The Korean Women's Movement and the State

The Korean Women's Movement and the State
Author: Seung-Kyung Kim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780415833714

Recent feminist scholarship has emphasized the need not only to recognize the accomplishments of women's movements through political participation, but also to analyze the process through which feminist organizations interact with formal politics. This book takes up theoretical debates on the relationship between gender and the state through an analysis of the relationship between the women's movement organizations and state-oriented gender politics during the ten year period of South Korea's progressive presidencies.

Gender and the Political Opportunities of Democratization in South Korea

Gender and the Political Opportunities of Democratization in South Korea
Author: N. Jones
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2016-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1403984611

This book explores how political opportunities afforded by democratization, including the relative balance of power between conservative and progressive civic actors, shape power relations between men and women in post-authoritarian Korea. Jones reveals that organized women can make a difference - depending on their strategic choices and alliances, and the manner in which they negotiate evolving political institutions. Moreover, democratic consolidation need not be led by political parties, but can provide surprising opportunities for an organized civil society to press for a deepening of political and human rights.

Practicing Feminism in South Korea

Practicing Feminism in South Korea
Author: Kyungja Jung
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134581653

The Korean women’s movement, which is seen in both Western and non-Western countries as being exemplary in terms of women’s activism, experienced a dramatic change in its direction and strategy in the early 1990s. At the heart of the new approach was an increasing focus on sexual violence, which has had a huge impact on bringing women’s issues onto the public agenda in Korea. This book examines feminist practice in Korea by analyzing the experiences of the country’s first sexual assault center, the Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center. Based on extensive original research, including interviews with activists and extensive participant observation, it explores why feminist activists in South Korea chose to organize around the issue of sexual violence, the strategies it used to do so, what impact the movement has made and what challenges it still faces to achieve its objectives.

Women Of Japan & Korea

Women Of Japan & Korea
Author: Joyce Gelb
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2009-01-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1439900965

Original research on the changing roles of women in Japan and Korea.

South Korean Social Movements

South Korean Social Movements
Author: Gi-Wook Shin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136708057

This book explores the evolution of social movements in South Korea by focusing on how they have become institutionalized and diffused in the democratic period. The contributors explore the transformation of Korean social movements from the democracy campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s to the rise of civil society struggles after 1987. South Korea was ruled by successive authoritarian regimes from 1948 to 1987 when the government decided to re-establish direct presidential elections. The book contends that the transition to a democratic government was motivated, in part, by the pressure from social movement groups that fought the state to bring about such democracy. After the transition, however, the movement groups found themselves in a qualitatively different political context which in turn galvanized the evolution of the social movement sector. Including an impressive array of case studies ranging from the women's movement, to environmental NGOs, and from cultural production to law, the contributors to this book enrich our understanding of the democratization process in Korea, and show that the social movement sector remains an important player in Korean politics today. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean studies, Asian politics, political history and social movements.

The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy

The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy
Author: Angela B. Cornell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2022-01-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108879632

We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.

Among Women across Worlds

Among Women across Worlds
Author: Suzy Kim
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2023-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501767321

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN's International Women's Year. Kim centers on North Korea and the "East" to present a new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed "no peace without justice," "the personal is the political," and "women's rights are human rights," long before Western activists adopted these ideas. Among Women across Worlds uncovers movements and ideas foundational to today's era.

The Comfort Women

The Comfort Women
Author: C. Sarah Soh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 022676804X

In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

The Korean Women's Movement and the State

The Korean Women's Movement and the State
Author: Seung-kyung Kim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317817788

This book asks what strategies women’s movements can employ to induce law and policy changes at the national level that will assist women’s equality without sacrificing their feminist energy, movement cohesiveness and core feminist commitments. The book takes up this question in order to emphasize the need not only to recognize the accomplishments of women’s movements through political participation, but also to analyze the process through which feminist organizations interact with formal politics. It examines the institutionalization of the Korean women’s movement under the progressive presidencies of Kim Dae Jung (1998-2002) and Roh Moo Hyun (2003-2007), focusing on three major pieces of legislation concerning women’s rights that were enacted during this time, and looks at the process of gender politics and the strategic bargains that needed to be made between the women’s movement and other political forces in order to advance their agenda. It questions whether the institutionalization of the women’s movement inevitably results in demobilization and deradicalization, and goes on to examine the relationship between the women’s movement and the government over the two most women-friendly administrations in South Korean history, a period marked by flourishing civil society activism and participatory democracy.

Korean "Comfort Women"

Korean
Author: Pyong Gap Min
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2021-03-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1978814984

Arguably the most brutal crime committed by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific war was the forced mobilization of 50,000 to 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these women died, unable to survive the ordeal. Those survivors who came back home kept silent about their brutal experiences for about fifty years. In the late 1980s, the women’s movement in South Korea helped start the redress movement for the victims, encouraging many survivors to come forward to tell what happened to them. With these testimonies, the redress movement gained strong support from the UN, the United States, and other Western countries. Korean “Comfort Women” synthesizes the previous major findings about Japanese military sexual slavery and legal recommendations, and provides new findings about the issues “comfort women” faced for an English-language audience. It also examines the transnational redress movement, revealing that the Japanese government has tried to conceal the crime of sexual slavery and to resolve the women’s human rights issue with diplomacy and economic power.