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.