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Wives of War-Disabled Veterans: The Gender Politics of War and Disability in South Korean Cinema (1960-1979)

  • The Journal of Korean drama and theatre
  • 2025, (86), pp.119~158
  • Publisher : The Learned Society Of Korean Drama And Theatre
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : November 17, 2025
  • Accepted : December 8, 2025
  • Published : December 30, 2025

LEE Hwajin 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the representation of wives of war-disabled veterans in 1960s-1970s South Korean cinema, focusing on war’s persistence as an affective regime in postwar women’s lives and on the gender politics of disability. To this end, it analyzes three films produced in the aftermath of the Korean War and the Vietnam War: To The Last Day (Shin Sang-ok, 1960), Homebound (Lee Man-hee, 1967), and Woman of Water (Kim Ki-young, 1979). To The Last Day presents a war-disabled veteran and his wife as agents of postwar reconstruction, while the film simultaneously makes visible the gendered suffering and endurance that the woman must bear as she cares for her disabled husband and assumes responsibility for supporting the family. Homebound employs modernist aesthetics to depict how war trauma intrudes upon marital relationships, revealing discord with nationalist narratives that attempt to suture the rehabilitation of disability through women’s sacrifice, culminating in the wife’s suicide after vacillating between devotion and infidelity. Woman of Water, which depicts the married life of a Vietnam War-disabled veteran and a speech-impaired woman within the conventions of Saemaul (New Village) cinema, presents the disabled woman as a subversive figure who fractures the nationalism of the developmental dictatorship era, even while the film accommodates eugenic and nationalist ideologies. This film subverts the hierarchy between men's “honorable” war disabilities and women’s disabilities as “defects,” reconstructing the topology of disability. The three films do not represent wives of war-disabled veterans solely as devoted helpmates who facilitate their husbands' remasculinization. Rather, through these characters, the films expose the transfer of suffering within the home, the gendered labor of caring for disability, and women’s own desires and limitations that remain insufficiently visible in society. Through this analysis, this paper illuminates how South Korean cinema reproduces nationalist discourse through wives of war-disabled veterans while simultaneously revealing an ambivalent mode of representation that distorts and fractures such discourse, critically examining the complex terrain where war, disability, and gender politics intersect.

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