Partly thanks to class assignments, I have recently started looking at some of the gender focused history of East Asia. I’m still only scratching the surface but I’ll share a few of my initial responses so far.
Last week for my Chosôn history class we watched Im Kwon-taek’s movie Sibaji, or The Surrogate Mother (Warning: the end is given away below). In this movie we are told the story of Ok-nyo, a poor country girl and hapless victim of yangban society who had her body “rented” out to bear a male heir for an elite family in return for ten patches of land. Ok-nyo’s mother, who also shares her daughter’s tragic history as a surrogate mother urges her to bear her suffering quietly, be obedient in performing her tasks, and above all, not to fall in love with the married man who would become her temporary paramour. This she is helpless to prevent and she even believes foolishly that after giving birth to a son, she will be allowed to see her son one last time before her return to the valley of her home.
The movie concludes with Ok-nyo’s suicide. As we see her dangling from the tree she hanged herself from, we are warned against the dark legacy of Korea’s desire for male heirs. If I was to plaster my own “moral of the story” sign at the end of the movie, I’m not sure that is exactly how I would put it (the subtitles I was reading weren’t that good so they may be partly at fault). There is more at stake than simply the desperate pursuit of having male successors. That said, the movie is certainly effective at mocking some of the aspects of the Chosôn period. There is an excellent scene in which Ok-nyo has a raunchy rendezvous with the yangban who has “rented” her in the bushes while we listen to a discussion among older scholars about the details of ancestor worship. The movie also shows all sorts of less confucian “superstitious” practices surrounding pregnancy.
When all is said and done, though, this movie is true “woman as victim” history. The spunky young country woman who is the movie’s protagonist loses all her individualist subjectivity as she is imprisoned in her lonely room as a “surrogate mother.” There is no “agency” whatsoever for Ok-nyo, except in her final act of defiant suicide and, perhaps, in her rebellious late night wanderings and secret viewing of some colorful masked dancers who mock yangban practices (perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie).
The movie and this view of history certainly laments male dominance in society, but only accomplishes this through the mobilization of pity. It is based on a portrayal of women as completely subjected and essentially passive victims in a game where men hold all the keys to power. In this way, history performs a continual reenactment of male dominance and female victimization. I am thus wholeheartedly sympathetic to an effort by a number of scholars of pre-modern Korea, China, and Japan who want to reach beyond this “script” and, “walk a fine line between highlighting the hegemonic power of structures and emphasizing women’s agency,” and who attempt to break down the temporally and conceptually uniform concepts of “Confucian” and “Woman.” (Ko, Dorothy, Haboush, Jahyun Kim, and Joan R. Piggott eds. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2) They do this by re-centering the discussion on the women themselves, their internal motives and perceptions, and by emphasizing the process of “negotiation” by which these power structures are formed and adjusted. Unfortunately, this is a task which faces huge obstacles, not the least in the history of the Yi dynasty, where my limited reading so far has done little to help me identify the ways in which women “negotiated” with these power structures in such a way which reveals anything but their own lack of power.
Continue reading The Search for Agency
