Friday, March 11th, 2022 Symposium: MeToo in Asia (Part 2)

Description

***This registration is for Part 2 of the Symposium only. Please register separately for Part 1.***

The symposium is organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Asian Institute’s Global Taiwan Studies Program, the Centre for South Asian Studies, the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and WIND Toronto Korean Feminist Collective

PART 2

7:30pm-8:30pm (EST): Poetry Reading by Choi Young-Mi & Conversation with the Poet (Chair: Janet Poole)

8:30pm-9:30pm (EST): After MeToo Documentary Screening and Conversation with Directors, Garam Kangyu and Somyi Yi (Chair: Michelle Cho)

The poetry reading and the poet’s remarks are in English, along with the Korean original poems. The documentary is in Korean with English subtitles, and a link to the documentary After MeToo will be shared with those who registered for this evening session to be viewed from February 21 until March 11 as part of the confirmation email. Please note that the recording, sharing, or capturing the images of the documentary is prohibited. The conversation with the directors will be in Korean with English translation.

#After MeToo (South Korea, 2021, documentary, 84 minutes)
Directors: PARK Sohyun, YI Somyi, KANGYU Garam, Soram

SYNOPSIS: How has South Korean society changed since the #MeToo movement shook up the society? Can this question even be answered, in the midst of strong backlash, persistent male alliance, and structural sexism still in place? The film explores the questions and possibilities that the #MeToo movement has left, through the daily lives and voices of women today.

PLEASE NOTE: After the registration, a link for streaming the documentary will be sent via email on February 21, as part of the zoom meeting registration confirmation, and the documentary can be viewed from February 21 to March 11, 2022, before the conversation with the directors.

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Participants’ Bios:

CHOI YOUNG-MI is a poet and novelist from the Republic of Korea, and is one of the defining figures who ignited the #MeToo movement in Korea. She is the author of poetry collections At Thirty the Party was Over (1994, 2015), Bicycling in Dreamland (1998), To The Pigs (2005, 2014), Life that has yet to Arrive (2009), Things Already Hot (2013), and What will not come again (2019) which includes the poem “Monster” and other #Metoo poems. Http://choiyoungmi.com/

GARAM KANGYU is a feminist filmmaker based in South Korea, and a co-founder of the Alternative Cultural Club, Youngheeya Nolja. She was the assistant director and film distributor for the feature documentary The Girl Princes. She was awarded the Best Korean Documentary Award for her film My Father’s House at the 3rd DMZ International Documentary Film Festival. In 2013, she collaborated with female documentary filmmakers for the feature documentary Let’s Dance. She also completed Itaewon, a feature documentary about the lives of women having lived in a U.S. military town and their experiences (2016), and Us, Day by Day on the everyday lives and activism of young feminist activists in South Korea from the 1990s and the present (2019).

SOMYI YI is a filmmaker based in South Korea, whose work centers on the power of marginalized lives and voices. She directed “100. My body and body became healthy,” as part of the documentary After MeToo (2021), which follows the lives of Park Jôngsun who later came to terms with the identity of victims of sexual violence later in life in her 40s, offering a poignant account of the power of her language. After MeToo premiered in the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival in 2021. Her earlier work, Observation and Memory (2018), an autobiographical documentary about sexual harassment from the past in the absence of evidence, received the Grand Prix (KAFA) award in 2019 at the Busan International Short Film Festival, and was featured in several South Korean and international film festivals.

MICHELLE CHO is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She’s published on Asian cinemas and Korean television, video, and pop music in such venues as Cinema Journal, the International Journal of Communication, Asian Video Cultures, and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. Her first monograph analyzes millennial South Korean genre cinemas, and her current project theorizes “vicarious media” in K-pop and its fandoms. She is co-editing a volume with Jesook Song on mediations of gender politics in contemporary South Korea. Her public-facing writing on K-pop, fandom, and media convergence can be found online at flowjournal.org, pandemicmedia.meson.press, Even Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

JANET POOLE teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of Toronto. Her exploration of Korean modernist writers’ response to Japanese fascist occupation during the Pacific War appeared as When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination of Late Colonial Korea (Columbia University Press, 2014) and was awarded the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is translator of the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun and has published a collection of his anecdotal essays (Eastern Sentiments, Columbia University Press, paperback edition, 2013) and a selection of his short stories written during the Pacific War and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic (Dust and Other Stories, Columbia University Press, 2018). Her most recent project is titled, “Going North and the History of Korean Modernism.”