Indifference to Sexual Love?: Representations of South Korean Working-class Women's Sexuality in Recent Life Writing

Discourse on sexuality in Korea has, until very recently, been dominated by a rigid patriarchal morality with female chastity at its core. Scholars have pointed out that the same kind of patriarchal and conservative attitudes that suppressed the representation of sexuality can be found in counter-cultural discourse by subalterns such as those in the memoirs and diaries of 1970s and 1980s working-class men and women. In this essay, I argue that such generalizations fail to do justice to the open, progressive, and creative attitudes towards sexuality that existed, and were represented, in life-writing(9) texts by Korean laborers. I analyze working-class women's open and progressive attitudes towards sexuality through an examination of life writing by Korean laborers written and published from the 1970s onward. In my examination, I pay particular attention to the possible differences in attitudes that may be due to the author's gender or position in the labor movement as well as to the author's choice of genre.