“Speaking Women” and Performativity at Roundtables in Colonial Korea

• In Event: Cultural Governmentalities: Speech, Radio, and Literature in Colonial Korea

Abstract

The roundtables in which women participated and the speeches they made at various events in colonial Korea illustrate the contexts and contingencies of their positionalities. As woman had relatively little freedom to speak during the colonial era, the "speaking women" at roundtables and different kinds of events were rare but important instances that helped to shape the discursive aesthetics and politics of women’s own language, speech and discourses and more broadly women’s politics at large. The “Speaking Women,” who were observed, commented upon and often critiqued by their male colleagues and intellectuals, did not simply employ words but they articulated aesthetic and political utterances and deployed gestures as part of their discursive apparatus. This paper inquires into where we might locate these women in the broader discursive space and apparatus. I pose the question of performativity as to “Who is speaking at all?” I examine how the subjectivity of the speaking women is constituted and the implications of their speech acts were changing, depending on their positions in the larger contexts. I examine the multiple kinds of venues and formats where these speaking women performed, including those where the exchanges between Japanese and Korean women as well as those between elite and working class women took place. These speech acts and performances reveal the complex interconnections between aesthetics and politics and the ways in which their subjectivity is constituted by the process of changing conflicts and clashes among women of different positions and in the broader contexts of the colonial period.

Author

• Ji Young Shin, Yonsei University