Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class

Ruth Barraclough · Elyssa Faison

Sep 2009 · Routledge

About this ebook

Bringing together for the first time sexual and industrial labour as the means to understand gender, work and class in modern Japan and Korea, this book shows that a key feature of the industrialisation of these countries was the associated development of a modern sex labour industry. Tying industrial and sexual labour together, the book opens up a range of key questions: In what economy do we place the labour of the former "comfort women"? Why have sex workers not been part of the labour movements of Korea and Japan? Why is it difficult to be "working-class" and "feminine"? What sort of labour hierarchies operate in hostess clubs? How do financial crises translate into gender crises? This book explores how sexuality is inscribed in working-class identities and traces the ways in which sexual and labour relations have shaped the cultures of contemporary Japan and Korea. It addresses important historical episodes such as the Japanese colonial industrialisation of Korea, wartime labour mobilisation, women engaged in forced sex work for the Japanese army throughout the Asian continent, and issues of ethnicity and sex in the contemporary workplace. The case studies provide specific examples of the way gender and work have operated across a variety of contexts, including Korean shipyard unions, Japanese hostess clubs, and the autobiographical literature of Korean factory girls. Overall, this book provides a compelling account of the entanglement of sexual and industrial labour throughout the twentieth century, and shows clearly how ideas about gender have contributed in fundamental ways to conceptions of class and worker identities.

About the author

Ruth Barraclough teaches modern Korean history and literature at the Australian National University. She is currently working on her book: Korean Factory Girls: Capitalism and the Seductions of Literature. Elyssa Faison is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Managing Women: Disciplining Labour in Modern Japan. Her current research interests include issues of citizenship and national belonging in imperial and postwar Japan.