• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.62 no.4
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• pp.69-80
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• 2012

This research aims at the contribution to globalize and modernize the traditional Korean image by comprehending the taste of design that domestic college students have for traditional feminine head ornaments and subsequently elaborate the development of cultural products that are related to these decorative objects. In regards to this research method, the examination on the traditional feminine ornaments was followed through a review of literature and precedent studies and a survey was conducted on the preference about them. After the adoption of final valid responses, an analytical method, PASW 18.0, was used for frequency analysis, technical analysis, reliability, and regression analysis. The results were as follows. First, in the category of tendency analysis for the application of traditional feminine headpiece in fashion cultural products, it was revealed that a taste for the design that meet the satisfaction for both trend and practicability was prominently prevalent. Also, the design that express the individual characteristic was taken as a preferred option. Second, in the preference for the design of traditional feminine headpieces in fashion cultural products, the result indicated that the modern type was preferred in the form of re-creation as long as those products deform the tradition. As for the selective taste for patterns, their preference came in the order of plant, animal, and geometry-abstract types. Especially, for the case of plant and animal patterns, the reinterpreted design of modernized shapes were opted rather than a simply recopied format of the conventional type of the feminist head ornament. Third, for the category of item selection to apply the feminine head ornament in order to design the fashion cultural products, it turned out that people preferred the application to accessory rather than clothing. Lastly, it was found that rarity, harmony with other fashion goods, pattern, and design should be considered when the traditional motif was used for cultural products.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.36
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• pp.91-119
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• 2014

This paper analyzed and compared the storytelling of female characters in Korean, American, Japanese animations and revealed the ideal image of woman of each culture. Chapter 2 analyzed the superficial images of the female characters and figured out how these images reflected awareness of a reality. This paper revealed that female characters act as a representative cultural symbols and embodies the paradigm and the order of those cultures. In Chapter 3, this paper analyzed and compared how the female characters solve the dramatic events in the entire narrative structure, and revealed the cultural implications of their action and these events. Korean characters were imitating the idols as an extension of the real world, and American characters were drawn as unreal Super Heroes who were utilized to enhance the order of the world if the United States. Japanese characters, the magical girls are led to create a magic circle and then become surreal goddesses. In this way, this paper revealed that female characters in animation reflect the male-centered ideology of each culture according to the awareness of a reality and cultural paradigm.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.3-39
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• 2009

Philosophical counseling, established by Achenbach in 1981, began as "philosophical practice" and emerged only recently as a new field of philosophy in its own right. It attempts, by recasting the philosopher as a counselor, to bring philosophy back from academia and recover the ancient notion of "doing philosophy," in a real-life context. Furthermore, it allows clients who are at a critical moment in their life a chance to revive their authentic selves and empowers them to pursue their own path. By engaging with philosophical counseling, clients are more likely to realize their hopes for their lives by examining their lives thoroughly and facing them anew. This paper first attempts to investigate philosophical counseling services for Korean women and to outline a new model of counseling based on the combination of two models of counseling, philosophical counseling and feminist counseling. In the second chapter, it seeks to introduce the history and characteristics of philosophical counseling and in the third chapter, the history and characteristics of feminist counseling are investigated, focusing on a counseling-activity entitled "Telephone for Women." Finally, in the fourth chapter, a comparative study is made by identifying the common aspects of each counseling type, in order to promote the shared outlooks of both counseling models. Although these two models of counseling emerged from different historical, social, and cultural contexts, they were founded according to four common beliefs, which are as follows: first, a focus on the importance of "practice," second, the establishment of an equal relationship between the counselor and the client, third, the importance of counselors listening attentively to the client and opening themselves up, fourth, the encouragement of clients becoming truly themselves and self-educated. Therefore, the writer believes that these two models of counseling are both aiming at the realization of an authentic "human life." It is hoped that philosophical counseling will give Korean women an opportunity to maintain a dialogue that will improve their "well-being" in the future.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.53-92
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• 2018

This essay aims to examine chick lit written within the Asian American context. For the most part, the chick lit genre has been typically regarded as a site to study contemporary white women's experiences and to debate the genres' credentials as feminist literature. Though some may disagree, there is general consensus that chick lit has fallen out of vogue after reaching its peak in the first decade of the new millenium.; nevertheless, it is being revisited by readers and critics alike as it has recently re-emerged as a location upon which to examine how race and gender inform notions of national belonging and female subject formation in the twenty-first century. To this end, this essay reads Kim Wong Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things (2004). Keltner's protagonist Lindsey Owyang is yet another twentysomething "chick" looking for love, self, independence, and success in the huge megalopolis of San Francisco. What sets Lindsey apart from the chick prototype is that she is a third-generation ABC (American-born Chinese) and issues relevant to Asian America frequently make their way into Lindsey's narrative. Though it is generally considered as standing a "few notches above the standard chick-lit fare" (Stover n. pag), I would argue that meaningful reflections on many of the major pillars of Asian American literature, history, and cultural politics are glossed over in favor of cursory musings about the daily vicissitudes of Lindsey's life. This essay thus takes to task Ferriss's claim that a "serious" consideration of chick lit "brings into focus many of the issues facing contemporary women and contemporary culture - issues of identity, of race and class, of femininity and feminism, of consumerism and self-image" (2). I contend that a close examination of Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things discloses that the chick lit format undermines a "serious consideration" of Asian American issues by presenting in particular a highly problematic representation of race and of Asian American femininity.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.51
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• pp.193-212
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• 2018

This paper attempts to explore how Ang Lee depicts Asian and Western women in his films. We focus on two parts of his consciousness First, Ang Lee does not consider himself a feminist, he understands the world in terms of women who play societal roles. Second, Ang Lee's films reflect his identity in a juxtaposition model, in which he is a member of mainstream American society and also holds an onlooker's viewpoint at the same time. He depicts women, who are often marginalized or considered the minority, and their feminist ideals, as means that break down the authority of the father and the man, the traditional ideology, and the male dominant nationalism. Chinese women in movies divide apart traditional Chinese patriarchal ideology and male-dominated anti-Japanese sentiments. Also, the Western women in his films reveal the non-stereotypical appearance of Western society in the 1970s and 1980s, with daily tension, anxiety, abdominal pain and anger, silence and anxiety about homosexual husbands, and excessive obsession. The director's portrayal of women not only separates the male-centered and Western-centered discourse, but also reveals a self-division of internalized masculine patriarchal Asian thought consciousness.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.282-300
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• 2009

This paper attempts to focus the ways in which Seoul as an urban space can be read and interpreted from gender perspective, assuming Seoul as a cultural text which represents modernity and post-modernity. Drawing on discussions of urban sociology and human geography which have analyzed the relationship between material spaces and social subjects, this paper explores the gendered segregation and representations of space in Seoul which has been constructed through the process of modernization. The framework of spatial interpretation of Seoul, concentrating on imageablity and legibility, consists of three dimensions; gendered division of labour and sphere, dichotomy of representations along with femininity and masculinity, and the ways of interlocking between modernity and post-modernity. In this paper, 'fl$\check{a}$nerie', Benjamin's method of interpretation of urban culture and the way of seeing with 'speculum' of Irigaray are adopted as metaphoric methodologies. It is an attempt to develop a new methodology to analyze and interpret urban space from gender-cultural perspective.

• 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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.51-77
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• 2016

In February, 2012, three members of the Russian Feminist Rock group 'Pussy Riot' were accused of staging a 'Punk Prayer' in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and were imprisoned for two years. This case, which sparked widespread enthusiastic support from those in the West, was viewed in Russia in quite a different way. The Pussy Riot affair very effectively shows the historic base of contemporary Russian gender discourse and gives an explanation as to why Putin's very conservative and masculine-centered nationalistic agenda works in Russian society with such great success. In this article, we introduce the Pussy Riot case and compare the reactions to the case published in the Russian and Western press; we then examine the historic causes of the masculine-centered nationalistic agenda of Putin's government.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.115-138
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• 2016

The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009) is a Peruvian-Spanish film by a young, female Peruvian director, Claudia Llosa (1976 - ). By applying the theories that feminist and subaltern scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presents in "Feminism and Critical Theory", the present work questions the ironic term, "Feminism in the Third World" by considering the Latin American context. Would the term refer to the feminism of Native Indian women or white creole women? The present work raises this question via Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow, in which a white creole woman, Aída, takes advantage of a quechua woman, Fausta. Through analysis of this film, this work demonstrates that in the Latin American context, even in a single country, there should be various types of feminism, since what Native Indian women fight against is different from what white creole women fight against. Thus, it insists that feminism in the Third World should develop in a deconstructionist manner, in which each woman has the ability to interpret her own social and political stance. Furthermore, it can be said that cultural appropriation is taking place in the "real" world as well as on the screen: a white creole director, Llosa, is taking advantage of a hot-button issue in our postmodern era, the violation of the human rights of minorities, especially those of Latin American Native Indian women, since Llosa became a success and won many prizes in international film festivals for her work.