, bearing children, going to mass; tries to help them to be heard and felt, while it gathers sounds on the street or at mass and shows the doors or narrow alleys which lead to the their rooms. It aims to mourn the dead kijich'on women and to represent the precarious life of the present migrant kijich'on women, as it shows no faces.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.22
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• pp.223-252
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• 2011

If we remember that modern world history has built systems of meaning through the concepts "difference," "different," and "other-ness" and has constructed new identity based on opposing hierarchy, music anthropology which tried to build "difference" between the west and the non-west was thoroughly west -centered, in the sense that it has perceived the heterogeneous symbolic systems among nations, as well as the barrier between the two cultures. On the other hand, world music, which has emerged as the most attractive field in culture industry and concert-art-market by crossing over global capitals, markets, and barriers, can be considered the most post-modernist and glocal. However, it is interesting to note that world music, which has been described as post-modern and glocal, has "difference" and "different" in its basis, just like the precepts for modern music anthropology (Meintjes 1990; Guilbault 1993; Taylor 1997; Frith 2000; Feld 1988). Furthermore, one can understand that the "different" and "difference," generally termed as being "non-western," are fundamentally based on ethnic or national imagination. In this sense it is interesting and important to examine such ethnic imagination in the "non-western ethnic musics" in music anthropology and in world music. Notwithstanding the attention paid and research made by music anthropologists, they have failed to elevate the "non-western ethnic musics" to become universally communicative, and these ethnic musics were reborn as "global" and "world music," through the process of "acculturation," "derivation," and "hybridization," with the west as major site for production and consumption. Meanwhile, the audience for world music, which did not exist before the birth of world music as a term, was now born as world music emerged. They are global populace who consume the musical "difference" and "imagined ethnicity," who through their consumption are constructing new social meanings including ethnicity, race, nation, and class identity. This study, by examining current discourse, performance, and process for the world music through media and field studies and scholarly debates, attempts to understand the production and consumption of "imagined ethnicity." This will also shed light on how "ethnicity" is created and consumed, and how this is involved in the process of world music.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.84
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• pp.99-123
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• 2017

We analyzed the movie (2016/ directed by J-yong E), which is entangled in politics of gender, age, class, or sexuality, naming as "spaces of Others", using the concepts of heterotopia of Foucault. Foucault addressed three types of spaces: the realistic space where we currently live, the unrealistic and non-existent utopia, and heterotopia, which functions antithetically to reality. Thus, Foucault's heterotopia can be considered to indicate "heterogeneous spaces" in reality. The Bacchus Lady revolves a 65-year old prostitute So-Young, sells her body to old men at the parks in downtown of Seoul. Old prostitute on streets are often referred as "Bacchus Ladies", because suggest the popular energy drink a bottle of Bacchus while selling sex. The movie represents some minorities such as transgender, Tina and madam of the club, G-spot, migrant women like Camila and Aindu, and a amputee, Dohoon. Through these people's bodies, the problems such as imperials, nations, ethnics, gender, age, class are entangled in the movie. The politics of these points work and construct heterotopias in four spaces of Others. First, the spaces which ageing and death are intersected. Second, the spaces of So-Young for prostitutes, Third, the spaces of So-Young's mothering: she adopted her baby to American when he was a infant, so she have felt guilty. Fourth, the spaces for So-young's quasi-family with Minho, a Kopian boy who was abandoned by Korean father, Dohoon, who is a poor amputee, and Tina, who is a transgender singer. Fifth, the spaces of speech of So-Young as the subaltern: the subaltern does not have the language to express its own experiences. In order to listen to the words of subaltern, we must do the task of measuring the silence. This cinematic representation of So-young as the subaltern makes her speak about her situation. Finally, the spaces constructed by the movie can be connected 'heterotopia of crisis', 'heterotopia of deviation' and 'heterotopia of fantasy'. The spaces of the movie represents lives of Others, nevertheless, So-Young's Otherness through spaces of heterotopia was transformed to an absolute Other by patriarchal traits of cinematic narrative.