Engendering the Modern-De/Sexual(ized) Body in Colonial Korea

This article analyzes the politics existing between gender, colony and empire in cultural discourses relating to Korean New Woman's sexuality. Especially, it questions the ideology of chastity buttressed by Neo-Confucianism, and its transformation in the colonial period from 1920 to 1939 as the Korean patriarchal system was being reconstituted. By looking at the kinds of nationalist politics engaged in during the formation of Korean collective identity in terms of the preservation of the purity of Korean blood, the implicit linkage between the nation-building project and sexuality will be revealed, as well as how women's body was subordinated and represented as authentic Korean culture, i.e., Other-ized, within the grid of Japanese Orientalism and Korean nationalism.