• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
• /
• no.15
• /
• pp.111-135
• /
• 2013

This study explores gender images represented in the works of women artists from the Middle East, where male chauvinism is recognized to be more predominant than elsewhere. The artists included in this study such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Lida Abdul and Sigalit Landau are Post-Feminist generation of artists who were born in the Middle East but spent significant amount of time in the West. In addition, they were trained as artists under the influences of the Western Feminist Art. This particular group of female artists pays much attention to the ontological question of their identities rather than male/female inequality, and each artist represents men and women in the ways that can hardly be found in the works by women artists in the West. These artists not only connect gender identities to the socio-political geography of the Middle East but also deconstruct Western stereotypes of men and women from Arab world. The paper focuses on the way these women artists incorporate male/female vs. culture/nature dichotomies into their works to subvert the premises on which Western Feminism has been based and not only to cast light on women's freedom and their ontological conflicts but also to emphasize social suppression inflicted upon men. In such process, these artists resist stereotypical images of Middle Eastern men and women widely circulated in the mainstream media of the West.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.211-233
• /
• 2007

Caryl Churchill achieved spacial politics to resist dominant ideology in Cloud Nine. It is suggested that heterotopia is a counter-site to the places which are controlled by colonialism and sexuality. Churchill juxtaposes African colony of Victorian period in the first act and modern London in the second act. It implies that individuals are similarly oppressed by dominant ideology until now though several conditions for individuals are drastically improved. White heterosexual men in the play try to build their utopia to keep their privileges. If they find anything abnormal to their standard, they systematically classify people and organize them into the different ranks and levels to seclude them from their utopia. Actually, the ideal people in the ideal place are oppressed by patriarchal ideology, compulsory heterosexuality, and colonialism which are covertly associated with gender. Therefore, Churchill uses the cross-casting to challenge the artificiality of gender, sexuality, generation and race in the play. People realize that they need to find their own desires free from gender, compulsory heterosexuality, ethnic, and race and their subjectivity flowing in and out of space. It is the site that all the binary oppositions are deconstructed and creates new multiple nodes to expand the boundary of their communities to heterotopia in real places.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.157-190
• /
• 2020

How is the "Yonsei University Incident" of August 1996 remembered from a periphery perspective and a gender perspective? With this question in mind, I reviewed the history of the revolution and the missing memories in the period from 1996 to 2016 in Korean literature. I tried to recover the story of the revolution experienced and remembered by those who were politically invisible or gender-excluded, by centering on novels with strange reminiscences of the student movement in 1996, namely Yoon I-Hyung's "Big Wolf Blue" ("Big Wolf Blue", 2011), Choi Eun-Young's "Responsibility"(2018), Hwang Jung-Eun's Didi's Umbrella (2019) and Park Sang- Young's "A piece of Rockfish Sashimi The Taste of the Universe"(How to Love in Metropolis, 2019). There is a correlation between the perception of the periphery and the name of the "unrememberable" revolution. And this fact tells us that revolution does not mean the same thing to everyone, even when it "passes" through the midst of a revolution that shares the imagination of a better society and the desire to reorganize the system. In other words, it emphasizes that the logic of exclusion and hierarchy was still in operation even at the moment of revolution. It would be said that this review is not only a rethinking of the student movement, but also a reevaluation from the gender perspective of Korean society in the 1990s.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.47-66
• /
• 2001

Today in modern Korea, the preferred modern social role for many modern women is that of modern housewife. This move to the role of housewife is a change in more than just a role; it also reflects a deep and fundamental change that has taken place in the social and economic roles of married women. This shift in economic activities and the gender roles they help produce speaks of a deep and profound process of transformation for all of Korea. Traditionally, a woman was a member of a family premised upon group production as well as group consumption. The role of jubu is derived almost exclusively from market forces and bases her identity and actions upon those forces. This distinction is crucial because it means Korean women are finding that they are no longer as central to the existence of the family. Modern life situations have altered a womans role by making consumption, not production by the woman herself, the keystone of modern families.

• Asian review of World Histories
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.147-167
• /
• 2014

The urban modernity that became an irresistible model for elites in Asia in the decades before and after 1900 was far from being gender-neutral. It represented an exceptional peak of patriarchy in its exclusion of respectable middle class women from the work force, from ownership and control of property and from politics. Marriage was indissoluble and the wife's role in the male-headed nuclear family was to care for and educate the abundant children she produced. Puritan religious values underlined the perils for women of falling outside this pattern of dependence on the male. Though upheld as modern and civilized, this ideal was in particularly striking contrast with the pre-colonial Southeast Asian pattern of economic autonomy and balance between women and men, and the relative ease of female-initiated divorce. Although attractive to many western-educated Southeast Asian men, including religious reformers determined to 'save' and domesticate women, urban respectability of this type was a poor fit for women accustomed to dominant roles in commerce and marketing, and at least equal ones in production. Southeast Asian relative failure in the high colonial era to adapt to the modern market economy may also have a gendered explanation. We should not be surprised that patriarchy and puritanism became more important in Southeast Asia as it urbanized in the late 20th Century, since this was echoing the European experience a century earlier. The question remains how far Southeast Asia could retain its relatively balanced gender pattern in face of its eventual rapid urbanization and commercial development.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.59 no.4
• /
• pp.511-526
• /
• 2013

Focusing on Anna Katharine Green's Amelia Butterworth series and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, this paper aims to examine the contradictory representation of a detective in spinster detective fiction. The spinster detective fiction reveals distinct ways of representing a female detective from the earlier woman detective fiction. Unlike the earlier woman detective represented as submissive and desperate for survival, a spinster detective is a wealthy, intelligent, brave, and independent woman from an upper class family. Since a spinster detective's attributes honor such masculine qualities as independence, intelligence, courage, and capacity for leadership, the spinster detective fiction has a possibility to threaten the established patriarchal authority. The possibility of gender disruption in the spinster detective fiction is, however, contained by the spinster's marginal position in the patriarchal system. Since a spinster exists outside the normal expectation of a woman's life in patriarchal society, a spinster detective creates no conflict with the dominant gender ideology. Furthermore, a spinster detective is represented as a conservative elderly woman expressing reactionary views on social, political issues including women's problems. The spinster detective fiction reinforces the established gender norms rather than challenges and questions them.

• Korean journal of communication and information
• /
• v.52
• /
• pp.90-110
• /
• 2010

This study problematizes the youth‘s politico-cultural process of identification as becoming in the context of candle demonstration in Seoul, 2008. We examine their ethical subjectivity, communicative subjectivity and political subjectivity based on our analysis of depth interviews of teenage activists in the candle demonstrations. It is suggested that instead of naming the teens as the historical consequence of so-called 386 generation, or social product in the neo-liberal economic and educational conditions, we need to understand the complexities and dynamics of the youth’s practice of identity politics: subjective pain and anxiety in daily life, creation and sharing of pleasure and fun of peer group comunication are mixed into the pursuit of justice in their social activation of generation/gender politics.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.1
• /
• pp.103-133
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to make a critique of racial aspects of Caribbean literature more ethical through a constant concern with history and political philosophy. The first step I take for this purpose is a comparative reading of C. L. R. James's view of Toussaint L'Ouverture's position and Frantz Fanon's view of race and class in the historical context of the Caribbean power-relations. In so doing, I examine how Toussaint's and Fanon's wills to negotiation were thwarted in the New World history. To elaborate upon this ethico-political approach, I have recourse to the so-called later Derrida, focusing on his books, such as The Politics of Friendship, Of Hospitality, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, etc. Taking an up-close look at Derrida's thought, I argue that his political contemplation of ethics is as effective as his deconstruction of "otherness" in dealing with the nature of ethnic clashes in both the real world and minority literature. In the second half of my paper, I reexamine the issues of race, gender, and class in the three novels of Jamaica Kincaid - Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. It is conceivable that from the feminist perspective Kincaid's fiction has been read as a postcolonial Bildungsroman. In my supplementary attempts to this criticism, I reveal that the teenage narrator's precocious awareness is still under the colonial influence in the Annie John section. My analysis of Lucy contends that the reasons why the white woman fails to make friends with the young black woman should be sought in the long history of the U.S. racial politics. In the section of The Autobiography of My Mother, I discuss how difficult it is for a minority woman to liberate from the spell of history insofar as she is engaged in the issue of identity. In closing, I pose a need of consolation that literature may grant us by becoming able to produce a different interpretation on all the bleaker reality.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
• /
• v.27 no.1
• /
• pp.41-77
• /
• 2021

It has been 20 years since the gender quota system for expanding women's political representation was enacted. However, the proportion of Korean women's representatives has not exceeded 20 percent. This study examines how the gender quota system, public funding for women candidates, and public funding for women's development, which are the three pillars of the legal system to expand women's representation, have changed systematically over the past 20 years, how they affected women's representation, and what institutional limitations they have. In addition, it explores the im/possible conditions of reforms for expanding women's representation. To reform the legal system for women's representation, it is necessary to understand that Korea's political system is arranged in a gender-based way in a male-dominated structure, while also understanding that the existence of critical actors and mass driving reforms for gender equality in politics is essential.

• Korean journal of communication and information
• /
• v.62
• /
• pp.30-50
• /
• 2013

Exploring the relationship between body and technology in gender studies, this paper argues that 'being women' as an analytical concept is not fixed but progressing, that is, 'becoming women.' In the age of neo-liberalism, gender and identity politics raised critical questions regarding the relations between women and technology. Understanding these dynamic relations asks us to reconsider the concept of 'body.' Thus, this study begins with a review of the discourses of body in feminism and gender studies. Then, it continues to the meaning of technology in body and gender relations, arguing that body is the discursive and material site where gender identity and being are simultaneously constructed. An introduction of cyberfeminism, which focuses on the triangular relations among body, gender, and technology follows, discussing the significance of technology in 'becoming women.' Finally, it is argued that finding the meanings of technology in becoming women requires reconsidering the discursive and performative construction of body. 'Becoming women' can be achieved through exploration of the articulations and processes of body, gender and technology, which allows us to figure out the (re)construction of gender identity.