Vortrag von Bonnie Tilland: Hungry Young Women and the Maternal Sublime in South Korean Screen Cultures

25. Juni 2024, von AAI Webmaster

Foto: B. Tilland

Vortrag von Dr. Bonnie Tilland (Leiden) am Dienstag, 25.6.24, 12-14 Uhr in Raum 221 am AAI

Wir freuen uns, Frau Dr. Bonnie Tilland für einen Vortrag gewonnen zu haben: Sie wird zum Thema “Hungry Young Women and the Maternal Sublime in South Korean Screen Cultures” sprechen.

Über das Thema:

This talk examines two types of depictions of women on screen in recent South Korean film and television: the “hungry” young woman and the struggling and overwhelmed young mother. Both types push against established earlier depictions of self-negating and obedient young women and sacrificial mothers, and in analyzing these depictions of women’s identity and femininity on either side of the “maternal transition,” this talk focuses on the filmic representation of embodied desires, comfort/discomfort, and pain. First, I compare two films featuring young women in the countryside who attempt to meet deep desires and explore identity through immersing themselves in traditional Korean food, in Lee Seo-gun’s The Recipe (2010) and Yim Soon-rye’s Little Forest (2018). Next, I turn to a television series, Birthcare Center (tvN, 2020) and an older film by Park Chul-soo, Push! Push! (1997) that both focus on the physical and psychological horrors of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum recovery. Both of the recent films and the television series harness contemporary South Korean gender dynamics and ideologies to critique gender norms, competitive South Korean society, and the cult of “motherly love” (mojeongae); Park Chul-soo’s earlier film is remarkably ahead of its time in its critical stance on reproductive politics of the late 1990s. This talk puts these diverse examples of South Korean screen culture in dialogue with one another to explore young women’s metaphorical hunger and the transition to the maternal sublime, with concomitant passion, awe, and horror at both the bodily and psychological level.

Bio: Bonnie Tilland is a university lecturer in Korean Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research has focused on gender and family, media, and the senses and affect in South Korea. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington, and was previously associate professor in the East Asia International College at Yonsei University Mirae campus. She is working on a book tentatively titled Sensible Mothering: Shifting Maternal Subjectivity in South Korea. Her new research focuses on language politics and soft power in language promotion efforts in South Korean and Taiwanese overseas language institutes.