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The connection of “lifestyle” hanbok, however, with a pre-modern national identity (posited as residing among the folk masses, or minjung), subjects the deployment of this clothing to the double-edged logic of colonial opposition. Grassroots activists wear it in part to validate their cause against the state, while actors within the state may also wear it to connect their interests with the “folk.” Originally produced on a small scale by retired activists or individual designers, these new styles have been taken up by large corporations, bringing the price down and making the clothing available to a wider market. The argument could be made that when such a marker of political opposition is taken up by powerful governmental and corporate interests, its message becomes neutralized to some degree. The gender cues embedded in the new hanbok also inform our understanding of postcolonial nationalism in South Korea. Though both sexes wear “lifestyle” hanbok, its feminine version, by contrasting markedly with currently popular styles of Western clothing, is part of a dynamic linking feminine virtue to national integrity. Hanbok covers the surface and obscures the outline of the female body far more than almost any style of Western clothing, from the jeans worn by college students to the sleeveless blouses and short skirts that in the 1990s gained entry into local fashions. Even new styles of hanbok, therefore, evoke traditional feminine values, including modesty and chastity (which under Korea’s neo-Confucian ideology should be more precious to a woman than her very life). |
Photo courtesy of Rebecca N Ruhlen |
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An activist’s usage of this clothing, viewed critically through the very logic of the 20th-century opposition movement, is deeply embedded in an equally gendered view. In the colonial world, powerful nations were cast as masculine, against an image of weaker, effeminate colonized races. Indigenous nationalists who seek to evict the colonial oppressors then fall into similar metaphors, casting themselves as the masculine protectors of the raped woman-nation-and calling collaborators “whores.” In contemporary South Korea, this is the story behind the epithet “Yankee whore,” hurled both at Korean women who marry white men and at camp town prostitutes. What then does it mean when a 21st century feminist activist wears the “new” hanbok for a street rally or a press conference? Is she displaying her pride in the nation? Her alliance with a more broadly-based social consciousness? Her opposition to various forms of postcolonial subjugation? Her devotion to traditional femininity despite her radical political views? When I asked this question of my informants, my etic analysis of the situation ran squarely up against their emic view of the same; I was told, “Wearing hanbok is just something we Koreans do.” Join E-ASIA(S)! Don’t forget to join E-ASIA(S) when you renew your AAA membership. Remind a colleague to join! This can now be done on a secure AAA website: www.aaanet.org/memsrv.htm. E-ASIA(S) in Cyberspace Now there is one comprehensive site to subscribe to the EASIANTH listserv and to find resources and information about the different events and organizations in East Asian anthropology: www. aaanet.org/easias. |
| Please send contributions to
this column to Eriberto Lozada, Anthropology Dept., Davidson
C, Davidson, NC 28035;
erlozada@davidson.edu. |