Patriarchy and the making of colonial modernity in colonial Korea: Colonialism, nationalism and modern Korean female subjectivities during 1920--1937

This dissertation seeks to understand the ways that colonial modernity conditioned the historical transformation of Korean patriarchy in the nation-building period ranging from 1920 to 1937. By setting the historical debate of the Korean "New Woman" as an analytical prism, this study visualizes the dialectical relation between the colonial and nationalist discourses of Korean women's sexuality and reproductive role in both private and public spheres. Through a contextual analysis of inter-war period Korean journalism, it foregrounds the interdependency of colonialism, nationalism and modernity in colonial Korea by showing that the "otherizing" of Korean colonial women was complementary in maintaining the Japanese colonial hegemony in the public domain and Korean male patriarchal power in the private domain-home. In order to provide an alternative framework for the historicity of the gendered aspect of colonial modernity, this dissertation deals with the question of how the Confucian patriarchal system collided with newly set-up social relations and the hegemony of colonial modernity, and how such a specific historical conjuncture conditioned the emergence of modern Korean female subjectivities. At another level, by way of analyzing the collision between Korean nationalist resolution of the women's question and the radical vision shared by the Korean "New Woman", this study establishes the conclusion that Korean colonial modernity was not a fixed structure but a reconstitution of Neo-Confucian patriarchal relations, a process of de(con)structive constructiveness derived from continual and mutual relations among nationalism, capitalism, colonialism, and modernity relative to the making of Korean-ness as an imagined fraternal community and a collective gendered national subject.