가족과 젠더를 넘어 돌봄의 관계를 상상하기 — 드라마 「동백꽃 필 무렵」과 「사이코지만 괜찮아」를 중심으로

Abstract

This article examines aspects of caring embodied in the recent dramas Camellia Blooms and It’s Okay not to be Okay in an attempt to conceptualize relationships of care that transcend family and gender. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of care in a paradoxical form. The care crisis and care gaps have deepened due to the cessation of the public care system, which transferred the burden of caring for others onto the “family.” In South Korea, temporary solutions to this care crisis have been reached via the self-exploitative overtime work of women. This study serves as a starting point for properly positioning and restructuring care, which has recently emerged as a form of “essential labor,” in a sustainable manner. It also is an attempt to overcome the current paradigm, which naturalizes the concept of the “normal family” and care work responsibilities through a gendered division of labor while also obscuring care work and care workers. Camellia Blooms and It’s Okay not to be Okay both feature main characters who are caregivers belonging to lower class families of two, each a child and a single mother, and a younger brother and older brother with disabilities. Through these main characters, the two dramas demonstrates the crisis of care experienced by poor individuals who exist outside of the frame of the “normal family.” The dramas also highlight the difficulties they face as caregivers. Both dramas also include romance narratives that follow the process of overcoming crisis and growing through building caring relationships and communities. In the absence of a well-established social care system, the protagonists of the two dramas, who are poor and helpless caregivers, struggle and are driven into isolation while fulfilling the care responsibilities imposed on them in the name of “family.” Yet, it is still difficult for them to provide proper care to the care recipients, and it only harms their relationships with the care recipients. The difficulties faced by the two main characters at the beginning of the dramas are intertwined with experiences of the severe care gap by people who have lived outside the boundaries of the “normal family” in Korean society. As they experience caring relationships with specific individuals who acknowledge their care needs, support them, and become included in caring communities via the invitation of those individuals, they gradually overcome obstacles and become hopeful that they can begin new lives. The characters and their narratives in the dramas allow viewers to virtually experience an ideal society based on an “ethics of care” by demonstrating the practice and value of caring. This article attempts to interpret the two dramas as texts that allow one to imagine and conceptualize a form of defamiliazed, degendered, and demarketized care which is demanded by today’s care discourse while also examining remaining real-world limitations to clarify the current state of a conception of care that transcends family and gender.