ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on conceptual transformations of success within educational reform discourses associated with excellence and equality, particularly in regard to narratives of education fever in South Korea. Using Foucault's notion of biopower, anatomo-politics, and biopolitics, this chapter denaturalizes the notion of gender underneath narratives of education fever. By analyzing two representative newspapers, this chapter concludes that the concept of success was inscribed in the cultivation of care for the self in the early 1990s, but painful experiences and memories of the International Monetary Fund occurrence strengthened historical and cultural heritages, such as the face-saving culture and the Confucian vestige of regulating the parent-child relationship by resonating and branding new systems of moral reasoning on the human body with a sense of parenthood of being good/bad in the late 1990s. From this, the conceptual space of success has shifted from well-being-as-self-cultivation of care to well-being-as-self-regulative modes of care. This shifting nature of success would give clues for finding flashpoints, provoke a reconsideration of family and gender, and denaturalize moral rationalities beyond the geopolitical realm.
