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UID:pretalx-wha-annual-meeting-korea-2026-BFCELT@pretalx.com
DTSTART;TZID=KST:20260627T141500
DTEND;TZID=KST:20260627T143500
DESCRIPTION:In the 1980s\, an era of closed borders and constrained global 
 mobility\, South Korea and Japan traced divergent material trajectories to
 ward a common horizon: the emergence of young women as agentive cultural s
 ubjects. Korea’s University Graduation Quota System (1981) produced a ra
 pid expansion of educated young women whose professional aspirations remai
 ned foreclosed\; Japan’s post-Plaza Accord bubble economy\, meanwhile\, 
 channeled the 1970s magazine-driven “An-non” culture of female self-fa
 shioning into the experiential consumption ethos of the nascent “Hanako 
 Generation.” Yet across these differences\, the small theater—_Sogŭkc
 hang_ (소극장) in Korea\, _Shōgekijō_ (小劇場) in Japan—function
 ed as an affective infrastructure: a shared spatial form funneling these p
 ressures toward analogous claims to cultural citizenship.\nArchival eviden
 ce from Korean daily newspapers and Japanese periodicals—including _Shū
 kan Josei_ (週刊女性) and _Shūkan Asahi_ (週刊朝日)—reveals tha
 t young women\, not passive audiences but active cultural agents\, transfo
 rmed 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 But
 oh—cultivating intellectual agency through cosmopolitan curation.\nI arg
 ue that this twin reclamation of cultural space and intellectual subjectiv
 ity constituted a claim to cultural citizenship enacted through distinct r
 egisters: Korean women practiced “Spatial Sovereignty” to circumvent p
 atriarchal domesticity\; their Japanese counterparts exercised “Consumpt
 ion Sovereignty” to define their own intellectual frontiers. These paral
 lel entanglements reconfigure 1980s East Asian youth culture as a foundati
 onal site of gendered agency—already embedded in transnational cultural 
 circuits—that anticipates new modes of “being global” crystallizing 
 in the post-Cold War decades.
DTSTAMP:20260412T140533Z
LOCATION:Room 204 PC Desk (Seats 30)
SUMMARY:Parallel Entanglements: Small Theater Practices and Cultural Citize
 nship of Young Women in 1980s Korea and Japan - Woojeong Choi
URL:https://pretalx.com/wha-annual-meeting-korea-2026/talk/BFCELT/
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