Men as the universal case

The notes take up the book Analyzing Korean Men and stay with three of its essays. Through much of human history, they write, “man” has been the general and universal being, and woman has been treated as something special rather than universal. Words such as woman employee, woman soldier, and woman teacher mark a special place, while men have been called youth, citizen, worker, or voter, as if those names were enough. If research on women has had to bring out voices that were buried because they were not the universal case, research on men, they say, has to take another method. This book, they write, points a way for the study of men, and of Korean men in particular.

Six authors, and a focus on three essays

They name six authors — Jung Hee-jin, Kwon Kim Hyun-young, Ruin, Jun-woo, Han Chae-yoon, and Eom Ki-ho — who move between culture and history, and who draw on anthropology, philosophy, and literature, to look at Korean masculinity from its origins to a masculinity they see splitting in a changing present. The point, they say, is to reset masculinity by focusing not on a universal being but on difference.

Jung Hee-jin’s essay, Korean Men’s Coloniality and Feminist Theory, is about a dependent, peripheral masculinity, a colonial masculinity, in which men who feel they are not manly enough try all the harder to suppress women. The author first sets out, clearly, the feminist theories that have analyzed masculinity from liberalism to structuralism. She then argues that such Western theory cannot explain Korean masculinity properly, and turns to the spirit of successive periods in Korea’s modern and contemporary history, and to cultural power, to describe that colonial masculinity. The notes take her to mean a Korean male culture with a dominant character, named in that way.

A modern turn, and the invention of a male body

Kwon Kim Hyun-young follows with an essay they title Korean Masculinity in the Modern Transition, on the historical origins of that colonial masculinity. The notes follow a look at the binary talk about women and men that appeared in Joseon through the modern transition and the Japanese occupation, and at the place of colonial men who, in a modern sense, could not become a universal being. Ruin’s The Modern Invention of the Male Body, they write, uses Korean contemporary history and world history to trace how a bodily norm of the “manly body,” focused on the penis, came into being. The notes leave the subject there, before a later recap. The same Korean report, in a longer form, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on the book Analyzing Korean Men, and on three essays within it.

Last updated 15 November 2026