사진으로 본 제주여성과 근대

Abstract

Most contemporary theories of the modern are male -centered. Many prevailing representations of modern feminity was shaped by the preoccupations of masculine ideal and cannot simply be read as accurate representations of women’s experience. The starting point of this analysis is a desire to reread Jeju modernity through the lens of feminist theory. I began asking myself the following questions: How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking make experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity? What difference would such a procedure make? Thus, my intent here is to claim that Jeju modernity is not a homogeneous Zeitgeist which was born at a particular moment in history, but rather that it comprises a collection of interlocking institutional,cultural, and philosophical strands which emerge and develop at different times and which are often only defined as modern retrospectively. And I suggest that Jeju women’s lives have been radically transformed by such modern phenomena, and in this sense, there can be no separate sphere of women’s history outside the prevailing structures and logics of modernity.