Description

The workshop will bring together authors who have submitted articles to the special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies on “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea” (publication scheduled for fall 2014).

Suzy Kim
Mothers and Maidens: Gendered Formation of Revolutionary Heroes in North Korea

Minjeong Kim
South Korean Rural Husbands, Subaltern Masculinity and International Marriage

Yoonjung Kang
Re-producing Gender and Kinship: Postpartum Care Practices in Contemporary South Korea

Jee Eun Song
The Soybean Paste Girl: The Cultural and Gender Politics of Coffee Consumption in Contemporary South Korea

Description

North Korea is often portrayed in mainstream media as a backward place without a history worth knowing. But during its founding years
(1945-1950), North Korea experienced a radical social revolution when everyday life became the single most important arena for experiencing the
revolution in progress. Historical accounts across the political spectrum characterize the five-year postliberation period as a period of competing
ideologies. But what distinguished these competing visions for Korea’s decolonization were not lofty political goals, since everyone advocated
independence and democracy, but the minute details of how everyday life should be organized. In that sense, everyday life became the primary site
of revolutionary struggle in North Korea, and serves as the most useful theoretical category for understanding the North Korean Revolution in
particular, and social revolutions in general, as expressions of a heroic modernist impulse.

Suzy Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the
University of Chicago. Her research focuses on North Korea’s social and cultural history. Her book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution,
1945-1950 was recently published by Cornell University Press. Her teaching and research interests focus on modern Korean history with particular
attention to gender studies, oral history, and social theory.

Description

Hearts of Pine focuses on the selves and social lives that these three women cultivated through song. During four decades of post-war public secrecy about the comfort women system, song served for these women as both a private and a public means of coping with their trauma-each used song in a different way to reckon with their experiences and to forge a new sense of self. In the 1990s a nationalist movement arose in South Korea to seek redress from the Japanese government and to tend to the previously-shunned comfort women survivors in their old age. Suddenly these women, and many others like them, found themselves pulled from the margins of society and thrust into the very center of the public cultural spotlight. Appearing on television and radio as well as at political events and protest rallies, the “comfort women grandmothers” collectively functioned as an emblem of the horrors Japan inflicted on long “enslaved” Korea-a Korea that had now overcome Japanese domination. But while the women were to stand forward as symbols of Korea’s triumph over metaphorical enslavement, they were largely swallowed up by an archetypal, faceless “comfort woman victim” in the public cultural imaginary. Yet in the face of the selective interests and forces of the public cultural imagination, and directly into the media spotlights of South Korean public culture itself, all three of these women continued to use song as a means of expressing the particularity of their experiences publicly.

Hearts of Pine paints intimate and tenderly crafted portraits of three off-beat old women in a South Korean old age home, who made routine appearances on national television and radio. In so doing, this lecture addresses basic questions about the power of music vis-à-vis other forms of social expression, illuminates the history of Korean music in the twentieth century, and tells a new history of the “comfort women” system and postwar South Korean public culture.

Joshua D. Pilzer is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of music in modern Korea and Japan, women’s musical worlds, and the relationships between music, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the analysis of everyday musical practice as a life resource. His introduces his 2012 book in this presentation. Since 2011, he has been doing fieldwork for his second book, an ethnography of song and speech among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan. He has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Dongyang Umak Yeonggu, and ,The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Description

This discussion examines the largest evacuation movement of the Korean War, the January 4th Retreat of 1951. Far larger than the civilian displacement following the surprise start of the war on June 25, 1950, the retreat was characterized by evacuations from both sides of the 38th parallel. Three different groups of people were targeted for relief: refugees from the north, the internally displaced from the south, and war sufferers. This talk will examine how each group was treated by official relief organizations and the general conditions for refugees in the winter of 1951.

Janice Kim is an Associate Professor of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Between Mountains: Refugee Life during the Korean War,” which explores the social and economic history of refugees and civilian livelihood during and after the Korean War.