Divine Domesticities

Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific fills a huge lacuna in the scholarly literature on missionaries in Asia/Pacific and is transnational history at its finest

Shopping, sex, and lies: Mimong/Sweet Dreams (1936) and the disruptive process of colonial girlhood

In the early Korean film we follow the melodramatic life of an unfaithful housewife. Sweet Dreams situates itself at the heart of the Korean colonial experience with urban Seoul as the backdrop to a narrative of deceit, adultery and consumerism. This article will explore how Sweet Dreams functions both as a warning about the perils of modern womanhood and, simultaneous to this, a vision of consumerist pleasure and delight. This article examines how the actions of lead character Ae-soon constitute a process by which the adult women is rendered girl via her positioning at the locus of female visual pleasure. I use the term girl as a process rather than a static category since, as will be explored, the attributes of girlhood with relation to Sweet Dreams are both expansive and fluid. In this way girlhood can be appropriated for transgressive purposes, not only in terms of a visualization of a desiring femininity, but also as a marker of colonial dissent. I argue that Sweet Dreams uses the interplay between the categories of woman and girl to disrupt the colonial drive towards a productive body in favour of the delights of consumption

Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways

This book vividly traces the genealogy of modern womanhood in the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century, during Korea's colonization by Japan. Hyaeweol Choi's shows that what it meant to be a "modern" Korean woman was deeply bound up in such diverse themes as Korean nationalism, Confucian gender practices, images of the West and Christianity, and growing desires for selfhood. Her historically specific, textured analysis sheds new light on the interplay between local and global politics of gender and modernity

The Visual Embodiment of Women in the Korea Mission Field

This article explores the role of missionary photography in enhancing our understanding of Christian mission history. It specifically focuses on the visual embodiment of women whose lives and stories have largely been overlooked in the history of Korean Christianity. Tracing the early pictorial images of women in relation to missionary writings, the article demonstrates the ways in which photographs�either in natural or staged settings�were taken, circulated, and appropriated for the purposes of missionary goals. In doing so, the article argues that missionary photography is an expedient analytical tool to plumb the dynamic interactions between the missionaries and the missionized and to demonstrate the interplay between material culture and human desire

Going South: Re-Orienting to Korean Studies from an Antipodean Perspective

This paper explores some strategic aspects of doing Korean Studies in Australia within the context of greater interdependence between Australia and the region of Asia and the Pacific. It examines the growing discontent with the concept of "area studies", a framework seen as an outmoded product of the Cold War that is too centered on "traits" of a country, and it goes on to consider an alternative approach called "liquid area studies" proposed by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. It argues that our geographical and temporal location vis-a-vis the region of Asia offers a unique vantage point for new ways of doing research and teaching related to Korea. To illustrate, the paper proposes a transnational approach to the history of women in modern Korea