Korean Studies Internet Discussion List KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. by Laurel Kendall. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 206 pages. (ISBN: 0-8248-2407-5, cloth; ISBN: 0-8248-2488-1, paper)
Reviewed by Heike Hermanns
University of Glasgow
Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Re-public of Korea is an edited collection composed of six chapters with an additional introduc-tion by Laurel Kendall. The book was conceived at a workshop on "Gender and Social Change in Late Twentieth-Century Korea," held at Columbia University in the spring of 1995, at which three of the published papers were first presented. In order to extend the scope of discussion three more contributions were added and some revision of the original papers has been made in light of the financial crisis of 1997. The term "gendering" in the title of the book refers to its concern with both the position of women and changes in the perception of mascu-linity. The volume provides a balanced view of the influences of modernity on the conceptualisation of gender and how Korean middle-class women and men contest and define modernity and gender. The authors use a variety of sources, from interviews to the study of novels, popular films and television programmes.
In the introduction, Kendall places the contributions to the book within the context of the construction of Korean modernity and gender relations. The volume's title, Under Con-struction, as she notes, 'evokes the language of contemporary gender theory in its assertion that masculinities and femininities are perpetually constructed and reconstructed in the busy unfolding of histories' (p. 1). But the title also plays with the situation in South Korea over the last 50 years, during which the entire urban landscape has been demolished, rebuilt and extended. In a similar manner, Kendall argues, the social landscape is changing and families themselves have become '"construction sites" for new definitions of home and family, work and leisure, husband and wife' (p. 1).
Kendall points out that modernities are inherently gendered and set in the context of class: the modernity of a middle-class Korean housewife is therefore different from the modernity of her husband, her mother, her daughter or that of a working-class woman. In this book the 'different ways Korean women and men "did" modernity in the 1990s' is emphasised (p. 2). While describing the Korean experience, the contributions rely upon the theoretical frameworks of western anthropology. Here, they follow a trend in the anthropology of gender that turns away from the search for the causes of female subordination to an 'analysis of the historical, cultural, and class-based specification of gender-relations and the tension between gender as an ideological construct and gender as a lived experience' (p. 3).
Kendall shows how the conceptualisation of gender has changed during the moderni-sation process on Korea, taking up each of the contributors' topics in turn. Following the introduction of military service for all young men after the Korean War, Korean society as a whole experienced a noteworthy militarisation. The hierarchical order of the military was copied by the large conglomerates, the chaebôl, in which many middle-class men found jobs after their military service. The chaebôl expected their employees to put in long work days, which included after-hours socialising. Through their work in the companies men became the main providers for the family, while women were assigned the role of family caregiver and concerned themselves with the domestic aspects of family life and status. Middle-class women in the 1970s and 1980s actively pursued the advancement of their family and engaged in consumption. This led to the stereotype of ambitious housewives, with little respect for their husbands, who are such a frequent target of media criticism. Their daughters, in turn, were pushed to higher education but then found that few opportunities of employment existed for them. The members of this younger generation of middle-class women now seek to express their individuality within the traditional framework of marriage through consumption and a different, younger and sexier, appearance.
In the first chapter "Women, Mobility, and Desire: Narrating Class and Gender in South Korea," Nancy Abelmann's focuses on how women narrate and interpret their experi-ences. Abelmann's interests in gender appear in three ways. First, she discusses the 'particular roles that women play in the daily production of status and in the inter- and intragenerational (re)production of class' (p. 33). Here, it is relevant that women in recent decades have been engaged in securing unearned income, for example, through real estate investment and land speculation. Their actions improved the class status of their families but also made women vulnerable to accusations of overconsumption. Second, Abelmann also takes into account the way class itself is gendered. Through the culture of families, class hierarchies are connected with gender relations. Third, Abelmann also finds that the rhetoric of class mobility is gendered, and that 'women narrate the social and psychological circumstances that produce gen-dered traits, traits that in turn engender particular life trajectories' (p. 35). Abelmann main-tains that competing narratives of social mobility can be found in Korea. On the one hand, there is the construct that suggests anybody can climb the social ladder through hard work. On the other hand, people speak of structural barriers, such as the importance of good connections with the "right" people, that limit chances of mobility. The contradictions of these nar-ratives become clearer when the narrative of one Korean woman is presented.
Abelmann tells the story of "So-yôn's mother", a woman from impoverished Yang-ban-background who moved to upper middle-class status through hard work. Challenging her role of a passive woman and housewife, she achieved personal and family class mobility, often ignoring the social and gender norms of her time. This included working at a bank before getting married despite her social background and engaging in real estate speculation after her marriage. Although behaving in a masculine way, she aspired to a feminine career for her daughter as a pianist (the ultimate symbol of modernity and femininity in Korea). So-yôn's mother, despite pursuing material gain herself, 'criticizes women who are caught up in the desire for material things that ruins society' (p. 47). Her narrative while representing only one woman's experience - gives interesting insights into the construction of social mobility and gender in contemporary Korea. It also gives an idea of the mind-set of the wives of politi-cians and generals who were implicated in 'overconsumption' scandals in Korea in the 1990s.
In the second chapter, "Discourses of Illness, Meanings of Modernity: A Gendered Construction of Sônginbyông," June J. H. Lee explores the phenomenon of sônginbyông and Korean media discourse about the illnesses of middle-aged white-collar workers in the early 1990s, following the publication of statistics that Korean men in their forties had the highest mortality rate in the world. Nonetheless, as Lee notes, the statistics used were fundamentally distorted and exaggerated. She points out that according to the National Health Survey of 1992, 'women in their forties actually showed higher morbidity rates than did men of that age' (p. 61). In Korean society, however, the image of a generation of men falling ill after giving their life to the development of the Korean economy by working long hours and socialising after work (involving heavy drinking sessions) at the expense of their family struck a chord. The situation was exacerbated by the lay-offs in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the late 1990s. Sônginbyông involves more than medical symptoms; the demise of traditional family values and the authority of the family head has also been lamented. In this conservative discourse, women were blamed for insufficient understanding of the pressures these men were facing. Lee also points out that in society the illnesses of middle-aged Korean men were viewed as the 'unforeseen consequences of their victimization as worker bees and of their sacrificial suffering as family heads' while the 'sufferers see themselves as entitled to social recognition and individual attention' (p. 74). Women, workers and the poor were marginalized in the construction of sônginbyông narratives.
Lee illustrates through the narrative of one such white-collar worker, "Park-sangmunim," how this phenomenon was seen and conceptualised by Koreans. Park was clearly aware that his long working hours and heavy drinking afterwards for the "good of the nation" had alienated him from his family and ruined his health. Given that modern ways were having such negative effects on his health and his position as head of his family, Park like so many other Koreans took refuge in the traditional ways he remembered from his childhood. This included meetings with his childhood friends and eating posint'ang (dog meat soup). Like So-yôn's mother in the previous chapter, Park fondly recalled the past, the poorer but less stressful days of his childhood. The renaissance of restaurants serving posint'ang and other traditional dishes in Korea are an expression of this longing among many older Koreans.
In the third chapter "The Production and Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity: Re-configuring Gender Hierarchy in Contemporary South Korea" Seungsook Moon provides a study of the dominant notions and practices of masculinity in Korea. In the first section Moon discusses how gender hierarchy has been reconfigured over the last fifty years. Although women now achieve a higher degree of education, they are still spending most of their time working in the household (on average 8.5 hours a day). Mostly, the Confucian tradition is blamed for the gender inequality in Korea, but, as Moon argues, there is little investigation of 'why Confucian tradition persists and how "tradition" itself is constructed' (p. 82).
In order to understand this phenomenon Moon looks at some aspects of Korean mas-culinity, namely the role of the family provider, the role of the militarisation of Korean soci-ety and male distance from housework and child care. The role of principal income earner justifies men's domestic authority and dominance in society. This notion of a provider-husband became the normative ideal only in the 1960s with the industrialisation of the coun-try but was firmly established by the 1980s. The notion of women staying at home as house-wives is, of course, a middle-class ideal. Women are, and have been, active in a wide range of economic activities that are often related in some way to their primary role as mothers and wives, such as formal or informal employment as teachers and investment in real estate and the stock market (as Abelmann's example of So-yôn's mother has shown).
Moon uses several popular novels to describe the conflict between the materialistic and moral aspects of the male role. As noted, with the introduction of compulsory military service in the 1950s, Korean masculinity became militarised. The population has accepted military service as duty to the nation. Companies were more likely to employ young men who had done their military service, and service was also seen as preparation for employment in the chaebôl. There remains, however, a negative perception of military service (p. 96), which explains why so many rich and well-connected families try to get exemptions for their sons or at least preferential treatment while serving. The stress of hierarchy during military service and the role of family provider justify Korean men's disengagement from social reproduction and working as caregivers within the family. The financial crisis and resulting rising unem-ployment rate have seriously undermined this image for many men. Although a growing number of men would like to spend more time with their families, structural barriers remain. Furthermore, Moon points out, men also fear that their paternal authority will decline if they change their behaviour.
Following the discussion of masculinity, the resulting image of femininity is presented: women are reduced to domesticity and reproductive labour. Since men have served in the military and thus shown their willingness to fight and die for their country, they are perceived as more responsible citizens than women. Women are therefore expected to play only a secondary role in politics, economy and household.
In the fourth chapter, "Gender Construction in the Offices of a South Korean Conglomerate," Roger L. Janelli and Dawnhee Yim take a closer look at gender relations in offices using fieldwork data they collected in the headquarters of a large conglomerate in Seoul during the mid-1980s. At that time, there were very few women working at the headquarters of the chaebôl and nearly all were in secretarial positions.[1] The division of labour within an office is by no means unique to Korea but it was (and is) frequent in many other countries. In Korea, however, the division between female secretarial staff and male career-oriented workers is extreme.
Janelli and Yim describe the gendered hiring process at that time: male office workers were hired after college in nationwide recruitment drives. Women, by contrast, were mostly from Seoul and hired after recommendations from their high school officials. Their lack of college education was then used to deny promotion. Women also received less job training than men, who had to undergo two separate weeks of training by both the conglomerate and the individual company, which was then followed by further on-the-job training. Promotions, largely based on seniority, were very rare for women. All this showed the short-term orientation the company took to women's employment and the expectation that they would retire upon marriage in their mid-twenties. It also helped the company to keep labour costs down.
Within a section, the company management stressed the importance of harmony be-tween co-workers, despite the competition for positions among them. To increase the com-munal spirit among office workers and to relieve stress, funds for after-hours recreation were allocated to the section managers. This recreation took place at least once a week and often included dinner followed by social drinking. Women were largely excluded from these activities or left after dinner. Often, Janelli found, women were excluded by the activities male workers had chosen. The exclusion of women, the authors conclude, 'may not have been in-tended by the owner-managers but was rather instigated largely by the new middle class male workers' (p. 130). All in all, women showed little resistance to the unequal treatment at their workplace. The focus of both the public and labour activists was on the plight of working class women.
As the authors point out in the postscript office dynamics have changed during the 1990s. Female college graduates have also been hired during general recruitment drives, al-though their numbers remain low. During the financial crisis of 1997, however, (married) women were the first to be dismissed, which revealed the conservative values of managers. As promotions became dependent on achievement rather than seniority, competition became fiercer and the communal spirit in the office became less important. After-hours activities were reduced, as younger office workers (and their families) resisted the extra hours expected of them, a phenomenon that in turn alleviated the exclusion of female workers.
In the fifth chapter "The Concept of Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture" So-Hee Lee examines the development of a discussion of female sexuality in the 1990s. Lee focuses on the 'sociohistorical discourse and textual analysis of three novels, two films and one television drama that were written, for the most part, by women' (p. 141). Her examples deal with women in their 20s and 30s and their experiences of love, marriage and sexuality and reflect the social transformation of Korean society in the 1990s. The chosen novels, films and dramas have achieved popular success in Korea and initiated and reflected discussions about topics previously not talked about, such as unhappy marriages, domestic violence, women's reactions to their husbands' infidelities, women taking lovers and sexual experimentation.
Lee shows that the experiences of women in that age group are by no means uniform. Women in their 30s grew up during the 1970s and 1980s and were educated in democratic ideals in school. While mothers at that time taught their daughters to live differently from themselves, they still taught their sons to live like their fathers (p. 144). This has led to quite different conceptions of marital life between partners. Furthermore, the mobilisation of students on university campuses during the 1980s changed the views of many women who were involved in protest or at least sympathised with the protesters. The active opposition against the regime also influenced women's attitudes towards traditional arrangements such as mar-riage; they were far more idealistic than their mothers. Their younger sisters, now in their 20s, in contrast grew up in the early 1980s and have known only abundant consumption. This group of women is aware that their employment opportunities are limited and they are far less idealistic than their older sisters. They tend to marry for status and gain, as the novel Marriage (Kyôrhon) by Kim Su-Hyôn shows.
In 1996, a popular television programme called The Lover (Aein) portrayed a woman, married and successful in her job, who begins an affair with another married man. This challenging portrayal of a married woman's sexuality was even discussed in the National Assem-bly because of its social implications (p. 154). It shows that Confucian notions of chastity and fidelity no longer dominate female sexuality but rather the notion of a woman's individuality. While women are influenced by the discourse of sexual liberation, many are not yet ready to experience sexuality outside their marriage. Lee finds that younger female writers have a clearer idea of their own sexual identity (p. 158) but overall most Korean women are at the moment 'passive consumers of the sorts of cultural products described previously, not as their active cultural producers' (p. 159).
In the sixth and final chapter, "Living With Conflicting Subjectives: Mother, Motherly Wife, and Sexy Woman in the Transition from Colonial-Modern to Postmodern Korea," Cho Haejoang argues that Korea over the last fifty years has seen three different generations of middle-class women. With economic development the "housewifization" of Korean society progressed, a nearly universal phenomenon associated with modernisation. In Korea, it implied the transition from a mother-centred to a wife-centred patriarchy (p. 167). Cho finds that while modernity has changed the role of women in society, it remains male-centred. Modern patriarchy still sees motherhood as the only fulfilment of womanhood, thus pressuring women into marriage.
The first generation of women Cho describes, the "grandmother's generation", lived through colonial times and the Korean War. Women held no position in society but had some influence on her sons in their role as mothers. With families torn apart during these years women often assumed the role of a family provider and worked hard for the survival of their family. Their daughters, the "mother's generation", grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Rapid urbanisation led a move toward the nuclear family, and women idealised a happy married life with a successful husband and children. They spent their energy on their children's education and aspired to a rise in class-status and engaged in activities to bring in more money, as illustrated in previous chapters. They expected their husbands to leave family affairs to their wives and lead a public life - thus living their mother's lives, despite rejecting it (p. 175). Cho also points out that this generation, with its endless yearning for achievement, was a major force in Korea's economic transformation. The behaviour of its members is, however, often criticised in the media.
The "daughter's generation" grew up in the 1970s, not experiencing hunger but the pressures of school exams and consumerism. Their mothers pushed them to achieve the best possible education, but the daughters then faced very poor employment prospects. Even women who were working found it hard to keep their positions after marriage and childbirth due to the lack of childcare facilities. They also found that their mothers, unlike previous gen-erations, were unwilling to provide childcare for their daughters. Further pressure is placed on the daughter's generation by the promotion of the "Missy" (agassi) image in the media. This image was given its name and created by a department store advertisement campaign and then taken up by the media. Young married women are pressured not to become like an ajumma (a middle aged married women), but to keep their youthful appearance, look like an unmarried woman and lead active and independent lives. The "daughter's generation" has learnt that their aspirations for employment remain unfulfilled for the time being and thus they have secured their own space and new sources of power within the spaces of the domestic realm. They no longer identify themselves as mothers and wives but as individuals and try to find self-realisation through consumption (p. 187).The contributions to this volume are theoretically well grounded, and thus will interest not only Koreanists but also anthropologists who focus on issues of gender in 'non-western' contexts. Gender relations in Korea are analysed in historical, cultural and class terms. The tensions between gender as an ideological construct and as personal experience in a patriar-chical society are well brought out through the use of different sources. The acceleration of change in Korean society and the growing differences between generations during the 1990s make the book a timely contribution. Moreover, its essays illuminate many recent develop-ments such as the nostalgic wave for the 'good old days' before the economic miracle. The skilful illustration of generational conflict and the contradictions Koreans are caught in when modernity collides with conservative institutions (such as patriarchy) render Under Construc-tion a fascinating document of Korean society at the end of the 20th century.
Notes
[1] In this reviewer's own fieldwork experience not much has changed ten years later at a chaebôl headquarters. Many young women may be seen in company uniform, which is reserved for secretarial staff, but very few other women in plainclothes, who would be working in other position, are to be observed.
Citation:
Hermanns, Heike 2002
Review of Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. by Laurel Kendall. (2002)
Korean Studies Review 2002, no. 14
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr02-14.htm
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