Woojeong Choi
Woojeong Choi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul. Her research explores gender, cultural citizenship, and material modernity in twentieth-century East Asian visual and performance culture, with a focus on transnational comparisons between Korea and Japan. Her doctoral dissertation examines the representation of female college students in 1980s Korean popular cinema. She is co-editor of Kinema: Film-Novels and Scenarios (Vols. 1 & 2, 2024–2025) and has published on Korean women’s independent film fandom. She also engages with contemporary media discourse as a film and theater critic.
Yonsei University
Session
In the 1980s, an era of closed borders and constrained global mobility, South Korea and Japan traced divergent material trajectories toward a common horizon: the emergence of young women as agentive cultural subjects. Korea’s University Graduation Quota System (1981) produced a rapid expansion of educated young women whose professional aspirations remained foreclosed; Japan’s post-Plaza Accord bubble economy, meanwhile, channeled the 1970s magazine-driven “An-non” culture of female self-fashioning into the experiential consumption ethos of the nascent “Hanako Generation.” Yet across these differences, the small theater—Sogŭkchang (소극장) in Korea, Shōgekijō (小劇場) in Japan—functioned as an affective infrastructure: a shared spatial form funneling these pressures toward analogous claims to cultural citizenship.
Archival evidence from Korean daily newspapers and Japanese periodicals—including Shūkan Josei (週刊女性) and Shūkan Asahi (週刊朝日)—reveals that young women, not passive audiences but active cultural agents, transformed these theaters into parallel sites of mediation. In Korea, the small theater became a space where the reclamation of national forms converged with contemporary experimentation—from talchum and pansori to poetry readings and art exhibitions—forging solidarity through hybrid practice. In Japan, the small theater became a space for localizing transnational and avant-garde aesthetics—from the French New Wave to Angura and Butoh—cultivating intellectual agency through cosmopolitan curation.
I argue that this twin reclamation of cultural space and intellectual subjectivity constituted a claim to cultural citizenship enacted through distinct registers: Korean women practiced “Spatial Sovereignty” to circumvent patriarchal domesticity; their Japanese counterparts exercised “Consumption Sovereignty” to define their own intellectual frontiers. These parallel entanglements reconfigure 1980s East Asian youth culture as a foundational site of gendered agency—already embedded in transnational cultural circuits—that anticipates new modes of “being global” crystallizing in the post-Cold War decades.