Constructing Whiteness: Racialized and Gendered Depictions of Korea in Transwar Japan
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Mcduffie, Kendra
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 03, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Gregory Smits, Outside Unit & Field Member
Jonathan Abel, Major Field Member
Jooyeon Rhee, Major Field Member
Charlotte Eubanks, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Charlotte Eubanks, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Japan
Korea
Representation
Gender
Literature
Visual Culture - Abstract:
- Utilizing art historical terms to analyze primary sources ranging from poetry to paintings, this study argues that transwar Japanese cultural production used aesthetic representations of Koreans as a discursive space for constructing Japanese racialized and gendered identity. Whiteness and gender were inextricable social categories that manifested differently for the colonizer—for whom they served as markers of masculine belonging to the imperial project, a subject position deserving of rights and colonial protection—and the colonized—for whom they served as a marker of feminine inferiority, a position of belatedness and objectness. The aesthetics of these depictions arising from the notion of whiteness as a gendered and racialized category stemmed from a white-supremacist imperial template and produced works that perpetuated violence, both rhetorical and physical, against colonized Koreans. Japanese, dually fearing colonization at the hands of white nations and having become colonizers themselves, also suffered a crisis of identity under the construction of whiteness. Chapter One, organized around color, shows how whiteness in representations of colonial Koreans defines Japanese identity in a way that attempts to prevent Western colonization of Japan via claims to whiteness (as property or racial proximity). From 1910 to the 1930s the convergence of whiteness, femininity, and objectification in images of Koreans in Japanese media tells us a great deal about tension between colonial desire and colonial anxiety belying both Japanese elites’ fears of colonization at the hands of white Western powers and the Japanese desire to use colonial Korean subjects to define Japanese cultural and ethnic identity. Of course, these constructed images do not reflect real Koreans in any sense whatsoever. Rather, they reflect that which the Japanese colonial masculine subject fears has been lost in the process of Westernization and a desire for those qualities deemed abject in a modern Japan. Chapter Two, organized around texture, shows how Korean colonial space becomes a discursive arena for talking about Japanese gender. In Japanese literature, Koreans are frequently erased, “flattening” colonial space and clearing it out for Japanese colonists to give it form and construct it according to state and personal desires. In these cases, Japanese female characters help to smooth out Korean colonial space, creating a clear divide between masculinity and femininity, Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized. However, when Japanese female characters engage directly in colonial expansionist activities, they begin to take on texture, creating the “brushstrokes” of imperial territory, becoming masculinized in the act since the imperial project assumes a masculine actor. Chapter Three, organized around framing and composition, shows how the subject, gaze, and shifting proximity between colonial Korean subject and Japanese colonial observer reflect the relationship between race and gender. In this relationship, the experiences of colonization have repercussions for gendered media presentation, enhancing the masculinity of the metropole and the femininity of the colonies by using whiteness to inflect gendered categories. This results in representations of Korea as more feminine than Japan betraying a colonial logic that seeks to subjugate and commodity Korean space and women claiming both as resources for the empire while simultaneously revealing colonial anxiety around Japanese identity in a desire for proximity/intimacy with the colonized. The conclusion reflects on the post-war afterlives of these themes and the link between visual and literary aesthetics and violence in Japanese depictions of Koreans.