KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper examines how waiting reveals the unequal distribution of futures in trans-East Asian women's SF, focusing on Xia Jia's "The Time You Cannot Reach" and Kim Choyeop's "If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light." It redefines waiting not as emotional passivity or narrative delay, but as a form of asynchronous temporality in which beings with different mobilities and paces cannot arrive at the same future together. In Xia's story, waiting appears through relational asymmetry between beings inhabiting divergent temporal rhythms. In Kim's story, it emerges through cosmic distance, broken transport infrastructure, and unequal access to futurity. Drawing on Hage, Bloch, Suvin, and feminist SF criticism, this paper argues that these works do not imagine the future as technological progress, but as a set of delayed, inaccessible, and unevenly distributed temporal possibilities.

This paper examines The Seagull: If One Is Different, All Are Different (2020) as a case study in gender-swapped adaptation, analyzed across three axes. First, Chekhov's original The Seagull, while not overtly patriarchal, is structured by invisible gendered asymmetries. These include asymmetrical address, a hierarchical division of labor between writer and actor, the writer's objectifying power, and a double standard regarding female emotionality. Second, the adaptation merges gender reversal with Koreanization as a single translational act. Two structural reconfigurations are particularly decisive: the mother-son dynamic transforms into a father-daughter relationship, activating a distinct power grammar, and an unintended cousin relationship introduces an incest taboo absent from the original play. Third, the adapted text is reinterpreted through the lens of Korean gender grammar, which refracts rather than corrects the original's asymmetries. The adaptation generates surplus meaning at the intersection of the source text's inherent asymmetry (A) and Korean gender grammar (B). Meaning is preserved where these align, but where they diverge, meaning vibrates and produces this surplus. This work serves as a model for repertoire-level dramaturgical gender experimentation within Korean performance culture.

This study employs a comparative cultural-historical approach to examine the Liederabend of nineteenth-century Europe and the Pungnyubang of late Joseon Korea, focusing on the musical practices of their respective emerging middle strata. Both traditions originated in private, room-centered spaces and served as participatory musical settings where the line between performers and listeners was fluid. The study investigates how repeated performances and social interactions within these spaces fostered the accumulation of shared repertoires and performance conventions. This process ultimately contributed to the formation of the Western art song recital and the Korean jeongak tradition. The findings indicate that private musical practices organized by the middle strata were crucial in sustaining and canonizing specific musical cultures. Moreover, despite their distinct historical contexts, the Liederabend and Pungnyubang traditions exhibit structural similarities in the development of room-based musical culture and performance traditions.