• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.6
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• pp.359-380
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• 2004

Considering Korean feminist theatre is not successful at all these days, it is needed to find the reasons of its crisis. As two Korean feminist theatre Scholars argued, the crisis owed to the structural problem from the start. That is the Korean feminist theatre started and developed depending on the imported popular feminist plays without social and cultural self-consciousness. Once the imported feminist theatres were flourished, some theatre companies pursued the commercial success blurring the feminist issues. It was resulted into the intentional ignorance in and out of the theatre society. While, some feminist plays were too inclined to the agit-prop without artistic sophistication. This essay tries to examine how the feminist theatres have been developing and what kinds of feminist performances have been made until now. And it intends to emphasize that the play text should be based on the Korean women's past, present, and future reality. Besides, they have to delve into the problem by which the Korean women were trapped in historical, social, and cultural environment. To make the women's matter the social issue at present and fur the future, the Korean feminist theatre should re-find its place as the socio-cultural forum. First, Korean theatre should cooperate with the other women's group crossing the different disciplines of the society, the culture, the politics etc . Secondly, we need to observe and watch where and how the distortion happens in women's matter, and react to correct it. Thirdly, we need to discover, to support, and to protect the women centered perspective of some playwrights as well as the performers. Co-writing or co-performing is also very positive to diversify the women's subjects. Lastly, to protect the feminist theatre against the consumerism, they need to have the financial support from the government or some civil society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.567-596
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• 2009

A staple of feminist literary anthologies which was instrumental in reevaluating the writer Susan Glaspell, Trifles(1916) has received numerous comments from feminist scholars so far. Most of them tend to concentrate on the themes of female solidarity and justice challenging the androcentric system of law and order. Lacking in the plethora of thematic approaches to the play's feminist subject, however, are formal analyses considering the way in which the play's generic form assists in communicating such thematic concerns of feminism. An alternative to the typical scenario at the courtroom whose mistreatment of women must have loomed large to the young Glaspell as she revisited the old trial of a midwestern murderess which she had covered as a journalist for a local newspaper in Iowa, Trifles serves as a corrective to the courtroom dynamics offering a 'dramatic justice' as opposed to a strictly legal procedure. What this article discovers at the heart of this dramatic justice is the celebration of the unsayable, or what Wolfgang Iser termed negativity, of women's experience which has no room for reflection in the legal discourse at the courtroom tyrannized by the sayable and the evident. Examining how the dramatic form of Trifles gives a voice to the unsayable of woman's experience, which can not be properly represented at the courtroom governed by the straightforward and definitive male rhetoric, the article argues that the play is a better form than its fictional adaptation "A Jury of Her Peers"(1917) in that it syntactically suppresses the monopolizing operation of the verbal by giving precedence to the scenic and non-verbal which is constituted of setting, props, gesture and eye contacts. As a theoretical frame of reference with which to examine the modes of the unsayable in the play the article brings the concept of 'negativity,' defined by Iser as textual effects or modes of the unspeakable and unsaid, into the discussion of the taciturnity of the absent heroine and the non-verbal representation of drama.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.269-293
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• 2014

Written as her last collaboration with the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell's The Verge is an exceptional play in that its formal experiment and modernist theme are clear of her general modernist ambivalence which combines a uniquely American and feminist expression of the modernist spirit with rather conventional forms. Following critics' brief and generalizing comments on the play's protagonist embodying modernist formalism and alienation, this paper offers a full and concrete survey detailing the tenets and the slogans of Modernism inlaid in the play. Its main argument is that Glaspell strategically deployed the metaphysics of egoism, anarchic hostility to the collectiveness of bourgeois society, and formalist preoccupation in Modernism in representing a female egoist's longing for a new order of society, illustrating an intersection between Modernism and feminism. It concludes that The Verge is an extremely rare case of modernist literature where a play, allegedly the least modernist genre of all according to Christopher Innes, exemplifies the "eloquent critical acts entangled in the creative work" which Michael Levenson lists as a distinct feature of modernist texts.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.41
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• pp.39-67
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• 2020

So far, research on the 10th performance of the Geukye Suryeonguhoe has been rarely conducted. In particular, Lee Seo-hyang's Eomeoni was rarely studied, and it was only recorded that at most it was one of the 10th performances. Although the script of Eomeoni remains, and the 10th performance was an important regular performance, it should be said that the status of this research is very poor. It seems to be the result of failing to accurately examine the historical value and meaning of the single act drama Eomeoni. In order to solve these problems, it is necessary to look at the performance situation of Eomeoni and to investigate the situation at the time of Geugyesuryeonguhoe. In addition, the reason for selecting Eomeoni, the stage performance situation, theatrical elements, stage design, and related evaluations should be analyzed throughout. This study focused on examining the status of Eomeoni's performance and examining its significance, and intends to examine the flow of feminist play as a context of the Geeugyesuryeonguhoe through the conclusion.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.69-91
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• 2012

Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats.... (1998) is the last play of the trilogy of "the midlands plays" which can be regarded as her re-writing of both Euripides' Medea and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World by resetting the two plays in the midlands of contemporary Ireland. Carr intends to courageously explore into the dangerous liminal space, i.e., the middle between the past and the present, the high Greek and the Irish folk culture, dealing with the ghosts of the dead writers for her own Irish feminist theatre. Thus, in the middle Carr can build a new Irish theatre by minorating and abjecting the Greek tragedy and subverting and expanding Synge's theatre of grotesque realism. This paper attempts to read By the Bog of Cats... as Carr's final project of exploration into the midland of Ireland to establish a new Irish feminist theatre and at the same time a new Irish folk theatre. By focusing on her strategies of minoration and subversion through grotesque imagery and carnival rituals it argues that Carr put Hester's becoming-ghost in the middle, the bog of the cats as both grave and womb, waiting for the birth of a new Irish people. And it emphasizes that the ghost of Hester, merging with the ghosts of her mother and daughter by the bog of cats will haunt the official society as a threatening abjection, challenging the restoration of the social order.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.510-520
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• 2018

This study explored the phenomenon of heterosexual women embracing Boys' Love manga within the heteronormativity context from a feminist psychological perspective. Specifically, the issue of genre characteristics of Boys' Love manga, women's psychological mechanism of reading Boys' Love manga, and the functions and effects of embracing Boys' Love manga were discussed. As a theoretical framework of analysis, I started from the classical psychoanalysis and critically adopted the concepts of the various camps of feminism, queer theory, and Huizinga's Homo Rudens. The results show that Boys' Love manga can be classified as a sub-category of the romance genre, which fulfills heterosexual women's desires of eternal love and equal partnership. From these wish-fulfilling fantasies, heterosexual women attempt to be decontextualized from the heteropatriarchism, to enjoy distancing and voyeuristic separation from the characters in the texts, and to disturb the dichotomous gender system through gender reversal identification. These processes, which can be regarded as a women's play challenging sexual rigorism, ultimately bring about an awareness of the female sexual subjectivity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.947-971
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• 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Washing-Day" (1797) has sparked a variety of feminist critical endeavors over the past two decades. While many feminist literary critics try to salvage the poem as a successful tongue-in-cheek riposte directed at the male dominant literary world, more rigorous Marxist feminists accuse Barbauld of being limited by her own middle-class woman's view on women's domestic labor. Legitimate as they may be, these readings fail to elucidate Barbauld's place in a larger literary and intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century. In this paper I read "Washing-Day" as a woman's georgic, a genre or mode concerned with agricultural labor, the public value of which was highly recognized in eighteenth-century England. Alluding to canonical texts by writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, Barbauld's "loaded lines" in mock-heroic form create a space in which the women's domestic labor of washing interrupts men's daily routines and disrupts their poetic assumptions. While she makes women's work visible, Barbauld also addresses its quintessential nature. Women's work is affective labor; women have to labor physically and mentally to produce the desired domestic comfort. By allowing the image of the soap "bubble" to echo with many "bubbles" in other writers' texts, from the soap bubbles the narrator used to play with as a child to the hot-air balloon "bubble" of the Montgolfier brothers, Barbauld pleasantly equates work and day-dreaming, men's toil and children's play, and finally public, scientific, and recognized labor and private, domestic, and imaginative activities.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.439-446
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• 2019

Feminism on the theme of gender equality is emerging as an important issue in the overall Korean culture. Feminism is not only a level of claiming or advocating women's rights, but an essential subject of gaze and thought, not a distorted, artificially portrayed image of women distorted or typified in a story created by men in the past It is a film that explores the problem of the individual's life in society fundamentally. Jun Koeun's movie' 'micro-habitat'(2018) 'expresses a feminist theme that shows a strong self - selection and transcendental thinking in male - oriented stereotypes and inequal social structure. The film, which focuses on the public insight into society and the enhancement of the ideal human being from the viewpoint that the public film should lead the educated enlightenment character that raises the broad insight into the world and lead the mature social culture, I think it will play a big role.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.135-160
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• 2019

This paper gives a feminist reading of Suzanne Alexander in The Alexander Plays by focusing on her performances as active reconstitutions of history and memory. A compilation of four of Adrienne Kennedy's more recent plays, The Alexander Plays revolves around a central protagonist who, behind windows and within the closed spaces of the home, waits for her missing husband to return home. Yet, the plot of the waiting wife seems to mask the hidden and more dangerous desires for political transgressions of the play. By analyzing Suzanne's interaction with various literary and historical figures, memories and events, this paper argues that her seeming approval of domesticity, femininity and intimacy serves as a cover for her more political altercations with history, race and gender.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.200-211
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• 2004

The Purpose of this study was to review the effects of the cyberspace mentality on fashion as a visible symbol of feminity and to analyze terms of its aesthetic values. As for the research methodology, relevant theories across cultures and disciplines are reviewed and an experimental study is conducted to explore spiritual objectives in cyberspace. Then, major issues facing the digital society. symbolized in the computer networks, are reviewed in terms of feminine identity and physical beauty from a feminist＇s viewpoint. Lastly, the aesthetic values found in the spatial meditation of a new dimension (reality versus virtuality) is comparatively analyzed. The virual reality technology and bio-medical technology are combined to be represented in fashion to create a more realistic virtual world than the real one. Such a world may well be characterized by virtuality, artificiality, masquerade, and fantasy. The intrinsic values which are revealed as psychiatrical or psychological implicated values featuring virtual or artificial implications may well be characterized by distopia, hyper, hybridity and Sur Reality.