The Male Malady of Globalization

Abstract

In this article I analyze how masculinity has been co-constructed with sexual violence within a narrative of national and personal redemption in South Korea. In examining what I identify as phallocentric nationalism, I trace the symbolic construction of the penis—naturalized in its erect, penetrating form and its participation in heterosex—as a source of masculine power within a nationalist discourse of emasculation and recuperation in Korea. Tracing the representation of this penetrative masculinity alongside its penetrated corollary in the whore/wife binary, across a range of literary, cinematic, and legal discourses, I analyze how male sexual violence has been understood, practiced, regulated, and resisted. It is within the “imagined nation” (Anderson 1983) of Korea that the penis comes to stand in for masculine power, men’s relationships to women, the Korean nation, and the world at large. The penis and its medicalization since the 1990s further provide a productive site to examine how meta-narratives about the nation, gender, and sexuality translate into individual desires, embodied practices, and erotic entanglements in Korea. I refer to these desires and anxieties invested in the penis as the male malady of globalization.