Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (review)

Long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, politics and society on the Korean peninsula continue to be influenced by the legacies of colonialism and the ideological antipathies of the Cold War. In this study, Moon first examines the institutional and cultural processes that shaped the relationships between people, the state, and businesses in South Korea during the period of rapid industrialization under military dictatorships (1963–1987). Then she looks at struggles to redefine South Korean citizenship during the years since democratization (1988–2002). Moon describes how both coercion and Foucauldian discipline characterized the process of making dutiful national subjects during the period of militarized modernity.¹ Since that time, men and women have struggled to claim and create a more substantive and active political position as citizens. Moon shows that the trajectories of these later struggles reflect the gendered repressions of the experience under military rule.

Moon argues that the ideology of national security and the practice of universal (or near-universal) male conscription had a variety of gendered effects. Military service trained young men in obedience, preparing them for lifelong roles as productive "soldiers" in the national economy, not as active political subjects. The fact that military service was open only to men, however, had the effect of excluding women from full citizenship both symbolically—because they did not contribute to the protection of the nation—and practically—because veterans were rewarded with preferential access to vocational training, employment, and benefits. Moon traces South Korean women's efforts to redefine their political position, from membership in a social category recognized primarily for its reproductive contribution to full participation in a productive society. Moon contrasts South Korean women's cross-class activities with South Korean men's class-specific activism, which divides into a dichotomous type of citizenship—(masculine) workers who realize political subjectivity through democratic (labor union) action versus (male) citizens claiming political civil rights.

The data for this study are drawn from both English and Korean primary and secondary textual sources, as well as interviews with officials in a variety of public and civic agencies. Moon creates a narrative of discursive transformation regarding citizenship in the context of changing domestic and international economic and political forces. Her argument is bolstered by occasional statistical evidence of temporal shifts in opportunities for vocational training, union membership, and employment, as well as multi-year surveys of trends in several periodical publications of leading civic agencies. Although this book concerns relatively recent events, it includes few quotations from participants, and none from people who were not directly involved. A smattering of excerpts from activists' memoirs and popular media add color, but since a significant element of Moon's argument is about common perceptions and feelings, voices of ordinary South Koreans would have helped to support her map of changes in ideas about citizenship.

The sophistication of the argument and the thoroughness of the research make the book's few other shortcomings curious: At several points in which Moon reveals a political viewpoint, she fails to provide a theoretical framework or an argument to support it. For example, she writes that although workers in strategic industries during the late 1980s were relatively privileged, they were "unquestionably exploited" (132). Is Moon broadly critiquing capitalist economy or something specific about the conditions of these elite South Korean workers that was exploitative? Similarly, her comment that the large percentage of South Koreans hired as contingent laborers after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 "are denied their basic labor rights" prompts the question of what basic rights these workers would ordinarily expect, and what legitimizes them (145)–surely open questions. Moon might have conveyed more information about the ways in which South Koreans have engaged the theoretical issues of exploitation and labor rights.

Finally, Moon avoids discussion of the Korean peninsula's security and the presence of many thousands of American troops in South Korea. She dismisses the first issue by focusing on the ideological exploitation...