Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Far East, Southeast Asia, Pacific))--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2008. / Thesis Advisor(s): Looney, Robert. "December 2008." Description based on title screen as viewed on January 29, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-57). Also available in print.

Pu-Ma Hangjaeng (the Pusan and Masan Uprising, hereafter Pu-Ma) of 1979 was the largest and longest incident of civil unrest and resistance during the Park Chung-hee regime in South Korea. However, overshadowed by more sensational and disruptive events in the turmoil of contemporary South Korean history, Pu-Ma was largely forgotten. In the post-democratization era, scholarly attention on Pu-Ma in Korean has steadily increased, and Pu-Ma’s valorization as a citizens’ uprising against government oppression has increased as well. It has now been given an important place in the genealogy of the democratic movement in South Korea. I term such recognition among scholars, as well as South Korean governments, the nationalization of Pu-Ma. One of the central concerns of this study is to explore the socio-political reasons behind this process. I attempt to demonstrate that the nationalization of Pu-Ma is closely related to the consensus among progressive scholars about the need to transcend regionalism and resist nostalgia for the Park Chung-hee era. My other focus is on the localization of Pu-Ma, which refers to citizens’ acceptance of Pu-Ma as a proud part of the identities of Pusan and Masan. I explore why localization of Pu-Ma has been problematic despite progressive scholars’ efforts to promote it. I argue that the most significant reason is the difficulty in building coherent collective memory among the participants in Pu-Ma as well as the citizens who witnessed the uprising. I investigate Pu-Ma through newspapers, oral history, and scholarly works to learn why memories of it have remained disconnected and inconsistent for so long. / text

This study explores the patriarchal unconscious underlying the Korean horror genre through a critical feminist psychoanalytical reading of the family dynamics and female agency in three landmark texts, namely, The Public Cemetery under the Moon (Kwon, Chul-hwi, 1967), Mother's Han (Lee, Yusup, 1970) and Woman's Wail (Lee, Hyuksu, 1986). By closely examining these horror film texts using insights from feminist psychoanalytic approaches and situating the texts within historical events and popular culture in the Park Chung Hee era, this study produces an understanding of the cultural dilemmas of women's desire and agency, and especially those of mothers. These textual analyses demonstrate that Confucian virtues, especially as been reinvented under Park Chung Hee's leadership to facilitate developmentalist goals, have formed the roots that shape the mother-child relationship into one that both parties want to dissolve. Through placing the cinematic representation of the monstrous feminine within a historical understanding of Korean horror cinema, this dissertation also demonstrates that the sacred, perfect image of the mother as it is known in Korean popular culture today is in fact historically produced formation within the genre. Besides, with Woman's Wail, a very characteristic Confucian female monster is discussed, namely, the mother-in-law. With this very rare type of the female monster, the misogynistic gender politics within Confucian patriarchy is saliently represented. The feminist psychoanalytic discussion on the spectatorship focuses on the interplay between the image and the Confucian female spectator. In a close reading of the two women's desires in The Public Cemetery under the Moon, this study explores the ways in which the female spectator may find visual pleasures in Korean horror cinema and the ways in which they are communicated and negotiated vis-à-vis the matrix of gender politics in Confucian culture. Taken together, this work demonstrates how the Confucian value system re-invented in the Park Chung Hee era has been a crucial apparatus for women's oppression, and at the same time, how women's agency is nonetheless evinced despite the strictures of Confucianism.

This dissertation is a cultural history of total war (ch’ongnyŏkchŏn) mobilization in South Korea from the 1946 outbreak of mass uprisings in the U.S.-occupied southern provinces to the withdrawal of Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) troops from the Vietnam War in 1973. It focuses more specifically on the role of cultural production in programs of anticommunist pacification in postcolonial South Korea. Following the collapse of the Japanese Empire and the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945, U.S. and South Korean elites confronted popular insurgencies in Taegu (1946), Cheju Island (1948-49), and South Chŏlla Province (1948). Acknowledging the mass character of these rebellions, anticommunist ideologues emphasized the importance of campaigns—variously referred to as culture war (munhwajŏn), thought war (sasangjŏn), or psychological warfare (simnijŏn)—targeting the home front (hubang) as a refuge for communist subversion. Cultural production would remain a central element of war mobilization in the subsequent Korean War (1950-1953) and Vietnam War (1965-1973), as well as in the militarized village development schemes of the 1950s and 1960s. In exploring the cultural dimension of unending war in divided Korea, this dissertation draws on a wide variety of documentary media, including roundtables, war correspondence, reportage, travelogues, ethnographies, memoirs, diaries, realist literature, illustrations, photographs, and oral histories, among other such sources. These genres, often sponsored or otherwise influenced by the state, functioned to investigate the historical causes of insurgency and propose suitable modes of prevention. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, such investigations evolved, moving from a post-liberation fixation on repatriated “war victims” (chŏnjaemin) to studies of other displaced groups purportedly vulnerable to communist subversion: refugees, POWs, vagrants, juvenile delinquents, peasants, lepers, and, in the Vietnam War, National Liberation Front (NLF) recruits. In South Korea, documentary media was emblematic of a Cold War “exhibitionary complex” founded upon claims to a pure reality unmediated by ideology. This study argues that the peculiar conditions of divided Korea ensured that anticommunist exhibitions did not just broadcast the messages of power but served in themselves to display and facilitate punishment. I further argue that the functional nature of embedded texts—as mechanisms of identification and surveillance as well as representation—lies behind their value as historical sources. This dissertation also argues for a conception of South Korean militarism (kunsajuŭi) capable of integrating such artifacts of literary, mass, and popular culture. Building on and departing from the foundations of South Korean anticommunist ideology in the 1940s and 1950s, the Park Chung Hee regime (1961-1979) offered a vision of the North Korean enemy as invisibly embedded in the socioeconomic contradictions of the home front. The Park-era discourse of “indirect invasion” (kanjŏp ch’imnyak) projected the masses as a hotbed of potential subversion, encouraging new forms of civilian participation in the militarized development schemes of the 1960s. The participation of non-state actors—whether as philanthropists, entrepreneurs, educators, proselytizers, performers, writers, or artists—in the reproduction and justification of war at home and in South Vietnam throughout the 1960s is one critical aspect of South Korean militarism overlooked in existing studies. This total mobilization of an emergent civil society into war and militarized development, however, produced unintended consequences, obstructing reporters’ attempts to represent the Vietnam War and incentivizing the exploitation of labor export programs and support initiatives aimed at the home front. These contradictions helped fuel the re-emergence, in late 1960s and early 1970s South Korea, of documentary writing as a vehicle of anti-capitalist critique rather than state propaganda.

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