Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism

From the publisher’s website:

Dangerous Women addresses the themes of Korean nationalism and gender construction, as well as various issues related to the colonialization and decolonialization of the Korean nation. The contributors explore the troubled category of “woman,” placing it in the specific context of a marginalized and colonized nation. But Korean women are not merely configured here as metaphors for an emasculated and infantilized “homeland;” they are also shown to be products of a problematic gender construction that originates in Korea, and extends even today to Korean communities beyond Asia. Representations of Korean women still attempt to confine them to the status of either mother or prostitute: Dangerous Women rectifies that construction, offering a feminist intervention that might recuperate womanhood.

Elaine Kim is Professor of Asian American Studies and Chair of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Chungmoo Choi is Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction | Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi
2. Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea | Chungmoo Choi
3. Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea | Seungsook Moon
4. Men’s Talk: A Korean American View of South Korean Constructions of Women, Gender, and Masculinity | Elaine H. Kim
5. Kindred Distance: Photo Essay by Yong Soon Min
6. Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women: Nationalism. Sexuality and Silencing | Hyunah Yang
7. Prostitute Bodies and Gendered States in US-Korea Relations | Katharine H.S. Moon
8. Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: Images of Working-Class Women in Popular and Radical Texts | Hyun Sook Kim
9. Working Women and the Ontology of the Collective Subject: (Post)Coloniality and the Representation of Female Subjectivities in Hyun Ki-yong’s Paramt’anun som (Island in the Wind) | You-me Park
10. Mother Land: Photo Essay by Yong Soon Min
11. Ideals of Liberation: Korean Women in Manchuria | Hyun Ok Park
12. Re-membering Home | Hyun Yi Kang
13. A Peculiar Sensation: A Personal Genealogy of Korean American Women’s Cinema | Helen Lee
14. Contributors’ Notes