한일 한센병문학의 여성과 ‘격리’ 연구 서설

Abstract

In this paper, I examined how female patients were used in an isolated space called the National Hansen's Disease Sanatorium, starting from the modern Japanese Hansen's Disease policy.　Mitsuda Kensuke, who had a major influence on the system of the National Sanatorium and the segregation policy, established a system that accommodates men and women together and efficiently uses female patients through patient labor, gender division, and vasectomy, in order to alleviate the dissatisfaction of male patients and to operate the National Sanatorium more efficiently. On the other hand, in the Sorok Island in Korea, the continuous construction works to expand the facilities harshly drove the patients including the females into forced labor, thereby threatening the very survival of the patients. This complicated situation is examined in detail in Mizuno Kazuo's The Remnant (1954), Yun Jeong-mo's And I Hear the Shout (1990), and Kim Jeong-han's the Human Estate (1971). In the Remnant, female patients are treated as exchangeable goods by male patients even after the war. In And I Hear a Shout, a female patient who is threatened with survival itself is depicted as an instinctive object of sexual desire of a male patient. In the Human Estate, it was seen that the hierarchical order of the patriarchal system heavily worked in disfavor of female patients. The Korean and Japanese female patients were victims of realistic and structural violence, but it can be said that the Koreans were under particularly harsher conditions. It is therefore essential to continuously discover and study gender-related data in Hansen's disease literature in the two countries.