“A Good Woman is Hard to Find”: The Monstrous, the Grotesque, the Feminine in Woon-young Chun’s Needle

Abstract

This essay examines Korean female writer Woon-young Chun’s short story collection Needle (2001), in which Chun predominantly figures the female body as one that is riddled with monstrosity. Chun’s tribe of monstrous women also demonstrates a streak of violence and aggression; their freakish appetites for meat and for sex are also chilling common denominators. Chun’s depiction of her female characters easily piques the interest of those who are invested in exploring the literary representation of female bodies. Chun, in her emphasis of monstrous women, seemingly veers away from a feminist discourse aiming to destabilize a gender-biased view of femininity as a “handicap,” an inferior version of masculinity. Rather than elaborate on the transgressive potential inherent in the monstrosity of her heroines, Chun presents us with an alternative: the vegetarian woman whose hyperfemininity begets a kind of reconciliation between the two genders. While I do not deny the possibility that Chun aims to deconstruct the conventional definition of monstrosity and to critique it as a state of female marginality in contemporary Korean society, I submit that Chun’s portrayal of deformed and grotesque women in Needle begs further investigation. Even though there may be some empowering aspects to figuring the female body as that of an aggressive monster, this essay examines how such representation may reinforce the subaltern status of women in contemporary Korean society.