From the Front Line of Contemporary South Korean Feminist Criticism

Abstract

From the Front Line of Contemporary South Korean Feminist Criticism1 Hye-Ryoung Lee (bio) Translated by Jamie Chang (bio) The essays collected for this special issue embody a dynamic temporality in which the lives and voices of generations of women from grandmother through mother to daughter from the colonial era to the present converge and intervene with one another. While not explicitly addressing the question of how to write women's history, the articles have in common a sense of feminist temporality that opposes itself to a monolithic evolutionary temporality as well as to the politics of gender based on sameness. Here, it is worthy to note that Kim Jiyoung, Born in 1982, and From Sisŏn, two contemporary South Korean women's writings which I discuss in the subsequent section, make no reference to key events related to South Korea's democratization, although the Korean War and Asian Financial Crisis are some of their key backdrops.2 Perhaps such a silence may reflect a [End Page 215] historical reality in which those big events that have signposted the trail of democracy might have an immediate bearing upon women's lives—a point that reflects Virginia Woolf's comparison, in A Room of One's Own, between women's suffrage (the right of women to vote) and the inheritance of 500 pounds given per year. By investigating many aspects of recently-popularized forms of feminism as well as of mass culture, the feminism here and now underlying these essays makes great strides in interrogating the current status of South Korea's democracy. Before moving onto individual essays, I would like to usher in the ways in which literature and #MeToo and #MeTooWithYou feminism blended themselves and paved distinctive tracks in contemporary South Korea. I will begin by introducing Prosecutor Sŏ Chi-hyŏn's narrative acts, to be followed by a discussion of two recent novels written by women. Prosecutor Sŏ Chi-hyŏn catalyzed the South Korean #MeToo movement by appearing on JTBC's Newsroom on January 28, 2018. She spoke out against An T'ae-kŭn, a former prosecutor and then-director of policy planning at the Ministry of Justice; on a bereavement visit for their colleague's father where he accompanied the minister of justice, An sexually harassed her. Frustrated in her efforts to bring about an investigation and apology within the Prosecutor's Office, Sŏ publicly declared #MeToo. The next day, January 29, she posted two pieces on e-PROS, an internal prosecutor's office site: one piece revealed the sexual harassment and the other, which had no title, adopted the narrative conventions of fiction. Both were published the next day in Hankyoreh.3 Sŏ says she wrote the second piece to clarify her thoughts while undergoing severe psychological suffering. Though the piece is stylistically novelistic, she has said that it is "based on 100% real facts." In the narrative, Sŏ appears as Park Chi-hyŏn and is [End Page 216] consistently referred to as "yŏja" (woman). One section describes Chi-hyŏn's sexual harassment by a former high-ranking prosecutor ten years before, an event that has dominated her mind and body despite her desperate endeavours to forget it. Another section expresses her resentment towards her husband and her deceased parents. When she tells her aloof husband about the incident, his reaction was to ask, "Can you really deal with the lawsuits?" For her attentive father, raising her was only about making her an attractive and good daughter. Her own mother had shown the exemplary virtue of silence despite humiliations and ungrounded accusations. Throughout her life, Chi-hyŏn's mother had remained obedient to her family elders even as they wrongly held her responsible for her father's loss while fleeing in the Korean War; they repeatedly call her "the bitch who devoured her own father." In yet another section, the prosecutors' sexist and misogynistic culture is most nakedly exposed by various episodes from everyday life, such as work and drinking parties, as well as promotions. Here Chi-hyŏn, in effect, faces a gag order in relation to her sexual harassment case; all the while, she is demoted...