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Recovery of Masculinity and the Taboo of Female Desire in the Postwar Era

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2018, 75(1), pp.327-360
  • DOI : 10.17326/jhsnu.75.1.201802.327
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : January 10, 2018
  • Accepted : January 31, 2018
  • Published : February 28, 2018

Taeyoung Oh 1

1동국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

After the outbreak of the Korean War, both men and women were placed in a new field of gender politics in the grammar of the ‘postwar regime’ which promoted the structural change of South Korean society. And at that time, gender politics was largely dominated by the resurgence of masculinity and the taboos of female desires. Choi Jung-hee’s Endless Romance features a man who wants to secure his authority as a patriarch by sponging off the masculinity of the US military, and men who criticize women who love and marry US military men as “foreigners’ whores” while at the same time wishing to recover their lost masculinity through the act of putting themselves as the hero in saving such unfortunate women. These men felt uneasy about the loss of their masculinity after liberation and war and so placed women as objects of sexual exchange value or branded women’s love and desire as being unhealthy. Through this, they tried to regain their masculinity. The cry of patriarchy and male supremacy was nourished by notions of pure blood and nationalism. On the other hand, Choi, Jung-hee’s Endless Romance also narrates the destruction of a woman who has come to love and marry a member of the US military. The reason that she came to ruin is because the exceptional situation of war which brought about the loss of masculinity made women into fallen or betrayed beings, making it impossible to express desire itself. At this time, the romantic love of a woman was not meaningful in terms of the woman who was the subject of the emotion. Rather, it had only become meaningful for the male gender of South Korean society who desired to recover masculinity. The degraded and polluted woman, even if she carried out her own ritual of condemnation and purification, was not accepted as a member of the nation. This means that the gender politics of the recovery of masculinity made the self-planning of women impossible. The stronger the desire for the recovery of lost masculinity, the more the female desires were forbidden. This was the workings of the grammar of the postwar regime.

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