Dilemma and Detours, Making the Invisible Visible via Gender, Sensibility, and Corporality: Cultural Politics and Women’s Practices in Late Chosŏn

Abstract This article examines cultural devaluation and gender bias in literary accounts of Chosŏn yangban women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that documents from the period, written by yangban men, distorted the image of women, otherized them, and described them in contradictory terms. Work assigned to the domain of women—termed “women’s chores” in the record—is described in the written record in terms of duty rather than labor and in terms of inborn talent rather than acquired learning. Women’s social interactions were presented in the language of anonymity, collectivity, and non-place, and they were not allocated social space. This image served as the basis for the modern conception of yangban women, with its accompanying further distortions and limitations, as represented by such phrases as “wise mother, good wife,” “wifely support,” and “severing natal ties upon marriage.” These concepts developed after the end of Chosŏn and perpetuated contradictions in the portrayal of yangban women by privileging Neo-Confucian, patriarchal ideals of womanhood over their actual lived experiences, the latter being consequently excluded from history, culture, and written records both in Chosŏn and well into the modern period.