- KOREAN
- P-ISSN1229-4632
- E-ISSN2733-5925
- KCI
ISSN : 1229-4632
No.67
Abstract
This paper examines how the combat performance of female characters, particularly haenyeo during the Jeju April 3 Incident, as depicted in literary works created in North Korea at the time, disrupted existing gender norms and rendered newly intelligible subject positions. Employing Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as its analytical framework, this study challenges existing Jeju 4·3 literature, which has confined women to passive victims or supporting roles to male heroes, by foregrounding them as central actors on the front lines of the uprising. Through close readings of Park Se- young’s Jeju Island, Ahn Ryong-man’s Camellia Stamp, Oh Jeong-sam’s Halla Mountain, and Ham Se-deok’s Mountain People, this study traces how haenyeo’s embodied labor transforms into combat performance, how everyday tools become weapons, and how new subject positions as warriors are rendered intelligible through the reiteration and displacement of gender norms. This study rethinks female warriors in Jeju 4·3 literature from North Korea during the liberation period as performatively constituted under the specific spatiotemporal conditions of the uprising. It seeks to paradoxically recov- er the erased presence of female warriors through the very literature produced by the ideologically opposed North Korean state, thereby restoring what has been systematically excluded from South Korea’s history.
Abstract
This study examines Choi Jeong-hee’s liberation-period fiction as a transitional field prior to the full institutionalization of nation-state norms, analyzing the multiple con- figurations of masculinity that emerge therein. It argues that masculinity in Choi’s nar- ratives is not a naturalized attribute, but a performative norm articulated through lack, anxiety, and affective excess. Focusing on Jeomnye and Baby Star, the study first analyzes how the instability of the rural economy represented by Deokso and the reorganization of class relations undermine the material foundations of male authority, thereby producing anxious masculinity. It then examines A Scene of Cleaning a Well and The Rooster to show how masculinity is fractured at the level of the body. Male characters attempt to sustain masculinity through youth and physical capacity, yet hunger, aging, infertility, and emotional volatility expose its vulnerability. Finally, through Spring, the study consid- ers masculinity performed by female characters, demonstrating that masculinity is not an essence anchored in the cisgender male body but a norm enacted through relations and desire. The liberation period thus appears as a moment of oscillation before gender norms were fully naturalized. In Choi Jeong-hee’s fiction, masculinity does not assume a single stable model; rather, it emerges as a normative effect continually reconfig- ured through class instability, bodily vulnerability, and female performance. This study reads Choi’s liberation-period fiction as a site where the fracture and reconfiguration of gender norms intersect.
Abstract
This study examines the representational of intimacy in Memento Mori and The Silenced, and explores how their processes of production, promotion and acceptance were influenced by discourses on women and sexual minorities in Korean society. Memento Mori portrays the school as a space where the desires of queer women are refracted, by depicting the process through which Hyoshin’s desire for a Homo-sexuality is erased within the rumors circulated among students in there. The film reflects the cultural atmosphere of the mid-to-late 1990s, when making the existence of sexual minorities visible was a central agenda of sexual minority’s activism. This is realized through its attempt to reveal the desire for “Jeongsa” , which is rendered invisible within rumors and discourse. In contrast, The Silenced, set in a boarding school in 1938, places greater emphasis on issues of history and violence, reconstructing the girls’ school as a Possible World that provides a backdrop for romanticized “S relationships.” However, in its distribution and promotional processes, the film adopts a strategy of not foregrounding queer codes; in this process, intimacy within the girls’ school is refracted into something “not quite homosexuality.” This reflects one aspect of the landscape of 2015, when “rebooted” feminist discourse and movements were becoming highly contentious social issues in Korea.
Abstract
At the moment when humidity, heat, smell, and color adhere to the surface of the body, the space of Vacation Novel emerges not as mere nature but as a field where sensation and desire are organized. This article conceptualizes such a tropical space as “tropical modernity, ” constructed by colonial tourist capitalism, and examines how it operates as a mechanism that arranges and regulates women’s desires and impulses into manageable forms. However, this order ultimately fails to reach completion as it encounters the intrusion of tropicality, the sticky affect of humidity, and the appearance of ghosts, thereby revealing internal fractures. In the collapse of sensory organization, affect does not disappear but overflows, refracted into anxiety, fear, and anger, and the world can no longer be sustained as a stable system of meaning. At this point, the female body functions as a surface of contact where sensation and affect intersect, a site that perceives the rupture of order while also mediating the persistence of affect beyond control. Ultimately, Vacation Novel invites us to reconsider how the world endures after the failure of desire’s regulation, within the ongoing flow of affect.
Abstract
This study defines deokjil (fandom practice) not as mere reception but as an artistic practice that actively produces aesthetic value. The process by which individual subjects within K-pop idol fandoms compete to secure aesthetic legitimacy is redefined as an emergent narrative performance through which Aesthetic Sovereignty is established. In this process, fans employ sadomasochistic affects and autochorissexual voyeurism as aesthetic devices, constructing an autonomous aesthetic norm grounded in the extremization of gender hierarchies. Taking Lee Hee-ju’s fiction as its primary object of analysis, this study provides a symptomatic reading of her work. Grounded in a cultural studies framework that reconceptualizes fandom as an aesthetic community, this study adopts a multidisciplinary approach centered on narrative analysis, supplemented by queer theory and sexuality discourse. Through this, it argues that deokjil constitutes a site of emergent narrative performance organized around the struggle for aesthetic sovereignty, and demonstrates that the ‘shota aesthetics’ enacted by the subjects of Lee Hee-ju’s fiction represents a narcissistic practice of Self-Authorization through which subjects retroactively confirm their own beauty.