Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea

Abstract

The feminist work of reimagining women’s fraught subjecthood under empire has prompted many inquiries into the everyday negotiations colonized women made to survive and even thrive. Hyaeweol Choi’s Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea demonstrates how “Protestant modernity” shaped gender relations in colonial Korea, reframing the iconic figure of the New Woman emblematic of elite learning and the questioning of tradition. A culminating work of Choi’s pioneering scholarship on New Womanhood, Gender Politics builds upon her previous publications such as Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (2009) and New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (2013). The book theorizes beyond binaries of colonized and colonizer and agency and passivity, situating a subset of Korean women as creative negotiators of gender under Japanese empire, Korean neo-Confucianism, and American Protestantism.Gender Politics argues that gender norms and material practices embedded in modern domesticity in colonial Korea were the result of “border crossing” in both a literal and a figurative sense (198). Choi shows how transnational encounters—more specifically, encounters between native Korean women and white American Protestant missionary women—“played a role in shaping modern gender ideology, reforming domestic practices, coming to grips with a sense of locality and the world, and claiming new space for women in the public sphere” (ix). Choi uses the phrase “Protestant modernity,” which she explains as “a composite of religious morality, historical outlook, and material practices that could mean different things to different historical subjects,” as a heuristic device to trace the formation of modern gender relations fostered by the global Christian network in colonial Korea (15). The purpose of the book is to move beyond “the nexus of the metropole and colony” (195) and examine the transnational encounters that illuminate the resistance and appropriation of “both native and foreign ideas and practices” (200).The first half of Gender Politics traces how Protestant modernity shaped colonial Korean gender ideologies of woman and home. Chapter 1 explores the ways in which the colonial ideology of “wise mother, good wife” was influenced by Protestant Christianity in Korea. Choi argues that the ideology of “wise mother, good wife” in Korea was a “transcultural modern construct” that was a result of the convergence of the Chosŏn dynasty’s Confucian ideal of pudŏk (womanly virtues), Japan’s Meiji gender ideology of ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), and American Protestant missionaries’ Victorian ideology of domesticity (41). She introduces a transcultural, transpacific framework to understand a gender ideology inextricable from the making of Korean national subjecthood and womanhood. Chapter 2 situates the modern house and home in colonial Korea as a point of convergence for national, colonial, and missionary projects inflected by the local and the global (75–76). Choi utilizes a “multivalent” approach that considers how “Western modernity, Japanese colonial imperatives, and Korean nationalist desire” (107) influenced colonial domesticity in Korea, further building upon her emphasis on the transcultural in chapter 1. She highlights the transpacific nature of colonial-era home economics, with a particular emphasis on the American Protestant domestic ideology of “sweet home,” which New Women such as Kang Kyŏngae and Ch’oe Isun subverted and reshaped. Choi argues that the construction of modern domesticity in colonial-era Korea “illustrates the complex interplay among competing forces that defied the typical nexus of the colonizer and the colonized” (108). In chapter 2 and throughout the volume, the United States is referred to as a “non-colonial power” that refashioned modern domestic ideals and practices under Japanese colonial constraints (108).The latter half of the volume explores how New Women’s experiences of crossing borders of gender, class, and nation produced transnationally articulated identities and practices. Chapter 3 examines the gender politics of New Women’s travel overseas with an emphasis on how the global missionary network acted as a means for these women to pursue advanced study and move beyond the domestic sphere. Choi utilizes the term “crossing” as an interpretive framework that evokes (1) women crossing the divide between traditional gender roles and new expectations for women in the modern era, (2) overcoming hierarchical order of the social classes, and (3) going beyond the nexus of the metropole and colony under Japanese rule. Choi argues that New Women’s everyday experiences of “crossing” enabled by their mobility influenced their national identity and gendered bodily practice, thus developing “a sense of colonized self” (148). Chapter 4 shifts the book’s attention to Protestant missionary involvement in rural revitalization programs in colonial-era Korea. The chapter discusses how Protestant Korean women intellectuals shared practical knowledge about nutrition, hygiene, family budgeting, and child-rearing with rural women despite colonial constraints. These New Women consciously took an apolitical approach in executing their rural programs, which emphasized enlightenment and moral spiritual cultivation for the purpose of national restoration (154). Choi proposes that these rural programs produced a “locally sensible modernity” facilitated by transnational encounters and native traditions (188–89).Gender Politics illuminates the triply transcultural subjecthood of New Women who lived under Japanese empire. The book is impressive in its scope and approach, performing both literary and visual analyses of primary sources such as essays by American Protestant missionaries, photographs of Korean New Women, and colonial-era Korean women’s magazines. The book succeeds in communicating the colonial grammars influenced by Protestant missionary culture that regulated Korean women’s gender and sexuality, as well as how colonized Korean women channeled the resources provided by missionaries to negotiate their own womanhood. Choi conducts an expansive feminist rewriting of colonial-era Korean women intellectuals as resourceful agents triply influenced by Japanese, American, and Korean gender norms.A potential point of critique is the brevity of the book’s explorations of certain productive tensions such as the opacity of native Korean women in the eyes of white Protestant missionaries, which Choi briefly mentions in chapter 2. How might such opacity be further contextualized in New Women’s “crossing,” which generated racial and ethnic identities? Choi’s characterization of white Protestant missionaries as noncolonial Western forces partly obscures the very complexity of coloniality that the book is positioned to communicate. Would it be accurate to characterize Protestant missionaries in colonial Korea as noncolonial simply because they were not Japanese, or direct colonizers of Korea? Or could what Choi has termed Protestant modernity be inextricable from the history of American empire? One could note that the approaches of these Protestant missionaries are deeply colonial in their fixation with managing the gendered other—in this case, native Korean women. More attention to how the nexus of the colonizer and the colonized haunts the dynamics of organized religion—even if used as a means for native women’s self-actualization—could add to the impressive contributions this book makes.Gender Politics shares critical sensibilities with a robust body of postcolonial and feminist work that examines how native subjects negotiate their own ambiguous agencies under empire and theorizes womanhood from a non-West-centric feminist perspective. Works with similar interventions include Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s Scattered Hegemonies (1994), Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2011), and Sungyun Lim’s Rules of the House (2018). The book is also in conversation with Korean cultural studies on New Women such as Ji-Eun Lee’s Women Pre-Scripted (2015) and Sunyoung Park’s The Proletarian Wave (2015). In addition, Gender Politics joins a dialogue generated by scholars who have been pushing the boundaries of what constitutes Koreanness beyond an ethnonational understanding. These scholars include David S. Roh, who examines connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures in Minor Transpacific (2021), and Yoon Sun Yang, who in From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men (2017) explores how individuality was translated into Korean in the form of the early colonial domestic novel inflected by Japanese and Chinese literary traditions. Choi’s Gender Politics will be useful not only for specialists of colonial-era Korea but also for postcolonial and feminist scholars working in a variety of transnational cultural contexts.