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‘Democracy of Desire’ and Reconstruction of the Gender Order – Featuring working women in the postwar popular magazine 『Arirang』

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2023, 29(1), pp.109-140
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2023.29.1.004
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 6, 2023
  • Accepted : February 6, 2023
  • Published : February 28, 2023

KIM YEONSOOK 1

1경희대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines the representation of working women in 『Arirang』. This takes a look at the method and meaning of the popular magazine 『Arirang』 in response to the reality of postwar reconstruction. Usually, the Korean War left many Korean families no patriarchs or male family members, so female heads of households or war ‘widows’ appeared representative working women in war epics and postwar novels. In contrast, 『Arirang』 featured described peculiar patterns of postwar working women as follows. First, 『Arirang』 revealed the phenomenon of generational change, focusing on the working women of the children's generation, not the position of war widows, surviving wives of their dead husbands. In other words, the mother as a ‘war widow’ is portrayed as helpless, while the daughter is portrayed as actually supporting the livelihood and playing the role of patriarch. Second, the generational shift of working women becomes more evident after the late 1950s, and 『Arirang』 embodied it in two categories, virtual and real, through the visual images of pictorials. First of all, in the case of virtual working women, there was a kind of experiential activity pictorials featuring gorgeous female celebrities. However, rather than showing the reality of working women or introducing workplaces/labor sites, these pictorials placed an emphasis on providing the pleasure of ‘seeing’ female celebrities, that is, providing intriguing ‘sights’. In contrast, the “Flowers of the Workplace”-series pictorials featured actual working women. The ‘flower of the workplace’ is a term used to describe the appearance of women outside the home in a male-dominated society. By the time when the “Flower of the Workplace” pictorial had appeared, the women who actually did the most active economic activities were married women in their mid-late 30s to early-mid 50s. Contrary to this reality, the magazine 『Arirang』 visually reproduced very few ‘working women’. Third, the working women pictorials of 『Arirang』 caused the objectification of women in that they provided ‘images of women to see’, but on the other hand, they revealed women's modern jobs and their personal qualities and characteristics. This was a modern sign that women were moving away from the position of community members as family members or people in charge of population reproduction. This dipiction, in the end, was a landscape in which the desires erupted from the postwar reality were equally visualized. However, in this landscape, women were being reconstructed as beings that were still visible while revealing their desires. The magazine 『Arirang』 triggered and produced and distributed ‘democracy of desire’ through the representation of working women, while the hierarchical gender order of men and women was continuously reconstructed.

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