Book Reviews 227
Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope By Youna Kim, New York:
Routledge, 2005. 242 pp. US$39.95, ISBN 978-0-415-54668-3 (paperback).
Watching television is an important segment of popular leisure among
Koreans today. Not only do almost all families own TVs, the family
television set is often placed in the central location of the home. In other
words, daily life for Korean families revolves around the family television
set.
For housewives who take care of housework, childcare, and education,
TV dramas not only provide joy in everyday life, but also function as a
text that allows self-reflection on their identities. Watching TV, for women,
allows an opportunity to share their identity with other women through
so-called TV talk. In this sense, Youna Kim’s work contributes not only
to the study of television viewers but also to the study of women, family,
and culture.
Youna Kim’s work shows that, far from being passive consumers of
television programs, women are actually creative interpreters of TV drama
narratives as well as producers of “imaginary self” and related discourses
using such narratives. Based on unstructured open-ended interviews
with a total of forty-two women―seven each from working-class women
in their twenties, thirties, and fifties, and middle-class women in their
twenties, thirties, and fifties―the author presents both the differences and
similarities in the processes of identity-formation via watching television
across both generational and class divisions.
Working-class women in their fifties do not have much intimacy with
their old-fashioned and patriarchal husbands nor do these women have
control over their own television viewing. Their lives are perceived as
miserable, and they rely emotionally on their sons in important ways. “The
women’s TV talk in relation to their sons reveals a complicated ‘duality
of everyday life,’ –‘misery and power.’” In other words, while such “sonpower ideology” allows these women to acquire a certain power against
patriarchal rule, it also ironically reproduces the traditional ethos of male
domination. Therefore, ideal sons to these women are patriarchs who
rule their daughters-in-law. Through watching television, these women
carry out drama validation of their own kind of talk, and TV realism
allows pleasurable identification with the traditional Korean mother. As
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a result, these women express hostility against prime-time feminism that
challenges traditional moral values inherent in the ideology of family,
sexual morality, and gender hierarchy.
Middle-class women in their fifties, who often have greater power
within the household than their Western counterparts, consider daytime
television watching to be vulgar and prefer to enjoy leisure activities
outside of the home. Due to the longest average work hours among the
OECD nations, Korean husbands of their generation do not have much
leisure time at home. Therefore, the family TV becomes the exclusive
possession of the wives. While working-class women in their fifties
cannot escape patriarchy, the TV becomes a method of class distinction
for middle-class women with economic means. They prefer TV dramas
that portray normative families and homes, displaying a sense of
repulsion towards Western culture and with themes such as divorce that
deviate from the normative family. What is interesting is that, contrary to
the common notion that the men possess the power in the family, the
husbands increasingly rely on their wives to meet their emotional needs.
Women in their thirties, on the other hand, are often burdened
with the backbreaking tasks of housework, childrearing and education
of young children. TV watching by women in their thirties, however,
produces different identities and discourses according to their class.
In the case of the working-class housewife, television watching is
ritualized. They construct TV ritual and integrate it into everyday life in
order to achieve ontological security and family intimacy. The desire
for ontological security becomes strengthened through the fantasy of
dominance. For example, television dramas dealing with the theme of
daughter-in-law and mother-in-law conflict serve to both reconfirm the
traditional family values and justify their position―that of the daughterin-law. In this sense, there is a preference among this group for dramas
that portray everyday life over the ones dealing with fantastical themes.
Western television dramas that do not deliver what the author calls “A-ha!
Emotion” as well as the opportunity to identify with the characters are not
interesting to this group.
Middle-class women in their thirties, compared to their workingclass counterparts, possess not only more economic capital but more
educational capital (college education) and cultural capital. They are
interested in maintaining this capital as well as reproducing it. While, due
to their husbands working long hours, they have more power at home
Book Reviews 229
than feminists may generally believe, they also grieve that their desire for
self-realization is constrained due to mothering. While mothering is an
important aspect of their self-identity construction, they nevertheless live a
life that is without much leisure and confined by the “professionalization
of motherhood.”
Therefore, while working-class women of the same generation
prefer dramas that deliver “A-ha! Emotion,” middle-class women in their
thirties favor unrealistic romantic dramas. They imaginarily reconstruct
their personal desires through individualistic discourses that exclude roles
related to being a wife and a mother. In other words, housewives in their
thirties are forced to give up many of their individual desires and ideals
due to housework, childcare, and child education regardless of class.
However, the responses and introspective reconstructions of self-identity
among them differ according to class due to differences in economic,
educational, cultural and symbolic capital. Therefore, middle-class women
in their thirties have greater desire for self-realization and social mobility
due to the greater amount of Bourdieuian capital they possess.
In contrast to the women in their fifties and thirties, the amount of
time unmarried women in their twenties spend while watching television
dramas is lesser to a significant degree. However, they did display a
far larger interest in foreign dramas. Such a tendency results from the
relatively greater ability to carry on activities outside of the home due to
the generational lack of housework and childrearing obligations as well
as their desire to live their fantasy life. The ideal life for the workingclass women in their twenties is to both achieve self-realization in the
public sphere through working and perform family duties after marriage.
However, this life of dual responsibility is both personally exhausting and
socially less-than-acceptable. Issues emanating from pregnancy, exclusive
responsibility for housework, and persistent prejudice against married
women in the workplace display the gap between the ideal and the
reality. Therefore, these women avoid identifying with television dramas
that in different ways reflect such reality. They attempt to placate their
unachievable desire through “mediated excursion.” This is so because
their class background does not permit overseas trips or study abroad.
Their acceptance and embrace of foreign culture for vicarious experience
collides with extant traditional values such as sexual morality. In other words,
they cannot escape their identity in the real world even in the realm of
cyber world.
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While more opportunities for advancements in terms of class are
available for middle-class women in their twenties vis-à-vis workingclass women of their generation, they are still not free from uncertainty in
employment. While working-class women of this generation emphasize
family values, their middle-class counterparts prefer (albeit imaginary)
occupational individualization and gender equality. “Systematic sexual
discrimination in the Korean labor market is unlikely to allow them to
implement such a desire.” In the midst of such economic and social
conditions, they prefer programs of entertainment such as unrealistic
comedies or programs dealing with pleasant and optimistic themes. For
them, such programs are an “imaginary site for constructing an alternative
culture.” While middle-class women in their twenties desire utopia and an
alternative culture, they nevertheless have the ability to read the program
text exquisitely. They are introspective enough that they would not fall for
ungrounded imaginings.
For women, television plays a critical role as a vehicle for self-examination.
For them, generational differences played larger roles in determining
their identity formation than class. The author points to widespread basic
education, influence of mass media, and national homogeneity as the reasons
behind such a tendency. To categorize generational differences, women in
their fifties represent a traditionalist “constrictive self,” women in their thirties
represent an introspective “negotiating self,” and women in their twenties
represent an outwardly “mobile self.” While their introspective selves differ,
they all live in a period of transition between traditional and modern cultures
and values. “The nuclear family built around traditional gender roles still
remain[s] as a culture norm, and significantly, women’s identities are still
defined in terms of home and family.” Korean women are reconstructing the
“negotiated family” in midst of the changing gender roles and the weakening
of patriarchy in both the public and private spheres.
As mentioned thus far, Youna Kim’s work, through an analysis of the
process of identity formation among the Korean women, and a comparative
analysis with Western societies, discovers both class and generational
differences among women, as well as characteristics specific to Korean
society. Through such methods, the author indeed provides an inspiration
for researchers of Korean society.
Lastly, I want to point to the following while hoping for future
research pursuits by others based on this work. First, while this has to
do with the author’s research interests, the interviewees are limited to
Book Reviews 231
members of normal families, constitute a simple model, and therefore
cannot be “generalized.” “New” families such as double-income, singleparent, divorced, and remarried families were left out. Next, among the
interviewed working-class women in their fifties, four out of seven of their
husbands were unemployed. Three out of seven fathers of the interviewed
working-class women in their twenties were unemployed. Such tendencies
contrast to the interviewed middle-class women, who had no unemployed
members in their families. Such distribution makes it questionable that this
work is representative of the larger whole.
Related to the abovementioned issue, this work is still insufficient
to be seen as a work of discourse on women and family that reflects the
recent changes in the Korean families. While some of the explanations of
historical background and the value system analyses may fit the readers’
perceptions, some of them may not. In addition, there is also a need
to examine the sense of ambiguity inherent in the class categories. In
explaining her methodology, however, the author does not explain much
about her methodological and sampling choices within class categories.
The working-class group in this book is mostly comprised of workers
in sales and service industries or the unemployed. It does not include
workers in manufacturing. Considering how factors such as employment
status, type of business, income, and working conditions exert great
influence on everyday life including television viewing, more thorough
explanations are necessary.
Ryu Jecheol
Ph.D. in Sociology,
Graduate School of Korean Studies, Academy of Korean Studies