Femininity in North Korea

Important changes are taking place inside North Korea. The collapse of the command economy, and the emergence of capitalism in its place, is ongoing. A burgeoning moneyed elite and increasing exposure to foreign pop culture are transforming how North Korean femininity is conceived. These changes are reaching far beyond Pyongyang to affect many, if not most, women in the country. Officially, North Korea’s founding juche (self-reliance) ideology supports gender equality. In practice the leadership cult that was entrenched under Kim Il-sung, who led the country from 1948 to 1994, gave patriarchal relations a significant boost. Under Kim Il-sung, the nation was recast in line with traditional, largely Confucian, male-dominated family structures — a considerable backslide from the progressive gender norms promoted by the early Korean socialist movement. Despite its rhetoric, Kim Il-sung’s juche ideology directly perpetuated gender subordination

From patriarchal socialism to grassroots capitalism: The role of female entrepreneurs in the transition of North Korea

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Since the collapse of North Korea's command economy in the 1990s, a large number of women have become entrepreneurs. This remarkable feature of North Korean marketisation cannot be adequately explained by female entrepreneur (FE) deficit premises, which highlight women's supposed shortcomings in what is considered a male enterprise. Based on in-depth interviews with female North Korean defectors, and viewing entrepreneurship as a catalyst for socio-cultural change, this paper questions how FEs emerged in North Korea and whether women's market participation influences gender relations, or attitudes toward the North Korean regime. There have been noticeable changes in gender roles, son preference and choice of marriage partners. Our findings suggest that female entrepreneurship has the potential to both challenge and support the North Korean system. This research significantly advances scholarship on gender and entrepreneurship by adopting a constructionist approach to gender and transcending the prevalence of descriptive analysis of gendered entrepreneurial practices

The onward migration of North Korean refugees to Australia: In search of cosmopolitan habitus

© 2017 Kyungja Jung, Bronwen Dalton and Jacqueline Willis. Based on assumed common ethnicity, language and culture, and generous settlement programs, South Korea is believed to be the best country for North Korean defectors to restart their lives. This is, however, not necessarily the case. Since the mid-2000s, 2000 to 3000 North Koreans have allegedly settled in the UK, Canada, the US, Australia and EU countries. Despite this trend and its broader implications, the onward migration process of North Korean refugees, together with their motivations and lived experiences, remain poorly addressed in academic research. Drawing from the unique experience of North Korean refugees’ onward movement to Australia, the paper suggests that discarding a North Korean identity and habitus and gaining cosmopolitan habitus are the main reasons behind North Korean defectors’ onward migration. The paper is the first empirical study on North Korean refugees resettled in Australia to adopt habitus as a theoretical framework, and thus provides new insight into migration studies

Fashion and the Social Construction of Femininity in North Korea

© 2017 Asian Studies Association of Australia. In this paper we argue that North Korea’s socioeconomic transformation has had a profound and yet under-appreciated impact on the social construction of femininity. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with North Korean refugees, interviews with regular visitors to North Korea and NGO workers, and our own field notes from trips to North Korea, we analyse changes over three discernible (yet overlapping) economic periods: the 1960s–90s pre-famine period; the mid-1990s to late 2000s grassroots capitalism era; and the current Kim Jong Un period of quasi-capitalism. As dress is a discursive daily practice of gender, we focus on the practice of femininity as shown through North Korean women’s fashion choices. We argue that images of women in state propaganda have been shaped primarily by male leaders, but norms of femininity have shaped, and also been shaped by, women themselves. That is, the recent trend for North Korean women to dress in hyper-feminine styles can be explained in terms of women remaking themselves and planning their future lives

Tunneling anisotropic magnetoresistance in multilayer-(Co/Pt)/AlOx/Pt structures

We report observations of tunneling anisotropic magnetoresitance (TAMR) in vertical tunnel devices with a ferromagnetic multilayer-(Co/Pt) electrode and a non-magnetic Pt counter-electrode separated by an AlOx barrier. In stacks with the ferromagnetic electrode terminated by a Co film the TAMR magnitude saturates at 0.15% beyond which it shows only weak dependence on the magnetic field strength, bias voltage, and temperature. For ferromagnetic electrodes terminated by two monolayers of Pt we observe order(s) of magnitude enhancement of the TAMR and a strong dependence on field, temperature and bias. Discussion of experiments is based on relativistic ab initio calculations of magnetization orientation dependent densities of states of Co and Co/Pt model systems.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let

Transient analysis of spectrally asymmetric magnetic photonic crystals with ferromagnetic losses

We analyze transient electromagnetic pulse propagation in spectrally asymmetric magnetic photonic crystals (MPCs) with ferromagnetic losses. MPCs are dispersion-engineered materials consisting of a periodic arrangement of misaligned anisotropic dielectric and ferromagnetic layers that exhibit a stationary inflection point in the (asymmetric) dispersion diagram and unidirectional frozen modes. The analysis is performed via a late-time stable finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD) implemented with perfectly matched layer (PML) absorbing boundary conditions, and extended to handle (simultaneously) dispersive and anisotropic media. The proposed PML-FDTD algorithm is based on a D-H and B-E combined field approach that naturally decouples the FDTD update into two steps, one involving the (anisotropic and dispersive) constitutive material tensors and the other involving Maxwell’s equations in a complex coordinate space (to incorporate the PML). For ferromagnetic layers, a fully dispersive modeling of the permeability tensor is implemented to include magnetic losses in a consistent fashion. The numerical results illustrate some striking properties of MPCs, such as wave slowdown (frozen modes), amplitude increase (pulse compression), and unidirectional characteristics. The numerical model is also used to investigate the sensitivity of the MPC response against excitation (frequency and bandwidth), material (ferromagnetic losses), and geometric (layer misalignment and thickness) parameter variations

Standing wave oscillations in binary mixture convection: from onset via symmetry breaking to period doubling into chaos

Oscillatory solution branches of the hydrodynamic field equations describing convection in the form of a standing wave (SW) in binary fluid mixtures heated from below are determined completely for several negative Soret coefficients. Galerkin as well as finite-difference simulations were used. They were augmented by simple control methods to obtain also unstable SW states. For sufficiently negative Soret coefficients unstable SWs bifurcate subcritically out of the quiescent conductive state. They become stable via a saddle-node bifurcation when lateral phase pinning is exerted. Eventually their invariance under time-shift by half a period combined with reflexion at midheight of the fluid layer gets broken. Thereafter they terminate by undergoing a period-doubling cascade into chaos