The Nationalist Critique of Female Double Suicide in Colonial Korea

L. Yuh, Claudia Soddu
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Abstract

During the colonial period, the double love suicides of young “new women” were sensationalized by media outlets and became the object of discussion at a national level, triggering discourse over the role and value of women in Colonial Korea. This sense of involvement in the life and death of women was even more prominent when these suicides involved young women of child-bearing age, whose deaths could be collectively perceived as a loss of an important human resource for the country. This article will examine why the media focus was on young, educated upper-class women and how the discourse about their suicides expanded beyond a moral cautionary tale and was coopted by the Korean nationalist movement. We analyze the discourse that followed two representative female double suicides, the Yun/Kim suicide of 1926, and the Hong/Kim homosexual double suicide of 1931, focusing on the critique published mainly in the Tonga Ilbo newspaper. We also examine the response of the feminist movements, or lack thereof, and the development of the ideological conflict between feminist and nationalist movements. Female suicide was one of the many battlefields between the nationalist and the feminist movements during the colonial period. As an issue involving women at every level of society, it had the potential to challenge the Confucian patriarchal system and bring to light the new needs of Korean women. However, as this analysis has shown, it was dismissed as a personal and trivial matter compared with the urgent public issue of national liberation. The rise of women's movements in Korea, fueled by a small clique of educated women, was ultimately subsumed by the nationalist movement and relegated to the realm of the private and inconsequential.
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殖民时期朝鲜女性双重自杀的民族主义批判
殖民时期,年轻“新女性”的双重爱情自杀被媒体大肆渲染,成为全国层面的讨论对象,引发了对殖民时期韩国女性角色和价值的讨论。当这些自杀涉及育龄青年妇女时,这种参与妇女生死的感觉更加突出,她们的死亡可能被集体视为国家损失了一项重要的人力资源。本文将探讨为什么媒体关注的是受过良好教育的年轻上流社会女性,以及关于她们自杀的讨论如何超越了一个道德警示故事,并被韩国民族主义运动所采纳。我们分析了1926年尹/金自杀和1931年洪/金同性恋双重自杀这两起具有代表性的女性双重自杀事件之后的话语,重点关注主要发表在《汤加日报》上的批评。我们还研究了女权运动的反应,或者缺乏女权运动,以及女权主义和民族主义运动之间意识形态冲突的发展。女性自杀是殖民时期民族主义运动和女权运动的众多战场之一。作为一个涉及社会各阶层妇女的问题,它有可能挑战儒家的父权制度,并揭示朝鲜妇女的新需求。然而,正如这一分析所表明的,与民族解放这一紧迫的公共问题相比,它被视为一个个人的、微不足道的问题。韩国女性运动的兴起,是由一小群受过教育的女性推动的,但最终被民族主义运动所淹没,并被归入私人和无关紧要的领域。
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18
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