기지촌 여성의 자기서사와 반(反)역사―최현숙의 구술생애사를 중심으로―

Abstract

This article examines the political performativity of testimony by focusing on the self-narratives of U.S. Camptown prostitutes that have emerged in South Korea since the 2000s, and reads Choi's oral life history work through the lens of counter-history. In 2009, Choi met Kim Mi-sook, an elderly woman in her mid-80s, as a care visitor. In 2010, Choi proposed to Kim that she conduct oral life histories, and by early 2013, the two were working on transcribing the oral histories. Choi proposed the oral life history project after hearing Kim's story of coming to Seoul from Pyongyang to work at Hwasin Department Store after the liberation of North Korea, but during the interview process, Choi realized that the speaker was a woman from a U.S. Camptown who made money selling sex to American soldiers. While the narrator of Choi's oral life history reconstructed and reinterpreted her identity by telling her life story, she also actively expressed her pride in her life and religious beliefs, which enabled her to avoid internalizing the social stigma of being a woman in a base village. Choi, who emphasized the social utility of oral life history in its ability to revive the history of opposition, aimed to subvert the way of interpreting poverty and hardship by bringing out other people who have been treated as invisible in Korean society as narrators, and practiced in the process of recording Kim's oral life history that the listener must first respect the narrator and reflect on what interpretation to share with the listener so that the narrator can interpret her life completely differently. Choi restored Kim's life not as a woman who sold sex to the U.S. military, but as a strong mother who raised her son to become a pastor on her own in an unconnected South Korean society, and as a self-respecting Christian who used the Bible as her ethical guide. The process by which a narrator in her mid-80s, who was unable to reveal her existence in Korean society, recreates herself as a witness to her own life by meeting an audience that treats her without prejudice and actively understands her, can be evaluated as an example of the political performance of oral life history.