Abstract: This article interrogates how Taehan News , a newsreel produced by the South Korean state in the 1960s, created and circulated a discourse of female labor through its portrayal of female bodies marked by beauty and care. The early Park Chung Hee regime used Taehan News to not only establish and justify the regime's dominance but also to promote government activities and mobilize the masses for South Korea's modernization and industrialization. By exploiting the propagandistic and top-down strategies embedded in the medium of newsreels, the regime presented idealized versions of female bodies that incorporated beauty and care as a rhetoric of femininity. It also envisioned women as organized into a vital yet secondary body of labor that was composed of four categories, which I label the "servicewoman," the "wise mother, good wife," the "beauty queen," and "working hands." I argue that Taehan News 'sdiscursive use of beauty and care perpetuated traditional gender ideology by segregating and marginalizing female labor as ancillary, and it deemphasized the contributions and sacrifices women made for Korea's modernity. Moreover, I argue that this discursive practice of associating female labor with beauty and care, along with juxtaposing it against male labor, has augmented hegemonic masculinity. This analysis reveals the contradiction that female labor posed for Korea's development and industrialization in the 1960s: it was seen as both essential for the nation's development and inessential due to the unproductive consumptive attributes associated with beauty and care.

Abstract: This study examines gendered poetic language in Korean postwar modernism in the context of Virginia Woolf's "androgynous mind," as understood in Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity (1995). Specifically, the values represented in the poetic landscapes of Pak In-hwan (1926–1956), one of the poets representing Korean postwar modernist poetry in the 1950s, will be reconsidered in light of literary gender. Pak In-hwan's poetic approach is sympathetic to women and does not express male-centricity to the same extent as the contemporaneous male intelligentsia. Close reading also shows that his poetic diction reflects an awareness, unique for the time, of gendered language in Korean poetry, as well as his pursuit of Woolf's androgyny. Pak's position among Korean postwar modernist poets can be reevaluated by revisiting his poetic world with a focus on the androgynous mind manifested in his writings.

Abstract: This article aims to trace the genealogy of Confucian modernity after Korea's liberation from Japanese rule and analyze how the historical context in which Confucian traditions were reconstructed. It seeks to analyze the process through which the disparate concepts of modernity and Confucianism were combined, moving beyond the perspective of denigration and development of Confucian traditions found in existing studies and approaching it from the perspective of postcolonial studies and traditions as invented practices. From the post-liberation period to the early 1960s, two arguments competed: one viewed Confucianism as having ruined the country, while the other claimed that it had sprouted modern times. While the former view still persisted, Confucianism was being used for political purposes, and scholars including Ch'ŏn Kwanu made efforts to find the sprout of modernism from Confucianism. The turning point came with the fervor of "modernization" that swept the country and the world in the 1960s. Influenced by domestic and foreign modernization theories, including Rostow's modernization theory, which began in the United States, the Park Chung Hee regime embraced the "modernization of the motherland" as its slogan. At the academic level, this trend was reinforced by the United States' support for Korean studies. In this process, discussions linking traditional Confucianism with modernization became more sophisticated in the intellectual community. By the late 1960s, these discussions went beyond explaining the connection between Confucianism and modernity through the concept of sprouting and reached a level of directly mentioning their connection. In the 1970s, this trend intensified further, leading to the conclusion that sirhak (practical learning) in Confucianism had pioneered its own modernization theory before the adoption of Western modernity. Through these analyses, this study aims to delineate the genealogy of discussions about Confucianism, such as that it is the cause of underdevelopment represented by stagnation or that it is the basis of East Asian modernity. Ultimately, by analyzing the contexts in which Confucian traditions are reconceptualized, this study aims to critically reconstruct the notions of tradition, nationalism, and modernity.

Abstract: Despite its ambition to tap into global talent, South Korea has been struggling to scout and facilitate the migration of professional migrants. This study investigates the migration trajectory of Indonesian expatriates and how they successfully achieve labor market insertion in South Korea. It focuses on the mobility routes of migrants to become highly skilled workers: their motivation, the ways they migrate, and elaborates on how migrants from a developing country enhance their likelihood of getting hired. Nine professionals from the under-researched group were interviewed to uncover a range of migration trajectories and its relationship with employment prospects. The findings suggest that ethnic identity is crucial to improve the labor market outcome, which indicates an exclusive and ethnicized labor market in Korea.

Abstract: The South Korean television series When the Camellia Blooms ( Tongbaekkot p'il muryŏp , 2019) was one of the highest-rated and most-discussed miniseries dramas of 2019. It is notable that the K-drama has succeeded in attracting viewers from all demographics. This popularity seems to be related to the issues that are highlighted in the drama, such as the #MeToo movement, misogynist murders, and new concepts of family. This article focuses on the portrayal of the single mother Tongbaek in the drama and argues that When the Camellia Blooms used intertextual references to other single mothers from Korean literature and film as a contrast to portray its own message as progressive. The title alone suggests understanding When the Camellia Blooms in relation to both the title of the short story When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom ( Memilkkot p'il muryŏp ) from 1936 and the film title Ms. Camellia ( Tongbaek agassi ) from 1964. Both the short story and the film depict the single mother as a self-victimizing character reduced to her role as mother. In contrast, the K-drama chooses the other extreme and celebrates the single mother as a self-sufficient heroine. While the drama's idealization of motherhood seems to be at odds with the feminism it promotes, the emphasis on solidarity and alternative parenting/caring communities toward the end of the series suggests a more open-minded narrative. I argue that by providing diverse messages on mothers, mothering, and motherhood, the drama stimulates the discussion on how to overcome patriarchal motherhood and move toward feminist mothering.

This article analyzes the notion of freedom under Park Chung-hee's regime by examining media representations of freedom in South Korean newspapers during the early period of Park's regime from 1964 to 1970. The analysis of the media discourse of freedom brings to light the complex mechanisms of Park's dictatorship and South Koreans' participation in mobilization projects under Park's regime. I argue that the notion of freedom played an essential role in the way in which Park's regime produced and mobilized dutiful, productive citizens. By appropriating conflicting media representations of freedom, Park's regime defined South Korea's own ideal of freedom within the contexts of Cold War South Korea in the 1960s. Whilst Park's regime assured South Korea's enjoyment of freedom in contrast to communist countries, Park's regime convinced South Koreans that freedom in South Korea cannot be same as in other western countries. Specifically, in the name of South Korea's urgent missions of economic development and national security against communism, Park's regime claimed South Koreans should practice freedom in a responsible, restricted manner. Hence, this article highlights that Park's regime utilized the notion of freedom in a way to turn South Koreans into citizens who believed themselves to be free, yet who acted responsibly to serve national interests against communism. By illuminating the notion of freedom under Park's regime, this article discusses both the conditional, limited nature of mass participation under Park's regime and how the regime used the complex, specific conditions of Cold War South Korea to create mass participation.

10.1353/ks.2018.0031

Editor's Note Cheehyung Harrison Kim In the aftermath of South Korea's recent presidential election, while the public, regardless of party alignment, was still reeling from Yun Sŏkyŏl's victory, there emerged a startling voting pattern. Almost sixty percent of men under the age of thirty had voted for the far right-wing candidate. This was a group that had been important in the historic Candlelight Movement of 2016–2017, which ousted the ultra-conservative president Pak Kŭnhye and brought in the presidency of the center-right Mun Jaein, anticipating the lengthy rule of Mun's party, the Democratic Party. Five years is a long time in liberal politics, but the fact that in the period of a single presidential term the majority of South Korea's young men rejected the Democratic Party and its capable, if not slightly slick, candidate Yi Chaemyŏng and found resonance in far right-wing politics was bewildering—and symptomatic of a cultural fissure in the country. The on-going MeToo movement in South Korea is a crucial rectifying process, but it has also made more audible the discontent of underprivileged men who experience disadvantages in university admission, secure employment, and social life, largely due to the economic class and geographic region they were born into. They see—misrecognize—the new culture of feminism, with its sophisticated use of art, scholarly research, and social media, as another layer of unfairness over which they have little influence (when in reality it will uplift them, too). At the same time, we are observing that the conservative turn of young men is a global phenomenon driven by the conditions of labor precarity. And naturally, [End Page iii] all over the world, far right-wing political parties like Yun's People Power Party have seized this capitalist condition of misery and turned it into election votes by supporting the culture of anti-feminism (reminding us again that misery and crisis are central to capitalist expansion, not its byproducts). Culture is at once a medium through which we make sense of the world (for good or ill), a field of empowerment for the underprivileged, and a source of hegemony for the state and corporations. This cultural complexity is discernible in South Korea's current political landscape, and it is also the very theme explored in this volume's Special Section "Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea," dexterously guest edited by Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang. In Katherine Lee's elegant piece on the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir, musical performance is at the heart of transnational religiosity and Cold War politics. Transnationalism is also the framework of Dafna Zur and Yoon Joo Hwang's original research on children's music during the colonial period, when the merger between western style of songwriting and Korean emotionality unevenly transpired in the genre of tongyo. Music as a field of popular resistance is the core of Pil Ho Kim's audacious piece on South Korea's 1960s protest songs, which, for Kim, is a pre-minjung expression of the multitude. Susan Hwang's emotionally prodigious article, too, is on the resistive and resilient aspect of music, which, in the aftermath of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, served as a crucial repertoire for the counter-state. From the opposite side, music as practice of hegemonic efficacy is dealt with in Alexandra Leonzini and Peter Moody's intricate article on North Korea's sonic culture, as it is done in Roald Maliangkay's perspicacious study on South Korea's use of K-pop in marketing. Whether the hegemonic entity is the state or a corporation, music is, in these two articles, a potent medium of influence. The regular pieces in the volume are just as rich and relevant. Hyang-Joo Lee's review article covers the history of presidential authority in South Korea, about which many of us will be pondering in the coming years. Such an authority is critically explored in Jungyoung Kim's research on the notion of freedom during the early Pak Chŏnghui period, in the 1960s. Conservative populism, which blossomed during the Pak years, is to be a pertinent phenomenon in South Korea today...

Introduction to the Special Section This introduction outlines some of the key ideas about migration and identity that the multidisciplinary works in Korean studies in this special issue delve into, focusing on a few of the great many Korean migrations that have taken place over the last century and continue to do today. After contextualizing Korean migration historically and in contemporary times, it explores concepts and approaches that should be considered in framing human migration and introduces the articles in this special issue. All articles in this issue present multiple trajectories of Korean migrations while demonstrating how migrants in each group have established and reestablished themselves by embedding and connecting themselves both in their (ancestral) homeland and in the diaspora. By presenting a range of interdisciplinary works focusing on Korean migration and identity, this special issue seeks to highlight how migration fosters a variety of identities and agencies among those who live in (between) multiple homes and residency statuses. In so doing, it aims to spark discussion on the social and experiential plurality of Koreans at home and in the diaspora that mutually reinforces the ethnic complexity of Koreans, deserving as future topics of investigation in Korean studies.