Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea by Ruth Barraclough (review)

Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea is at once labor history and literary criticism, tracing literary representations of working-class women while engaging in the wider discourses of female labor, working-class politics, and the relationship between literature and politics. It is a major contribution to Korean literary, working-class, and gender studies. The sizable body of research on the working-class women of Korea, written in both Korean and English, has always been situated within the context of South Korean economic development and labor movements, focusing largely on the construction of working-class identities and the trials of workers toiling under harsh conditions. The inner world of working-class women, as seen through literary representation or expressed in other media, has been left virtually untouched by Korean Studies scholars. This is so despite the rich history of “labor literature” in Korea from the Colonial Period through to the critically received and sometimes commercially successful autobiographies of women workers in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, one of the many merits of this work lies in the fact that it connects these two periods so often considered disparate in literary history. With this book, Barraclough defines a “distinctive archive” of what she calls “factory girl literature.”

Chapter 1 introduces the “red decade,” during which factory workers became culturally and politically significant figures in Korea. In chapter 2, Barraclough offers one of the most astute and sensitive analyses of Kang Kyŏngae’s canonical The Human Predicament as a case of “greater possibilities for working-class women, both as fully individualized literary characters and as thinking and active political beings” (p. 39), especially when juxtaposed with the works of another great writer, Ch’ae Mansik. In the 1970s and 1980s, rapid economic development, and the rural-to-urban exodus that accompanied it gave rise to a number of autobiographies by women workers. Some of these have become classic, such as Song Hyosun’s The Road to Seoul, Chang Namsu’s The Lost Workplace, and Sŏk Chŏngnam’s Factory Light. In chapter 3, Barraclough both pays homage to these writers with her characteristically careful readings and offers succinct analyses of the sociopolitical and cultural forces that led to women workers becoming militant labor leaders who were beset by their own conflicted agency. She then continues in chapter 4 with analyses of these autobiographies and delves deeper into some conundrums faced by the writers: the “extreme sexualization of lower-class women that went hand in hand with their economic vulnerability” (p. 110), among others. Indeed, romance for these women was intimately and most often disastrously bound up with “politics, society, and money” (p. 109). Chapter 5 discusses Sin Kyŏngsuk’s acclaimed novel The Solitary Room, which was published in 1995 but set in the 1970s and 1980s.

Barraclough’s choice of the term “factory girl literature” here is a deliberate attempt to highlight the conflicting reactions inspired by women factory workers, both in society and in literary and labor movements, and to further bring attention to the persistence of various gaps: (1) the gap between representations of female workers in society and the labor movement and the women’s own wish for selfhood, (2) the gap between the emphasis on female subjectivity and the emphasis on their being “abject and degraded” in literary representation, and (3) the gap between their assumed un-femininity by virtue of their being working class and society’s constant fear of their female sexuality.

The women writers examined by Barraclough do not necessarily stick to their collective identity or live up to the class mission conferred on them, but they claim for themselves the “errant ways of individuality” usually reserved for professional writers or middle-class women writers. Following the spirit of Jacques Rancière’s work on the nineteenth-century French working class, Barraclough rejects the “worker resistance...