Note from the Editor

We are extremely pleased to offer the current thematic issue “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea.” Korea has obliged us by electing the first woman president in Korean history, Park Geun Hye. Once again our editorial instincts have been confirmed by current events (the issue began its planning in 2010, well before the election of President Park).

The issue of gender, of course, has been a continuing fascination in the Korea studies field: some of the first monographs appearing on Korea in English in the 1980s dealt significantly with issues of gender and new works featuring gender come out regularly. With the mind-boggling changes in South Korean family and society over the past generation, we have never lacked material in this area.

Although most of the articles in this issue concern contemporary South Korean gender and sexuality, Suzy Kim demonstrates that gender is an equally compelling perspective from which to analyze North Korea. On the South Korean front we find that work on gender and consumption is still productive, but new themes have been presented for exploration including the sex trade and sexuality—topics for which it would have been hard to find material in print even ten years ago. It is particularly gratifying in this regard to see Minjeong Kim’s article on rural male subjectivity. Too often “gender” has been a euphemism for “women.” While the exploration of South Korean female subjectivity has been a necessary corrective for past androcentric analyses of Korean society, Korean male subjectivity itself has often been neglected.

I look forward to passing on the editorship of The Journal of Korean Studies to my successor after volume 21, number 1 in the spring of 2016. I hope there are many eager beavers out there just waiting to take the journal on its next journey.