2000년대 이후 여성시로 본 사이보그 페미니즘적 특성 -이원, 정진경의 시를 중심으로

Abstract

The focus of this study will be the Cyborg Feministic Peculiarity in women’s poetry since 2000, with a concentration on the poems of Lee Won and Jeong Jingyeong. In order to provide a clear focus for this study, it is necessary to establish a clear definition of the concept of cyborg and to determine the peculiarity this concept presents in the poems of Lee Won and Jeong Jingyeong. The present study refers to the debate arising from the work of Donna Haraway, whose “A Cyborg Manifesto” firmly establishes cyborgs within the feminist literary tradition. According to Donna Haraway, feminism’s current practice of differentiating between the organic body and the machine, and privileging the organic in the form of the natural female body is merely a continuation of the dichotomous thinking typical of patriarchal forms of thought. In contrast, contemporary engagement with cyberspace by means of digital technology provides women with a context in which they are deeply involved, both in terms of reason and emotion, with the frontier upon which the mechanical and the organic fuse, and provides them with an opportunity to escape the artificial dichotomy between the two. Therefore, rather than rejecting machine civilization, contemporary feminism finds it necessary to cast light on a deeper narrative by resisting the symbolic language of the patriarchal order and by re-appropriating the meaning of that order in a positive light. The cyborg, hybrid of human and machine, is the primary rhetorical symbol by which this purpose is pursued. Efforts to reinterpret the frontier between the organic and the mechanical are well represented in the poems of Lee Won and Jeong Jingyeong. In their poems the body is conceived of as a cyborg that draws energy from its engagement with cyberspace. Lee Won’s poems depict a mechanized body that is cloned and propagated through contact with a computer system. This process liberates the woman’s natural body, although another problematic arises from the body that emerges from technology and capital. Lee Won explores these concerns through descriptions that blend the language of humanity with machine language, as well as through the ventriloquism arising from the shadow of being as perceived through the lens of the material. In recent work, Lee Won has turned her attention to an exploration of the dynamics of seeking new relationships, concentrating on the loneliness of the subject even as they are connected to the network. Jeong’s poems, on the other hand, turn their focus toward desire as motivated within the context of Capitalism. The body of these poems is depicted as a prosthetic material graft, or avatar, a masked, transformed figure that brings cyberspace into greater focus, perceiving it as a space mutated by postindustrial society, within which human ambition is driven by images and signs. The ego of these poems, by playing the role of a transformed figure, perturbs the subject’s vision and blurs traditional boundaries between the object and the subject to such an extent that one is assimilated by the other. Through the poetry of these two poets, we can better comprehend the peculiarities that arise from cyborg feminism, and draw a new, clearer map of the challenges feminism presents the already established dichotomy. The cyborg drawn by these poets is of value to us for its suggestion of a new, relational world that surpasses the central tenets of a divisive paradigm and offers a path forward toward oneness.