- Author: So, Young Hyun
- Title: Women and Madness in the Perspective of Gender, Race, and Disability - Focusing on the representation of women’s madness
- Language: Korean
- Journal: Gubo Hakbo-The Journal of Korean Modern Literature 38: 397-429
- Publication Year: 2024
- Publisher: The Korean Association of Kubo Studies
■ Abstract In this paper, I examined the possibility of a different understanding of women’s madness by focusing on the memoir, A Taste Like War by Grace M. Cho, a Korean-American. I focused on the fact that the dichotomous understanding of madness, that is, the way madness is called as an expression of oppression and resistance, ends up ultimately turning away from the “mad woman” herself rather than approaching her. I also viewed A Taste Like War as a ethnography surrounding “Ha Gun-ja, ” who married a white man from a military camp town, immigrated to the United States, and ended up ending her life as a “mad woman, ” and discussed gender and race from a disability studies perspective. Specifically, through comparison with the narrative aspects of madness as a disease that began to appear in Korean literature since the 1990s, such as A Gift from the Bird and Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, this study examined the influence of gender, race, and the class and sexuality hidden behind it on the lives of immigrant women captured under the name of the disease called schizophrenia. Through this, the study aimed to draw attention to the reality of women’s madness itself, which is metaphorized and erased to the background, and to gauge its possibilities and limitations through A Taste Like War, which is based on the writing technique of memoir. |
