ABSTRACT
I began this book by tracing how the ideal of martial manhood first began to take hold in Korean national discourse through an examination of the thought of Sin Ch’ae-ho and later Park Chung-hee. Although my discussion of Yi Kwang-su and student dissidents focused on the role that women played in the national imaginary, it was by foregrounding the “failed” men associated with Korea’s Confucian past that women emerged as the enlightened and stalwart defenders of the home and, by extension, the nation. What I have hoped to show is that the emergence of the nation as linked to the rise of the global economy of the modern capitalist world system transformed the ways in which Koreans perceived themselves as gendered beings. The creation of new forms of masculinity (and to a lesser extent, femininity) in Korea was conditioned by the global demands of the modern world system and the nation-state.
