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The Birth of a Dirty Girl―High-teen Fictions of the Popular Magazine Myeongrang in the 1960s

LEE Jura 1

1한림대학교 한림과학원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examined the characteristics of sexual discourse surrounding teens in the mid-1960s, focusing on the popular 1960s magazine Myeongrang. This paper analyzed the social attention to disordered teenagers, the discourse about teenagers in popular magazines, the representation of teenagers, and finally the features of sexual discourse in adult men and their perception about sex and love of teenager girls. In the high-teen fictions, designed by Myeongrang, there were depictions of girls who voluntarily abandoned virginity. The girls were the target of criticism and the object of enlightenment in intellectual discourse; otherwise, in popular magazine discourse and novels, they were used as a means of men’s desire. They were the object to satisfy the instincts of the male public without guilt. Nonetheless, the girls in popular magazines longed for being the subject to voluntarily enjoy love and sex with their lovers. This desire began to form the basic element of romance, in which men who were reasonably protective of women and women who were passionately approached men made romantic love. In this paper, I analyzed the discourse of sexuality and the representation of teens who were defined as a disordered beings in the flow of the 1960s conservatism. Through this, the study revealed the perception and desire of the public that was suppressed in mainstream discourse in the mid-1960s, as well as the background of the formation of teen culture and novel that appeared in the 1970s.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.