Abstract
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This work attempts to understand the characteristics of women's sexuality that has unfolded in post-IMF Korean society from the aspect of its sexual politics. It is amid breathtaking transformation and reorganization of the whole Korean society during and after the IMF crisis that the sexuality of Korean women has been constructed and reconstructed. Changes in work, family, gender and government policies have been simultaneously and drastically transforming women's sexual experiences. This work tries to analyze and understand the ways in which women's sexuality has unfolded in these contexts and the new terrain the feminist sexual politics, in response, have strived to establish in post-IMF Korean society. Especially, it will be shown that sexual politics that had been previously practiced, based on identity of "pure heterosexual women suffering defenseless under male violence," reveals lacunae in the realms of both heterosexism and sexual violences. These lacunae emerge as flourishing of discourses of fun/pleasure on the one hand and as deepening intersectionality of sexuality on the other hand. A discussion of each realm will proceed by focusing on a specific event occurred or an issue raised and discourses generated by it in Korean society recently. They include lesbian rights movement, cyberporn, legislation process of the new acts on prostitution in 2004 and the Miryang sexual violence case in 2004.
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| Keywords:
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intersectionality, sexual politics, lesbian rights movement, cyberporn, prostitution, sexual violence
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| About the author(s)
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Cho Joo-hyun (Jo, Ju-hyeon) is Professor of Women's Studies at Keimyung University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988. She has published many books and articles, including Yeoseong jeongcheseong-ui jeongchihak (The Politics of Gender Identity) (2000). E-mail: juhyun@kmu.ac.kr.
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