1st Edition

Dangerous Women Gender and Korean Nationalism

Edited By Elaine H. Kim, Chungmoo Choi Copyright 1998
    334 Pages
    by Routledge

    332 Pages
    by Routledge

    Dangerous Women addresses the themes of Korean nationalism and gender construction, as well as various issues related to the colonialization and decolonialization of the Korean nation. The contributors explore the troubled category of "woman," placing it in the specific context of a marginalized and colonized nation. But Korean women are not merely configured here as metaphors for an emasculated and infantilized "homeland;" they are also shown to be products of a problematic gender construction that originates in Korea, and extends even today to Korean communities beyond Asia. Representations of Korean women still attempt to confine them to the status of either mother or prostitute: Dangerous Women rectifies that construction, offering a feminist intervention that might recuperate womanhood.

    1. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi -- Introduction 2. Chungmoo Choi -- Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea 3. Seungsook Moon -- Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea 4. Elaine H. Kim -- Men's Talk: A Korean American View of South Korean Constructions of Women, Gender, and Masculinity 5. Yong Soon Min -- Kindred Distance (Photo Essay) 6. Hyunah Yang -- Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Silencing 7. Katharine H.S. Moon -- Prostitute Bodies and Gendered States in U.S.-Korea Relations 8. Hyun Sook Kim -- Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: Images of Working-Class Women in Popular and Radical Texts 9. (Island in the Wind) You-me Park -- Working Women and the Ontology of the Collective Subject: (Post)Coloniality and the Representation of Female Subjectivities in Hyon Kiyong's Paramtanun Som 10. Yong Soon Min -- Mother Load (Photo Essay) 11. Hyun Ok Park -- Ideals of Liberation: Korean Women in Manchuria 12. Hyun Yi Kang -- Re-membering Home 13. Helen Lee -- A Peculiar Sensation: A Personal Genealogy of Korean American Women's Cinema Lee

    Biography

    Elaine Kim is Professor of Asian American Studies and Chair of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Chungmoo Choi is Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.