This article interrogates the history of North Korean encounters historical and discursive with Jeju's unique "women divers" (haenyo, alternatively known as "sea women"). Since the colonial days (1910-1945), Jeju Island was exceptional in that much of the socioeconomic and political struggles there were led by women divers, a highly organized group of skilled workers whose contribution to the island's economy was crucial. Divers continued to display their agency after the 1945 Liberation as well, playing a prominent role in the April Third Jeju Uprising of 1948. Migratory workers since colonial days, women divers used to travel to Japan for work, and some of them stayed in various Japanese localities, Tsushima included, even after the Liberation. Ca. ten divers' households moved from Tsushima to North Korea in the early 1960s as a part of Zainichi Koreans' "repatriation movement." Concurrent with this development, North Korean arts and literature began to focus very strongly on women divers' revolutionary contributions. In these ideologized artistic descriptions, the portrayals of Jeju divers in anti-colonial and anti-American struggles spotlighted women's own initiative and agency. These portrayals assumedly reflected the economic importance and social centrality of women divers in Jeju life, as well as their exceptionally strong autonomy from male-dominated groups and institutions.
This commentary critically examines the South Korean Ministry of Education's decision to remove the terms songsosuja (sexual minority) and songp'yongdung (gender equality) from social studies and ethics textbooks revised in 2025. It argues that this exclusion hinders societal understanding and acceptance of sexual minorities by denying the use of crucial vernacular terminology. Specifically, songsosuja is a linguistically accurate, culturally appropriate, and politically strategic term, emphasizing the marginalization and invisibility experienced by these groups within a broader framework of social justice and human rights. This commentary critically examines the prevalent use of anglicized queer terms in Korea, highlighting how uncritical adoption exacerbates communication barriers between queer and non-queer Koreans and undermines the cultural agency and ownership of Korean queer speakers. It calls for collaborative efforts between the National Institute of the Korean Language and queer community organizations to adopt, create, and disseminate culturally relevant and accessible Korean queer terminology.
This study examines how Korean Christianity reconfigures Confucian ancestral rites (je-sa) through liturgical inculturation, focusing on gender, ritual agency, and cultural transformation. Traditional je-sa, rooted in Confucian filial piety (hyo) and ritual propriety (rye), has long reinforced patriarchal kinship structures by vesting ritual authority in eldest sons. However, the rise of Christian memorial services (ch'udo-rye) has redefined ancestral remembrance, replacing sacrificial offerings with Scripture, prayer, and hymnody while preserving Confucian ritual aesthetics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary scholarship in theology, anthropology, and Korean studies, this paper argues that ch'udo-rye constitutes a hybrid practice where women-mothers, daughters, and daughters-in-law-emerge as ritual leaders and theological interpreters. Their leadership challenges Confucian and ecclesiastical patriarchies, enacting moral agency rooted in care, memory, and theological creativity. By analyzing case studies and Catholic-Protestant adaptations, this study shows how ch'udo-rye negotiates tensions between cultural continuity and Christian eschatology, transforming gendered ritual orders into relational ethics of remembrance and hope. It further engages feminist and postcolonial theology to theorize women's ritual agency as "compassionate disruption," reframing filial piety toward mutual care and inclusive communal belonging. Ultimately, ch'udo-rye exemplifies liturgical inculturation as a dynamic process of cultural negotiation, moral reimagination, and social renewal. It highlights how Korean Christian women's ritual leadership fosters communities grounded in justice, relationality, and shared flourishing, offering a vision of rituals as living practices that sustain memory, shape identity, and transform society.
During the formative years of Korean Studies in the United States (1955-1965), many scholars from South Korea went to the United States and participated in establishing Korean Studies as an academic field and produced the initial knowledge of Korean history. With high linguistic competency in Japanese, Korean, Classical Chinese, and English and relatively easier access to historical sources in multiple academia, they produced the knowledge of Korean history in U.S. academia, where there were not otherwise enough scholarly sources and people to carry out the research. This paper examines the dissertations written by these U.S.-based Korean scholars and discusses their contribution to the early scholarship and the historical narratives and themes they produced. It points out how their works were influenced by their attempts to secure a space for Korean Studies within the United States, the larger East Asian narrative framework informed by modernization theory, and the use of South Korean positivist scholarship and Japanese colonial scholarship. This paper attempts to expand the understanding of Korean Studies by locating it in a more transnational and global context.
Abstract: This paper aims to demonstrate how the nature of the South Korean government’s involvement in popular music has changed from repressive power to productive power, in addition to explaining how this transition affects the industry and why the government’s intervention is crucial to grasping the current state of the global phenomenon of Korean popular music (K-pop). This paper explores how the government’s cultural organ, the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), influences global audiences’ understanding of K-pop and Korean culture by supporting various types of musicians in global markets, on the one hand, and how KOCCA has also overseen regulatory programs concerned with the cultural industries on the other hand. This paper argues that the government’s approach to the cultural industries is ambivalent, which highlights why its cultural policy cannot be understood based on the binary perspectives, such as “state versus market.”
North Korean literature today is an extreme example of an inclina tion toward didacticism which has been expressed in differing forms under various social conditions throughout the history of Korean writing. In traditional Korea, writing was the unique function of an educated elite (who bore a responsibility for moral leadership of the society) and did not become the specialized vocation of a professional class until very recent years. But even then, works addressed to a popular audience beyond the writer's peers have tended to reflect a class attitude embodying many didactic elements. This tendency, adapted to the times, has continued into the modern era. There have been three major bursts of socially motivated, didactic writing during the twentieth century: turn-of-the-century works intended to introduce modern Western thought and thus enlighten the Korean people ; the nationalistic and socialistic literary responses to the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation; and the postliberation socialist realism of the communist north and, to some extent, the antigovernment writings of the intellectual opposition in the south. Since the north Korean didactic writing which this paper describes is a contemporary example of a tendency that has been clearly discernible throughout the growth of modern Korean literature, it is helpful to begin by considering the relevant historical background.
The late nineteenth-century world order was marked by intense rivalries between imperial powers that embarked on transcontinental expansion to expand their spheres of interest. As the world’s hegemon, Britain strived to maintain its position in Asia through colonies and informal presence in various hotspots. This paper delineates how in both Chakri Thailand and Chosǒn Korea, the imperial intrigues of European powers like Britain have culminated in the series of interventions that sought to reshape Southeast and East Asia’s geopolitical dynamics. For centuries, Korea had been closely tied to the Sino-centric tributary system, faithfully observing rituals and maintaining Qing-centered foreign policy. With the “opening” of Korea to Japan and the Western powers for “free trade,” however, the Korean court had to learn to navigate a new course in the increasingly treacherous international system. As the Korean peninsula transformed into a new geopolitical pivot in East Asia, Korea also attracted unprecedented interest from policymakers and statesmen from foreign powers. British foreign secretary Earl of Rosebery’s neutralization proposal was an outgrowth of such development, which, if successful, would have secured Korea’s territorial integrity and independence. Unlike in Korea, in Thailand, neutrality only briefly captured the attention of the policy circles. Instead, Britain struck an agreement with Thailand to formally guarantee the latter’s independence. Despite these apparent differences, the examples of Korea and Siam still leave much room for contemplation for contemporary scholars and policymakers who want to reflect upon their experiences to comprehend the sometimes-outsized influence of weak states during shifting regional order.
This article interrogates how Taehan News , a newsreel produced by the South Korean state in the 1960s, created and circulated a discourse of female labor through its portrayal of female bodies marked by beauty and care. The early Park Chung Hee regime used Taehan News to not only establish and justify the regime's dominance but also to promote government activities and mobilize the masses for South Korea's modernization and industrialization. By exploiting the propagandistic and top-down strategies embedded in the medium of newsreels, the regime presented idealized versions of female bodies that incorporated beauty and care as a rhetoric of femininity. It also envisioned women as organized into a vital yet secondary body of labor that was composed of four categories, which I label the "servicewoman," the "wise mother, good wife," the "beauty queen," and "working hands." I argue that Taehan News 'sdiscursive use of beauty and care perpetuated traditional gender ideology by segregating and marginalizing female labor as ancillary, and it deemphasized the contributions and sacrifices women made for Korea's modernity. Moreover, I argue that this discursive practice of associating female labor with beauty and care, along with juxtaposing it against male labor, has augmented hegemonic masculinity. This analysis reveals the contradiction that female labor posed for Korea's development and industrialization in the 1960s: it was seen as both essential for the nation's development and inessential due to the unproductive consumptive attributes associated with beauty and care.
On September 1, 1945, just over two weeks after the Japanese emperor made his famous surrender speech over NHK radio, Lieutenant General Kozuki Yoshio, Commanding Officer of the Seventeenth Japanese Army in Korea, established contact with U.S. Lieutenant General John Hodge, Commanding Officer of the XXIV Corps, remained in Okinawa but soon traveled to Seoul to direct the United States occupation of southern Korea. He had just learned that he would surrender to the U.S., rather than to the Soviet, armies. As Soviet troops were quickly advancing south from the Manchurian border, Kozuki informed Hodge that "there are Communist agitators among the Koreans who are plotting to take advantage of the situation to disturb the peace and order here." Fearing a possibility that this ideology may come to dominate southern Korean politics, Hodge directed the Japanese to maintain control over the peninsula until U.S. forces arrived. This was one of a number of clues that Japan would be positioned by the United States to again maintain a position of influence in the Northeast Asian region. This paper argues that U.S. attitudes toward the enemy Japanese began to soften as its relations with its ally turned enemy, the Soviet Union, hardened, even as the battles waged in the Pacific War. Japan's importance as a future belligerent in a possible future confrontation with the Soviet Union and the territory it would soon occupy in northern Korea?
Through the ongoing struggles from the 1990s feminist movements to the 2000s candlelight protests, the #MeToo movement, and beyond South Korean women have challenged patriarchal norms and reimagined women's bodies as political subjects. Focusing on the contemporary South Korean documentary films made by activist-feminist filmmakers, such as Candle Wave Feminists (Kangyu Ga-ram, 2017), Us, Day by Day (Kangyu Ga-ram, 2019), and Boundary: Flaming Feminist Action (Yun Ga-hyon, 2021), this paper examines how these films interrogate gendered precarity and mobilize fear as a transformative force for feminist resistance. Built upon the complex tapestry of feminist activism from the 1990s to the contemporary era, these filmmakers critically document and intervene in South Korea's evolving public discourse on gender, social movements, and political activism. The analysis draws on the theoretical frameworks of multitudo (masses), political affect, and relational embodiment to illuminate how these documentaries portray women's bodies as both sites of societal fear and agents of transformative power. In particular, the dual nature of fear takes a pivotal role in challenging the negative framing of women's emotions and precarity. This perspective offers a critical lens for understanding the political transformation of female masses and the emergence of counterpublic. By examining the interplay of fear, activism, and documentary filmmaking, this paper illuminates how South Korean feminist movements and women's filmmaking intersect to foster a new mode of political subjectivity and ethical engagement in South Korea's precarious society.
This article will analyze historian Pak Unsik's Hankuk T'ongsa (A Painful History of Korea) and argue that Pak was first and foremost a firm believer in the strength of history education to cultivate a resilient personality and will for Korea's national independence, which is why he emphasized that even if the form of a state should disappear due to an illegal occupation by a foreign power, history is the primary vehicle through which the state's national spirit is preserved. The nationalism of Pak's nationalist historiographical mindset was not just aimed at criticizing pro-Japanese collaborators who proactively led the Kapsin Coup but also groups such as King Kojong and officials who were too accustomed to comfort and wealth to promote meaningful change and the Tonghak, whose idealism for egalitarianism was quickly abandoned for progress's sake that they did not ponder too much about the means and ended up supporting Japanese colonial rule. Pak wrote A Painful History of Korea to critique a more comprehensive notion of "collaboration" than the usual sense of the term. A Painful History of Korea is a major record of the process behind Korea's annexation, intending to show its illegal nature. A Painful History of Korea encapsulates Pak's vision of nationalist historiography as a history which serves to not only preserve colonization as a shameful yet enduring lesson for future reference but also warn both Japanese collaborators and the world at large that colonization, from its inception to its formal practice, is and always will be fundamentally illegal.
This article explores issues of exclusion and precarity in contemporary (2015-2024) South Korean feminist activist spaces. I argue that the growth of biological essentialism and trans-exclusion within the feminist movement is exacerbated by digital technologies of surveillance-both within activist communities and from outside. This article uses data collected over fifteen months of consecutive fieldwork (2018-2019) with radical feminist activists and three radical feminist spaces as case studies: the Uncomfortable Courage (2018-2019) protests, a mass protest series against hidden digital sexual violence and biased prosecution, and the Bwave Black Protests (2016-2019), a series of monthly protests to repeal the criminalization of abortion. In both protest spaces, activists hailed primarily from online-based, anonymous, radical organizing spaces, and, in a departure from previous centralized feminist movements, these spaces banned photography by participants and outsiders, banned participants from group attendance, and restricted access to "biological females." By examining these radical movements central to the contemporary South Korean feminist movement, using radical feminist geography as a framework, this article departs from previous scholarship to illustrate the ways in which the exclusion of gender nonconforming people in feminist spaces is tied to digital media culture, anti-feminist backlash, social precarity, gender-based violence, and surveillance technologies.
Yoon Won Chang This article analyzes the discourses on young women's suicide and suffering in South Korea and their performative effect. The current discoursal and political landscape creates a spectacle of the suffering object that is the young Korean women while ironically neglecting the subjective experiences and the process of self-meaning-making of their psychological and bodily injuries. Two major spheres this article investigates are, namely, the state policies and public health discourses and the feminist critique, both of which use suicide and mental illnesses as symbolic rhetorics that represent a "crisis" either that of the Korean state or feminist politics. The sense of crisis created within suicide prevention policies serves as an extension of the Korean state's biopolitical management of women's life and reproduction. I contend that such an approach renders women's suicide and mental affliction inevitable and partially anticipates their deaths. The feminist critique, on the other side, has viewed the narratives of women's suicide and suffering predominantly as products of the neoliberal subjectivity of the young women. This line of inquiry that emphasizes the individualistic, sanitized, and apolitical mode of the young women's narratives, I argue, has neglected their embodied experience as an important site of knowledge production. This article calls for an ethnographic intervention as the future direction for research regarding women's suicide and suffering. By mapping the topography of public and scholarly discourses, this article switches the mode of feminist critique from delineating the causes of the deaths to analyzing the broader politics of knowledge production surrounding women's affliction in Korea.
Korean artist Jia Chang's 2017 exhibition OMERTA garnered significant media attention, albeit with a lack of balance. Her use of body waste, such as urine, and her showing of women's nudity contributed to sensationalized media coverage as well as feminist art critics' often disproportionately focused review of the subversive power that such selections of topics can impart. Reflective of my own experience of having written yet another reductive feminist art review, this essay underscores the risk of hastily categorizing an artist only through the lens of gender politics, which can potentially deprive their art of chances to be appreciated on its own merits within the context of postcolonial South Korea. Central to this argument is the role of disgust as a mediator, accelerating the essentialist interpretation of Chang's work despite her avoidance of such standpoints. Drawing parallel to how contemporaneous feminist struggles against digital sex crimes and the subsequent anti-feminist backlashes were felt "disgusting" by many, this essay critically revisits the role that disgust took in shaping the public perception of OMERTA , seeking to demystify it as a socially, politically, and culturally mediated feeling.
In 2019, South Korea was rocked by a mass-scale sex crime nicknamed by the media as the "Nth Room Incident." While not the first case of digital sex crime to garner media attention in the country, it was groundbreaking in its scale and in the swift response it garnered from the government. Responding to public outcry regarding digital sex crime, the government offered various amendments to existing censorship laws to make them more stringent. The amendments were intended to prevent further damage to individuals who have already been victimized by preventing further dissemination of their images online and preventing potential victimization of the rest of the population. This article examines the amendments to censorship laws implemented after the Nth Room Incident. I suggest that the censorship only achieves limited success in its objective to prevent further harm to the victims because it reaffirms the preexisting gendered sexual citizenship. In that regard, I suggest that censorship is an extension of national paternalism.
Though Philip Jaisohn [Sǒ Chaep’il] is recognized for his democratic reform work in Korea, less known is his work in the United States. Jaisohn’s work in Philadelphia as editor-in-chief of the English monthly, Korea Review , is typically linked to the March 1, 1919, movement since its inaugural issue appeared in June 1919. Importantly, however, Jaisohn desired to start a monthly prior to the March First Movement, and as early as 1913. Jaisohn’s own remarks, as well as the fact that he planned Korea Review with Syngman Rhee and Henry Chung [Chǒng Han’gyǒng], both of whom were drawn to the internationalist vision that was foundational to the nineteenth-century Peace through Law Movement and later espoused by Woodrow Wilson, help to show that one of Jaisohn’s motivations was this new vision of international relations in which international peace was secured through an awakened public that agitated for international justice. Because he realized that the solution to the “Korea problem” was a precondition for permanent peace, Jaisohn galvanized American citizens to work for international peace and justice by educating them about Korea. Jaisohn should be remembered as an individual who worked to improve international morality by building bonds between different peoples and by engaging Americans in international reform work aimed at international peace and justice.
