Theorization of Political Maternity in Korea's Post-Gwangju Uprising Movement

• In Event: Lightning Round: Feminism, Gender, and the State in Japan, Korea, and China

Abstract

With a critical, alternative examination on the roles of the patriarchal norms and expectations, this article examines how the bereaved mothers of the Gwangju May Uprising have negotiated and utilized Confucian gender norms for social transformation. It investigates how the mothers became the fiercest protesters for the truth and justice for the victims of the Uprising, by conforming to and defying traditional patriarchal canons of domesticity. As a practical, theoretical update to Ruddick’s (1995; 2002) notion of Maternal Thinking, Honig’s (2009) notion of Emergency Politics, this article further reconsiders the transformative, constitutive power of women’s plural and contingent political agency in a crisis situation. By doing so, this article contributes to the critical understanding of women’s political agency under conservative social milieus, and the dialectics between transformative human agency and any given socio-cultural tradition’s continuing influence on people’s life and everyday behaviors in South Korea.

Author

• Gooyong Kim, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania