“It’s Fair Now”: Students’ Use of History to Obscure Gender in South Korea

• In Event: Gender, Leadership, and Equity in Education: Power, Perception, and Practice Across Contexts

Proposal

“It’s Fair Now”: Students’ Use of History to Obscure Gender in South Korea

This study examines how secondary students use their historical understanding to obscure gender when discussing social issues by highlighting structural discrimination against women in the past, holding women, who “voluntarily” signed up for injustice, accountable, and disagreeing on whether contemporary feminism works for “everyone,” through a case in South Korea.

Purpose
This study examines how secondary school students use their historical understanding to engage with gender-related social issues using a case in South Korea. South Korea offers a powerful context for this research as it is one in which strong antagonism toward feminism, particularly among young men, restricts gender-related discussion in public (Kim, 2018), the mandated political impartiality of education discourages students from engaging with social issues at school (Jho, 2007), and the centralized and standardized educational system strictly controls students’ curricular experiences (Misco, 2016).

Theoretical Framework
To frame students’ use of their historical understanding as a resource to engage with gender-related social issues, this study draws on Iris Young’s (1990) concept of oppression. She contrasted two closely related concepts, oppression and discrimination, and articulated that “oppression, not discrimination, is the primary concept for naming group-related injustice” (p. 195). She characterized discrimination as “intentional and explicitly formulated policies of exclusion or preference,” but oppression “should not necessarily be understood as perpetrated by particular oppressing agents” (p. 196). In today’s world, as there has been a decline in overt discrimination against historically marginalized groups, many people often assume that injustices against these groups have also been eradicated.
Equating group-based discrimination with injustice, however, can obscure the structural and institutional nature of oppression (Young, 1990). When people fail to differentiate between oppression and discrimination, they can overlook “how the weight of society’s institutions and people’s assumptions, habits, and behavior toward others are directed at reproducing the material and ideological conditions that make life easier for, provide greater real opportunities to, and establish the priority of the point of view of” privileged groups of people (pp. 196-197). Young’s (1990) conceptual framework helps spotlight continuing injustice in contemporary society.

Methods
This study uses a case in South Korea. A total of 30 public secondary school students, 18 girls and 12 boys from four different schools, participated in the study. All of the students explicitly described that their gender identity corresponded with their sex registered for them at birth.
I conducted semi-structured interviews with small groups of the students, using elicitation techniques. In the interviews, they were asked to work together to select illustrations that they would suggest using in next year’s history class. Such techniques are alternatives to direct questions and are useful when interviewing participants who are unfamiliar with sharing their ideas or when discussing controversial or sensitive topics (Barton, 2015).
I analyzed data using both inductive and theoretical thematic approaches as Braun and Clarke (2006) suggested. I also reviewed the themes, against Patton’s (1990) dual criteria of internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity. Finally, the themes identified through the two approaches were combined into the broader analytic domain.

Findings
In interviews, the students cared more about their binary gender groups, and particularly when finding discussion topics were “directly related to me,” they were more likely to demonstrate their gender identifications. The girls, however, explicitly showed their identifications only when feeling safe in discussions of officially settled topics and respectable actors with substantial reference. Women’s suffrage was one of those topics as women’s right to vote was a resolved issue at least in their society, women obviously won the fight, and it was part of the official narrative of their history textbook and lessons. The girls identified with women suffragists, often using first-person plural pronouns, such as “our.” When asked to complete a sentence starting with “learning about women’s experiences,” for example, Yoon said that it gave her “pride” in “our efforts.”
The students also recognized gender as a socioculturally constructed concept, disapproved of what they regarded as conventional gender roles, and challenged the gender binary. In assuming that men and women exclusively participated in the establishment of patriarchy and feminist movements to challenge it, however, the students were less likely to recognize the complicated nature of issues when finding women “voluntarily” engaged in the unjust system and both women and men were victimized. For example, when asked to select topics from a set of images that they wanted to learn more about, Tammy brought up a beauty pageant protest. All students in her group rejected the pageant, explaining that judging people’s beauty is unacceptable. But when Tammy suggested that the participants would sign up for the event because they were “confident” in their beauty, they concluded the conversation.
Furthermore, the students expressed strong support for historical feminist movements that fought for equal rights, but many students viewed contemporary feminism as alarming and perceived it as a force that could destroy the common good. They emphasized that feminist movements served society as a whole in the past and contrasted them with contemporary “tainted feminism” only working for “their own interests.” The students believed that the world is “fair now” in general, particularly in their society, because women have “enough” rights, and they found present-day feminist movements “unfair” because “they promote women’s rights too much” for men to encourage to confront feminism collectively. Only a few students believed that feminism could benefit both women and men, allowing them to freely contribute to society as equals, supported ongoing feminist movements.

Significance
This study presents empirical evidence for the importance of including specific knowledge, especially about why unjust systems matter, how they have persisted, and what can be done to challenge them, in order to help students transfer their historical understanding into the present. Furthermore, in exploring students’ understanding of gender-related oppression, this study closely aligns with the conference’s theme, Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World, particularly by offering some insights into how education can help students engage with social issues in this divided world.

Author

• Hana Jun, Valparaiso University