서발턴의 말하기라는 사건이 말하지 않는 것-석정남의『공장의 불빛』에서 소실된 몇 개의 목소리들

Abstract

Kongjang-ui Pulbitt (Factory Lights), published in 1984, is one of the most important works of female working-class autobiographies in South Korea. Before this, female proletariats had existed merely as objects to be represented when Factory Lights marked a turning point in that it showed these women brandishing their pens to shape their own representation. Factory Lights also derives its importance from the fact that it does not confine itself to contain only the voice of a particular individual but the voices of an entire collective. However, this paper seeks to distance itself from reading Factory Lights as a product of a group of female proletariats, and in fact aims to deconstruct such a point of view. It argues that previous discourse has not delved beyond viewing the act of proletarian women writing itself as liberation and shows that such a standpoint can contribute to the minimization of the tensions and the differences in perspectives between the female workers that arose from resisting and fighting against their oppressive conditions. This paper is especially concerned with how the female workers in Factory Lights discoursed on and questioned the subjectivity of the struggle and the problems of language. While it is essential to acknowledge the meaning and significance of subalterns representing themselves and how this act of representation can become an act of subversion and transgression, it is also for this very reason that we must focus on how the female workers in Factory Lights discussed the problem of their subjectivity. This autobiographical text is the evidence that female proletarians confronted the problems of their language and subjectivity from the moment they undertook the task of shaping their own subjectivity and representation. Even as they were using language to be subversive and transgressive, they were also asking whether subalterns could accurately represent themselves in a society wrought with such oppressive power structures. This paper aims focus on this problem and discuss the radicalness that female proletarians’ writings contained on that point.