About the Book

This book explores gender, labour and class in Korea and Japan. It focuses in particular on two forms of labor that have been crucial to understandings of gender, work and class throughout the twentieth century: sexual labor and industrial labor. It shows how these have been central in shaping modern gender and worker identities, and argues that sexuality and labor must be analyzed together if we are to understand the history of capitalism in Korea and Japan. By discussing what happens to sexuality in factories and other sites of industrial labor, it explores how sexuality is inscribed in working-class identities, and shows how sexual and labor relations have shaped the cultures of industrialization in both Japan and Korea. It addresses important historical episodes such as Japanese colonization of Korea and its legacy, wartime labor mobilization, women engaging in forced sex work for the Japanese Imperial Army throughout the Asian continent, and issues of ethnicity and sex in the contemporary workplace. The case studies provide specific examples of the way gender and work have operated across a variety of contexts, including Korean shipyard unions, Japanese hostess clubs employing Korean-Japanese "passing" as Japanese, the poetry of female Japanese unionists and in the autobiographical proletarian literature of Korean female textile workers. Overall, this book provides a compelling account of the relationship between gender and labour in Korea and Japan, both today and across the course of the twentieth century, and shows clearly how ideas about gender have contributed in fundamental ways to conceptions of class and worker identities.