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A Dilemma of Feminist Crime Narrative—focus on Yang Gui-Ja’s Romance I Wish For What Is Forbidden

LEE, HYE RYOUNG 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article is a reexamination of the feminist criminal narrative I wish for what is forbidden by Yang Gui-ja in the context of the rise of the women’s movement and consumer culture of the middle class in Gangnam in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, the explosive media culture served to strengthen the ideology that placed the middle-class family at the center as well as the consumption culture. The combination of consumer media culture, women’s movement and democratization created a soft and domestic male image while visualizing the material foundation of the middle class in the 1990s of South Korea. In this novel, the domestic male image transforms the feminist criminal narrative into the narrative of the femme fatale attacking the stability and dignity of the middle class family, and at the moment of the transformation, the feminist woman Kang Min-ju is killed by a lower class man who has admired and loved her. This novel is not only current but also signifying as a text that overlaps sociocultural reproduction and feminist issues of the middle class based on Gangnam in the 1990s. This is because it shows the sociocultural context of femicide, such as serial murder of targeting women, as a core code of criminal narrative to be held in Korea since the late 1990s.

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.