The purpose of this study is to reveal that Choi Jeong-hee, a female writer who has been criticized for advocating male-centered ideology, actually tried to breach it while taking a position that seemed to imitate the dominant discourse. This study po...
The purpose of this study is to reveal that Choi Jeong-hee, a female writer who has been criticized for advocating male-centered ideology, actually tried to breach it while taking a position that seemed to imitate the dominant discourse. This study points out that sexual awareness is a key theme that penetrates Choi's literature. Choi creates her work based on the desire of a modern female character. It is important to note that sexual motives appearing in the novel are not simply based on biological essence, but are constructed by intersecting social and historical discourses. In other words, sexuality does not simply refer to sexual impulses and desires, but is a sociocultural component and a complex conception that can also be linked to various political concepts. Contemporary sex discourse takes a constructivist position, as Judith Butler who discarded the distinction between sex, gender, and sexuality argued that sexuality is also a freely moving artifact. Therefore, research on sexuality should include sociocultural gender relationships and be conducted from a broader perspective in combination with various methodologies. This paper aims to analyze the female sexuality appearing in Choi Jeong-hee's novels from various perspectives, focusing on the fact that sexuality is a concept that reveals personal desires and is influenced by social ideology.
This paper attempts to examine the sexuality of Choi's work in three layers: the body in the individual domain, the motherhood in the family domain, and the affect in the national domain. Chapter II which focuses on the individual domain, analyzes each individual in terms of their body, the most primary being that connects individuals to the world. Since individuals inevitably come to the world with their bodies and establish relationships with the outside world through them, examining the body gives insight into how individuals are subjectified or otherized between personal desires and public rules. However, under the Phallus-Logos centrality, female body was a subject on which the principle of the dominant rule is imprinted, and accordingly, women were deprived of their rights to pursue their own desires. Choi exposed how women were being subordinated to male domination by showing the pathologized sexuality expressed through the body. However, just as there is resistance where there is power, Choi also sheds light on women who form self-identity through their bodies and restore their subjectivity. Choi's women break free from the existing system or discover and practice their own desires through reflexivity realized via their bodies. Thus, reflexive sexuality allows women to regain their subjectivity of the body and to be reborn as active subjects who perform reversal and escape.
Chapter III focuses on the family domain and the analysis centers around motherhood, the most important role assigned to women in patriarchal society. In previous researches, the femininity of Choi's literature has been mainly reduced to motherhood, and this tendency has led researchers to overlook the sexual awareness in Choi 's novels. So this paper focuses on sexual motives that appear in women as mothers and reveals that “women” and “motherhood” are not conflicting concepts. Due to the maternal myth prevalent in the patriarchal society, women were forced to become virtuous mothers who neutralized sexuality and entirely devoted themselves to their families. Choi has become a recognized writer in a male-centered literary circles by posing as if she conforms to such maternal myth. However, it is worth noting that Choi carefully places women’s sexual desires beneath the narrative that seems to conclude to motherhood to successfully embody a narrative that disagrees with the dominant discourse. Motherhood is a constructive concept created by family ideology, and Choi captures the female-centered rather than institutionalized motherhood experienced by women themselves. Female-centered motherhood allows women to recover their deprived desires, and accordingly, Choi re-appropriates the concept of “women,” which has previously been considered contrary to motherhood, and dismantles motherhood myths by showing mothers who embody transgressional sexuality.
Chapter IV focuses on the national domain and analyzes Choi’s work focusing on affect, a force that allows individuals to be freed from the hierarchical state power. The fascist social system imported under Japanese imperialism has not been liquidated after liberation, but rather strengthened, establishing itself as a chronic mechanism that operates Korean society. Sexual enslavement and de-nationalization were the main mechanisms of fascism and women were used as a tool to create a male-centered nation. Choi wrote about the sexuality of commercialized women to expose the reality where women were being included in the state as a “constitutive outside.” However, Choi's women try to escape from the hierarchical national state and find their own identity, where affect acts as a force to induce constant changes across existing ideas and also to bring out new possibilities. As a result, by embodying transversal sexuality, women can break away from the image of capital women and be reborn as an “ungovernable subject” and a “nomadic subject” that affirms differences. This allows women to move toward affective solidarity so that they can build a new world in another way within the mainstream world.
In all, analyzing the female sexuality of Choi's novels in various areas allows the examination of the self-identity and desires that individual subjects possess, and the scene where social norms compete and coincide with one another. Choi reveals that women experience othering in the male-centered society through sexuality, and also shows that they can overcome such oppression to restore self-identity and subjective desires. In other words, Choi reveals the reality of the society by shedding light on the ambivalence of female sexuality in various ways and at the same time suggesting the possibility of subversion. In particular, the subversive and practical aspect of female sexuality allows women to stand on their own feet as “the Other woman” rather than as “the Other identity.” Therefore, this paper, which aims to analyze sexuality as a political concept that examines the relationship between women and the society, will allow reconsideration of Choi Jeong-hee's literature and also the dynamics that exists within her embodiment of the female subject.