탈북여성과 공감/혐오의 문화정치학

Abstract

The North Korean female refugees are a main character which the Korean literature takes notes newly with immigrant and foreign worker, as a nation-state changes to a place for migration and settlement in supranational movement of capital and reforming of the labor market. Crossing of the North Korean female refugees are giving evidence that while paternalistic authority of North Korea system is falling apart, the fringes of the world system is becoming a position of subaltern by powerful nation and huge capital. The story of the North Korea female refugees implies that even if they have a right of a stranger who is not treated unfairly when arriving at a strange land, a stateless person or a refugee couldn’t have shelter because they are exiled from the trinity ; nation, people and territory. Unless the society can’t admit their status, they could be called as ‘absolute stranger’, like an inhuman person that can’t be protected under the minimum law. The Korean literature rediscovers suffering of the North Korea female refugees as a resource of empathic morality that could awaken civic conscience. The tragic and degrading events during their movement thresh feelings such as sorrow, rage and shock. This implies that as the suffering of a victim has been transferred to an observer, and then the observer could feel the similar emotion as the victim, ‘consciousness of kind’ may be formed. In the process of making the North Korea female refugee an object of sympathy, however, the border area between North Korea and China becomes a metaphor of the savagery out of morality and order of civilization. In the nonfiction, Asia reminds us of natural state in which is a land for a pack of wolves that are ready to rape and to kill for a profit, like a vast wilderness, namely, all people become wolves. Such reappearance implies that as Korea, which is emerging as a subaltern in the world system, distinguishes itself from North Korea and China, Korea would like to try to escape from Asia. Hatred involves guard consciousness and rank consciousness, at the same moment it contains conception of proximity and homogeneity with oneself. It is difficult to think that reappearance for the North Korea female refugees also has got out of economy of disgust. The reason why is that as they fall into an in human person, being destroyed and being squeezed under grotesquerie space, Asia, they could be an object pity.