Delicate Hands, Tender Voices, Slender Bodies: Articulating Female Labor through Beauty and Care in the 1960s Taehan News Newsreel

Abstract: This article interrogates how Taehan News , a newsreel produced by the South Korean state in the 1960s, created and circulated a discourse of female labor through its portrayal of female bodies marked by beauty and care. The early Park Chung Hee regime used Taehan News to not only establish and justify the regime's dominance but also to promote government activities and mobilize the masses for South Korea's modernization and industrialization. By exploiting the propagandistic and top-down strategies embedded in the medium of newsreels, the regime presented idealized versions of female bodies that incorporated beauty and care as a rhetoric of femininity. It also envisioned women as organized into a vital yet secondary body of labor that was composed of four categories, which I label the "servicewoman," the "wise mother, good wife," the "beauty queen," and "working hands." I argue that Taehan News 'sdiscursive use of beauty and care perpetuated traditional gender ideology by segregating and marginalizing female labor as ancillary, and it deemphasized the contributions and sacrifices women made for Korea's modernity. Moreover, I argue that this discursive practice of associating female labor with beauty and care, along with juxtaposing it against male labor, has augmented hegemonic masculinity. This analysis reveals the contradiction that female labor posed for Korea's development and industrialization in the 1960s: it was seen as both essential for the nation's development and inessential due to the unproductive consumptive attributes associated with beauty and care.