A Study on the Gender Politics of 1970s Korean Culture in the Film Adaptation of Dogsinnyeo - Focused on the Changes in Relational Normativity through a Comparative Analysis of Novel and Film -

Jeong Mi-Seon 

This study analyzes the film adaptation of Jeon Byeong-soon’s novel Dogsinnyeo to determine the operation and meaning of gender politics in 1970s Korean culture. Dogsinnyeo is a unique and controversial novel from the 1970s, reflecting the life of Park Wol-ra, a voluntary single woman, from her youth to middle age, based on her ideology of non-marital childbirth. This study analyzes Jeon Byung-soon’s original novel, Song Gil-han’s censored script, and Moon Yeo-song’s film text, contextualizing them with other cultural and historical materials in the process of the novel's medium transition to film. The analysis reveals the following findings: First, the process of film adaptation reveals the cracks and splits in the gender politics of the 1970s Korean culture, along with the unrestful path of the original novel. The key variables are censorship and genre conventions. The film Dogsinnyeo explores the detours taken by cultural censorship under the Yushin regime and reorganizes the physicality, subjectivity, and relationality of female characters by adapting them to the melodramatic genre motifs expected of the film medium as the popular culture of the time. Second, the film adaptation reveals significant differences in the strategies used to depict characters and their sexuality. While the choices and ideologies of female characters are relegated to the background, the locations of structural victimization and sinpasung are brought to the forefront. This emphasizes key gender-political issues of the time— illegitimacy, hojuje(patriarchal family registration system), and sexual violence—while downplaying topics like single women, breadwinners, women's social class, and sexual modernity. Furthermore, in terms of sexual representation, the film highlights the typification of three male characters who have intimate relationships with Park Wol-ra, while selectively adopting sex, intimacy, reproduction, and motherhood in the portrayal of female characters. This demonstrates how the reproduction of relational normativity, based on a particular combination of state, class, family system, and masculinity in the gender politics of the 1970s served the nationalistic patriarchy rooted in the Saemaul(developmentalist) ideology. In conclusion, this study presents the transmedialization of Dogsinnyeo as an indicative text, tracing the layered discursive elements and modes of operation that shaped gender politics in the 1970s. It pluralizes the gendered political landscape of 1970s Korean culture, while simultaneously questioning the boundaries and categories through which we envisiongender politics of the time.

Jeon Byung-soon, Dogsinnyeo (A Single Woman), film adaptation, 1970s Korean culture, gender politics, relational normativity, family system, Saemaul ideology

https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART003129415