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Motherhood Representation and Divided System Observed through Actress Choi Eun-Hee

PARK Yuhee 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate relations between motherhood ideology and the divided system through the motherhood representation of actress Choi Eun-hee in her North and South Korean films. Motherhood representation records high frequency and claims such great essence in movies as the popular culture of Korea is characterized by high popular preference for melodramas and wide extension of melodramas. The most popular and representative "motherhood representation" from the 1950s to the 1970s derived from Choi Eun-hee, whose image of the kind continued in her movies made in North Korea in the former half of the 1980s. Motherhood representation common in North and South Korean films is closely related to the people discourse at risk. In the midst of the reconstruction and modernization after the Korean War, women in South Korea were asked to devote and sacrifice themselves to the patriarchal system. The image of Choi Eun-hee, who won the highest popularity those days, was typified as an image of woman demanded by the times as women's desire was excluded and put in hierarchy around essential motherhood. The situation was the same in North Korea in the 1980s. North Korea went into the system of transmission by heredity when a crisis started to emerge in the Eastern Bloc and recalled nationalism. It was at that time that Choi represented a devoted and sacrificing motherhood that followed her socialist son. The North and South Korean female representations overlapped each other despite different regimes and periods, for their nationalism discourses were the same in that they followed a dichotomy principle and were based on the logic of exclusion and hierarchy even though they had different objects to regard with hostility.

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.