Race, memory & identity of overseas Korean women: On the cultural politics of independent kyop'o women's cinema

In this dissertation, I examine the cinematic practices of select Korean North American women filmmakers and their politics of cultural representation in independent cinema and experimental video. Surveying the work of Yunah Hong, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Christine Chang, Sun-Kyung Yi, and Helen Lee, I explore the various intersections and links between gender, sexuality, race, and class in a North American context, which resonate across different genres (such as documentary, experimental shorts, and video installations) and artistic sites of production (such as film, video, and literature).;The dissertation not only contributes to the study of Korean Americans and Korean Canadians apart from the larger Asian North American community, but also adds a much-needed analysis of gender and sexuality to the study of diasporic cultural production in film and video. Thus, the principal focus on independent cinema supplements a major lack in current Asian American literary theory as it extends beyond the realm of literature and investigates the pioneering work of kyop'o (or overseas Korean) women filmmakers and artists, and the different narrative strategies and techniques of self/cultural representation in their cinematic practice.;The dissertation investigates the overlapping horizons of immigration, racialization, and (racial and sexual) discrimination in Canada and the United States, and the reconstruction of diasporic Korean histories in North America from a critical feminist perspective based on their politics of disidentification, decolonization, and dislocation. It adopts an autoethnographic approach that connects the personal with the cultural to analyze the different multilayered identity attributes within film, video, literature, and personal experience. This approach, I argue, emphasizes the importance of context and specificity in cultural practices, and opens up a space for new voices to emerge and describe their sense of the world and politics of self/cultural representation across different sites of artistic production. It builds on past research on gender and sexuality to include intersectional studies on cultural identity and self/cultural representation within the realm of independent cinema and experimental video.