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The Liberation of the Female Precariat - Tracing My Liberation Notes through Park Hae-young’s My Mister

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(1), pp.387~432
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.1.011
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 10, 2026
  • Accepted : February 14, 2026
  • Published : February 28, 2026

LEE YOUKYUNG 1

1서울대학교 인문학연구원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines to read Park Hae-young’s My Liberation Notes as a “liberation diary of the worker,” a text that seeks an exit from the neoliberal condition. It may be understood as an attempt to move beyond Park’s earlier drama, My Mister. The latter dramatizes the solidarity between Park Dong-hoon(박동훈), a tenured employee at the conglomerate Saman E&C, and Lee Ji-an(이지안), a dispatched temporary worker. Dong-hoon, threatened at once by his superior Do Joon-young(도준영) and by stalled promotion, is eventually elevated to executive status through Ji-an’s covert assistance. Ji-an, in turn, secures institutional care for her grandmother, extricates herself from predatory lenders, and finds support from the local community in Hugye-dong(후계동). The conclusion, in which Dong-hoon becomes head of his own firm and Ji-an gains permanent employment, stages a tentative happy ending. Yet this solidarity rests on the contingency of illegal wiretapping: it is only because the eavesdropped subject turns out to be an unusually ethical figure that their alliance can unfold—thereby revealing its structural limits. The drama thus leaves two questions unresolved: How is solidarity possible if one cannot access another’s interiority through illicit surveillance? And what if, in the precariat woman’s social field, there exists no figure like Park Dong-hoon, but only antagonists such as Lee Gwang-il(이광일)? It is precisely from this impasse that My Liberation Notes takes shape. Yeom Mi-jung(염미정), who lives in Sanpo(산포) on the periphery of Seoul, endures long commutes, mounting debt incurred through an unreliable lover, and the invisible discrimination that marks her as non-regular labor. In her effort to escape these conditions of precarity, she enjoins Mr. Gu(구씨) to “worship” her. Though scarcely different from Gwang-il in terms of social marginality and violence, Mr. Gu becomes, through the practice of unconditional affirmation and care—without inquiry into his past—a vehicle for what might be called a technology of the self: a practice by which both characters move from self-abasement toward self-regard. In this way, My Liberation Notes articulates, in a time when eros has become structurally foreclosed, a form of self-liberation grounded not in romantic attachment but in compassion that exceeds empathy. Park Hae-young’s drama thereby advances a politics as ethics, a mode of subjectivation that reimagines solidarity and liberation within the precarious conditions of neoliberal modernity.

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