Abstract
The purpose of this study is to generate complicated conversations about identity and culture with an examination of various panoptic technologies, including separation, invisibility, control, and productivity. Drawn from Foucault’s panopticism, the author examines how discipline operates as a controlling power in several Korean institutions of schools, the seminary, and the military. This autobiographical self-reflexive research explores disciplinary images of “Korean-ness,” which has been discursively and materially constructed and embodied via panoptic technologies. These counter-narratives do not support for the advancement of the universalized version of the “Korean” identity. Rather, the author theorizes Korean identity as discursive practices in modern power structures, while dealing with the “political ‘double bind’” of (a) individualization through instruments of discipline and (b) the reinforcement of Confucian ideal of proper human relationships. This article provides educators with a lens to examine the ways in which disciplinary power/knowledge operates to control students’ ways of thinking, behaving, and living, in relation to “self,” “others,” and institutions. By opening possibilities to examine cultural identity beyond discovering “true” self, the author emphasizes the analyses of power in its examination of cultural sameness/difference in multicultural curriculum studies.
Highlights
Confucian teaching predominantly takes a major role in introducing Korean culture or the “Korean-ness,” including Confucius’s emphasis on strong interpersonal relationship and harmony, hierarchical social interactions, and high value on education (De Bary, 1998; Yum, 2000)
Education Fever is a term to introduce Korea’s educational phenomenon that highly values education for keeping and/or promoting social status grounded in Confucianism
I have illustrated the complicatedness of cultural identity of Korean-ness, which is discursively and politically constructed and embodied by the panoptic technologies
Summary
Confucian teaching predominantly takes a major role in introducing Korean culture or the “Korean-ness,” including Confucius’s emphasis on strong interpersonal relationship and harmony, hierarchical social interactions, and high value on education (De Bary, 1998; Yum, 2000). As I mentioned earlier, I problematize predominant cultural determinations in terms of normalizing cultural sameness/difference Such elaboration with the frame of panoptic technologies is a necessary effort to examine complicatedness of subjectivity and discursive aspects of cultural identity. Discourses construct social meanings of self/other, cultural sameness/difference, and diversity via power/knowledge in terms of (a) who can say, (b) what can be thought/spoken, and (c) when, in what circumstances, and with what authority they are spoken and circulated (Jabal & Riviere, 2007). I examine the instrument of discipline and panoptic technologies This interrogation explicates the ways in which “discipline” functions as the controlling power therein and constructed my identities. This study interrogates the (im)possibilities of conducing identity research “differently” as a political engagement, that is, to recognize students who are not following the normalized understandings of cultural sameness/difference
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