Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s ...burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking to interrogate the role of popular media in establishing and shaping gendered common sense, this volume fosters cross-disciplinary conversations linked by the central thesis that gender discourse and representation are central to the politics, aesthetics, and economics of contemporary South Korea. In the post-authoritarian period (the late 1980s to the #MeToo present), media representation and popular discourse changed the gender conventions that are found at the core of civic, political, and cultural debates.
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea maps the ways in which popular media and public discourse make the social dynamics of gender visible and open them up for debate and dismantling. In presenting innovative new research on the ways in which popular ideas about gender gain concrete form and political substance through mass mediation, the book’s contributors investigate the discursive production of gender in contemporary South Korea through trends, tropes, and thematics, as popular media become the domain in which new gendered subjectivities and relations transpire. The essays in this volume present cases and media objects that span multiple media and platforms, introducing new ways of thinking about gender as a platform and a conceptual infrastructure in the post-authoritarian era.
"On the Margins of Urban South Korea, seeks to provide rich and illuminating accounts of key sites of urban, national, and transnational development in contemporary South Korea. It is an outcome of ...long-term collaboration and dialogue among interdisciplinary Korean Studies scholars from architecture, anthropology, and geography. The seven key sites are the Education City Project in Jeju; the Chinatown Project in Incheon; Saemaul Undong(New Village Movement)in Pohang; Alternative Korean Wave in Bongcheon-dong, Seoul; Pine Tree Hill Neighbourhood Activism in a southern port city; sites of struggles against greenbelt deregulation in the Seoul Metropolitan Region; and the garment worker movement in Changshin-Dong, Seoul. The volume offers an original focus on key sites or, what the editors and contributors call core locations, and aims to articulate the significance of knowledge based in a particular location. It is inspired by two inter-connected notions: "core location (haeksim hyunjang)," a place with the lived experience of multiple layers of marginality in colonial history with an emphasis on the reseacher's praxis and rootedness in the location; and "Asia is Method," a means of thinking about an area, especially the non-western, not simply as an object of western interest but as a tool to generate frameworks that enable decolonization of epistemological hegemony. This volume aims to further develop the relevance of core location and Asia as Method in social science, targeting both an Anglophone readership and an audience in East Asia."--
Despite the common held belief that Asian nations have displayed anti-market tendencies of under-consumption and export-oriented trade since the Asian financial crisis, in the 10 years since the ...crisis, South Korea has bucked this trend accruing a higher debt rate than the US. This groundbreaking collection of essays addresses questions such as how did the open market policies and restructuring processes implemented during the Asian financial crisis magnify the consumption and debt level in South Korea to such an extent? What is the impact of these financial changes on the daily lives of people in different cultural and socio-economic groups? In examining these questions the authors provide valuable insight into the rise of financial capitalism, transnational mobility and the implications of neoliberal governing tactics following the Asian Financial Crisis.
Examining South Korea’s transformation during the early years of the 21 st century, New Millenium South Korea will be of interest to anthropologists, economists and sociologists, as well as students and scholars of Korean Studies.
Introduction: Why Korea in the New Millennium? Song, Jesook Part I: Economic and Sociological Accounts 1. Globalization and Social Inequality in South Korea Shin, Kwang-Yeong 2. Neoliberalism, the Financial Crisis and Economic Restructuring in Korea Lee, Kang-Kook 3. Neoliberalism in South Korea: The Dynamics of Financialization Jang, Jin-Ho Part II: Ethnographic and Historical Accounts 4. Contesting Legal Liminality: The Gendered Labor Politics of Irregular Workers in South Korea Chun, Jennifer Jihye 5. The Will to Self-Managing, the Will to Freedom: The Self-managing Ethic and the Spirit of Flexible Capitalism in South Korea Seo, Dongjin 6. Educational Manager Mothers As Neoliberal Maternal Subjects Park, So Jin 7. For the Rights of "Colonial Returnees": Korean Chinese, Decolonization and Neoliberal Democracy in South Korea Park, Hyun Ok 8. "Not-Quite Korean" Children in "Almost Korean" Families: The Fear of Decreasing Population and State Multiculturalism in South Korea Paik, Young-Gyung 9. "If you don’t work, you don’t eat": Evangelizing Development in Africa Han, Ju Hui Judy Han
Jesook Song is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. As an anthropologist of Korea and a gender studies scholar, her interests include liberal governmentality, financialization, and youth education.
This paper historicizes "deserving" citizenship of South Korea by tracing spatial changes and meanings of two places: Seoul Train Station Square and a former textile factory renovated to a homeless ...shelter Both have been emblematic spaces where the most homeless people were populated since the break of the Asian Debt Crisis, However, each place embodies different history of "deserving" citizenship in a complementary way. The square, a politically charged literary and physical topography, became a location of protecting "normal" citizen from potentially violent homeless people. The factory, a spatial marker for the state regulation of laborer, became a site to promote the benevolent image of a welfare state for protecting homeless people through a demarcation of short-term street living people-as "deserving" homeless citizens-from long term street living people. The embedded history in two places would be the transition of the developmental state towards the welfare state that shifted its capitalist focus from labor/economic policies to welfare policy: neoliberalization of state governance in South Korea. This paper examines how homeless people emerged as new welfare subjects in an urban landscape; how only short-term street living people were selected as proper: how various social agents were involved in the process of implementing homeless policies: and how dualistic capitalist control over labor power, such as regular workers and surplus laborer, was imposed.
This article draws on ethnographic research to elucidate ways in which young women's care labor is appropriated by the state as “free labor” in South Korea. Building upon John Krinsky's notion of ...free labor as state-orchestrated exploitation of public sector workers and Kyounghee Kim's research on gendered care labor, this article examines the gendered experience of school social workers who are certified at a lower level than professional social workers, and are hired, laid off, and rehired by the state-sponsored Education Welfare Priority Project. It traces recent unionization efforts by school social workers and attempts to explain why these workers do not recognize care work as a source of exploitation. Finally, the author presents analytical tools to better understand the intersection of state employment, exploitation, and gendered care labor as an emerging neoliberal form of labor.
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