Gendering Resistance,Domesticating Violence in Korean Prison Literature

Abstract

This article explores how we may empower women in the context of state/prison/oppositional movements when women are categorically excluded from political actions, mass mobilisation, struggles against and for state power. Via a close reading of prison literature produced in post-colonial, post-Korean-War Korea, I rethink the relationship between resistance and revolution, unencumbered by the gendered understanding of each term. I argue that we need rigorously to read the gendered workings of state power and its economic, political and cultural structures as well as oppositional movements, with a view to fundamentally reconceptualising and redefining where power resides and what it means to have power. Only then will we be able to imagine resistance and revolution that are not contradictory to each other.