Science Fiction and Feminism in South Korea
Feminist sf storytelling first emerged in the late 1980s in the field of so-called “girls’ comics” (sunjŏng manhwa) through the work of young women artists such as Kang Kyung-ok and Shin Il-sook. Kang’s In the Starlight (Pyŏlpit sok e; 1987) is a space opera set on a planet called Capion [Fig. 5-1]. It tells the story of a superheroine’s adventurous space journey along with her romance with Redion, a military commander of Capion. Princess Shinhye, whose real name is Sirajenne, was exiled to Earth in her childhood because she was ominously born with black hair and brown eyes, instead of the more common blond hair and green eyes of Capion’s royalty. Upon returning to her native planet, she beats her sister’s competition and becomes a deity and the queen of Capion. She, however, loses Redion in the process and decides to leave her crown and return to Earth. Kang’s representation of a young woman who actively changes her destiny, struck a chord with the decade’s new generation of young women. Shin’s Born in 1999 (1999-yŏnsaeng; 1989) also features a young woman warrior in a post-apocalyptic world, where she battles alien invaders with an all-male multiethnic crew of comrades [Fig. 5-2]. While the plot’s main conflict is between Chris, the earthling heroine, and Kilets, a female alien scientist, the work also addresses gender conflicts within Chris’s special forces team. Supporting her through her difficulties is another female senior drill instructor. Shin, a renowned feminist artist, thus depicts independent female agents of military power and highlights solidarity between them. Today, online comics known as webtoons still serve as an important medium for feminist sf storytelling. Min Songah’s Nano List (Nano risŭt’ŭ; 2016), for example, builds its storyline around multiple women characters, including a scientist and a few gynoids, all of whom are involved in the future development of nanotechnology. The webtoon has enjoyed broad popularity for its representation of women’s conflicting desires—for a career, a personal life, and also sexual fulfillment—through its human and posthuman characters.
After South Korea turned to democracy in 1987, women’s sf storytelling expanded to the field of literature amid the country’s globalization and the computer and internet revolutions. The most outstanding writer was Djuna, who, named after American lesbian writer Djuna Barnes, began publishing online in 1994. Djuna’s first story collection Butterfly War (Nabi chŏnjaeng; 1997) became a sensation for the writer’s erudite knowledge of Western sf classics as well as the cosmopolitan scale of its stories. The book includes the story, “Mimesis” ("Mimesisŭ"; 1994), in which a gynoid bounty hunter buys her freedom by capturing an android who sexually abuses local women in Malaysia. Both the gynoid and the android hide behind a fake status as Korean citizens, and the story’s settings in Malaysia translate into a deconstruction of both the gender and the ethnic identities of the two characters. In “Where Is Your Father?” (“Nŏne appa ŏdinni?”), a later story that appears in the anthology Dragon’s Teeth (Yong ŭi i; 2007), two elementary school girls suffer daily from their father’s physical and sexual violence until they eventually commit patricide and bury his body [Fig. 5-3]. The dead father, however, returns every night as a zombie, and the girls have no choice but to kill him over and again, endlessly reliving their nightmare. Both stories address sexual abuse and domestic violence from the viewpoints of women, and they both feature counter-violent acts aimed at survival. By presenting the issues through such absurdist and cynical visions, Djuna’s sf stories reflected on the oppressive reality of Korean women under structural masculinity, contested the established gender hierarchy, and also showcased the subversive potential of feminist speculative imaginations to inspire and accelerate the development of Korean feminist sf literature.
Party due to Djuna’s influence, we have seen in the 2000s a new generation of writers and directors producing a rich body of feminist sf literature and film. The themes of motherhood are imaginatively treated by writers such as Yun I-hyeong, Kim Choyeop, and Kim Hayul. Yun’s “Danny” (“Taeni”; 2015), for instance, observes the vulnerable situation of female domestic workers through the lens of a robot. Danny, a childcare robot employed by a wealthy family, meets a grandmother who is also raising her grandchild. As they both fully devote their time and energy to child rearing, Danny identifies the grandmother as a robot-like laborer, but the grandmother reiterates that “I am not a machine.” Danny develops an attachment to the grandmother, but their friendship is tragically short-lived. Kim Choyeop’s “Lost on Premises” (“Kwannae punsil”; 2018), on the other hand, rethinks the myth of motherhood through the sf trope of mind-uploading technology. In the process of retrieving her dead mother’s memory from a digital library, Jimin gradually comes to understand the extent of the suffering and renunciations that have accompanied her own birth and upbringing. And Kim Hayul’s “The Making of Mother” (“Madŏ meik’ing”; 2019) projects a future world in which chemically produced maternal hormones have become commercially available. The story contrasts Bob, the father who receives the injections and becomes the subject of motherhood, with Li, the mother who criticizes the artificial hormones as a gender-biased technology. Focusing on the two different characters’ perceptions of the process of becoming a mother, Kim’s story further suggests a critique of the institution of motherhood as a fundamentally patriarchal sociocultural construction.
Other women writers design their own utopian/dystopian society in order to critique the established heteropatriarchal social order and to embrace alternative sexualities and family structures. Pak Munyŏng’s Women on Earth (Chisang ŭi yŏjadŭl; 2018) envisions a feminist utopia in which men overcome their misogynist impulses and actively learn a harmonious way of coexisting with other beings [Fig. 5-4]. Opening with a Korean man who is abducted by an alien force in punishment for having abused his Filipino wife, the novel indicts the South Korean state’s promotion of transnational interethnic marriages, and it sheds light on the plight of international, as well as domestic, women suffering under Korean patriarchy. On the other hand, both Yi Sŏyŏng’s “The Declaration of Hysteria” (“Hisŭt’eria sŏnŏn”; 2012) and Amil’s “Roadkill” (“Rodŭk’il”; 2018) imagine dystopian spaces in which women’s bodies are placed under the control of the state for birth control and reproduction purposes [Fig. 5-5]. In both stories, women eventually escape from authoritarian male-centric orders in pursuit of liberation. While Sen, the protagonist of “The Declaration of Hysteria,” seeks an abortion to resist becoming a state-controlled reproductive tool, the narrator “I” and her friend Summer in “Roadkill” commune with nature and escape from their lab confinement toward a gender-neutral and queer future.
Finally, Korean feminist science fiction provides a gendered critique of systematic problems—such as gender bias, racial bias, and ableism—in the current mainstream practices of science and technology. In Chŏng Soyŏn’s “Cosmic Go” (“Ujuryu”; 2009), the protagonist is a Korean woman scientist and a paraplegic whose dream of becoming an astronaut was shattered by a traffic accident. She eventually gets her chance, but only after the once popular space mission to the moon is revealed to have dangerous side effects on human health. Similarly, in Kim Choyeop’s “My Space Heroine” (“Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ”; 2019), the protagonist, Jaegyŏng, is criticized for being an imperfect candidate. At the same time, as a disabled Asian single mother, she is admired as a heroine who is the representative of gender and racial minority groups. By the end of the story, Jaegyŏng, whose body becomes cyborgized during the training, chooses to liberate herself from the binary oppression of normality by disappearing into the sea, instead of going to the space.
Feminist science fiction in South Korea often reflects on the interrelations between women’s bodies, their gender identities, and technological developments, and it also speculates on the limitations and potentials of challenging misogyny and hatred toward other sexual minorities. Today, the importance of the sf genre is only increasing in a society that is widely given to the gendered use of new technologies. In recent years, the country has been roiled by controversy over the commercialization of RealDoll (a life-size sex doll); the introduction of avatar members of the girl group Aespa by SM Entertainment; and the development of Iruda, a gender-biased AI based on machine learning from the well-known KakaoTalk messaging app. Considering the intensifying debates on gender-related problems in science and technology, it would be only timely and essential that we pay greater attention to feminist sf works.