Mother/Whore: Prostituting Motherly Care in Neoliberal South Korea
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As South Korea witnessed a neoliberal shift in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, economic competency and optimizing selfconduct came to constitute the threshold of normativity. Certain lives became increasingly identified as “disqualified” by the state and were then abandoned as “disposable.” This article examines E J-yong’s The Bacchus Lady (Chugyŏjunŭn yŏja, 2016) to examine how life and death are gendered and devalued in neoliberal South Korea. The Bacchus Lady’s Soyŏng is a sixty-five-year-old prostitute who figuratively and literally “kills” her male patrons. While repeatedly disciplined and punished for her unruliness, manifested in her lack of gender responsibility and neoliberal productivity, Soyŏng also complicates the threshold of neoliberalism as she becomes a “manager” of various lives. Remade into a voluntary and private solution to the state’s struggle to manage “disposable” lives by normalizing maternal and affective labor, Soyŏng problematizes the extreme and gendered discipline demanded by contemporary neoliberal conditions.
Abstract
As South Korea witnessed a neoliberal shift in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, economic competency and optimizing selfconduct came to constitute the threshold of normativity. Certain lives became increasingly identified as “disqualified” by the state and were then abandoned as “disposable.” This article examines E J-yong’s The Bacchus Lady (Chugyŏjunŭn yŏja, 2016) to examine how life and death are gendered and devalued in neoliberal South Korea. The Bacchus Lady’s Soyŏng is a sixty-five-year-old prostitute who figuratively and literally “kills” her male patrons. While repeatedly disciplined and punished for her unruliness, manifested in her lack of gender responsibility and neoliberal productivity, Soyŏng also complicates the threshold of neoliberalism as she becomes a “manager” of various lives. Remade into a voluntary and private solution to the state’s struggle to manage “disposable” lives by normalizing maternal and affective labor, Soyŏng problematizes the extreme and gendered discipline demanded by contemporary neoliberal conditions.