Gendering Genre in Korean Films with Filipino Women Characters

Abstract

The paper deals with the category of the Korean yosong yonghwa (yosong = women; yonghwa = film) and the place of the Filipino women characters in them. Especially in film genres where women play major protagonists from melodrama to vampire films, indelibly etched in their narratives is the all-too-familiar set of conventional roles and activities assigned to women, portraying a female identity constructed socio-culturally by a patriarchal society. A normative rather than a merely descriptive category, yosong yonghwa is fundamentally premised on the sinner-or-saint binary categories of a kind and patient female versus an ambitious, aggressive, and evil woman. Apart from the critical possibilities for social consciousness that underpin yosong yonghwa films especially directed by independent Korean women directors in the 1980s, in general, the conventional, run-of-the-mill cinematic visualization of yosong yonghwa is predictably of either the good woman, passively standing on the sideline, in need of salvation, or of the sinful one who caters to male voyeuristic desire in need of redemption. Such is the case of two famous Korean films, Thirst (2009), directed by Park Chan-wook, and The Taste of Money (2012), directed by Im Sang-Soo, top-billed by major Korean actors and actresses playing major roles. If viewed as yosong yonghwa, the limits of the genres of melodrama and horror films, as evidenced by these films, are transgressed by the deployment of generic border-crossing and affective elements, transforming the films’ yosong yonghwa into a narrative of redemption. The very minor supporting Filipino characters’ roles, predictably assigned to Pinays in Korean films, enable the films to undermine the narrative of redemption as they also underline the need for a shift from the topic of yosong yonghwa to the question of the yosong uishik (“self-consciousness as women”).

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Keywords

Ethics Of Care, Manichean dualism, redemption, yosong yonghwa, yosong uishik