This study examined lower-class women in 1970s, who experienced rapid social changes, through the media of movie. It is true that lower-class women shown in movies of 1970s have been ignored because of too a strong emphasis on sexuality. This thesis f...
This study examined lower-class women in 1970s, who experienced rapid social changes, through the media of movie. It is true that lower-class women shown in movies of 1970s have been ignored because of too a strong emphasis on sexuality. This thesis focused on not sexuality but class-state of lower-class women, and tried to recognize contradictions that lower-class women face under the patriarchal system, then, inferred her subversive power inside the system.
The base of this study lies on socialistic feminism. Above all, this paper examined circumstances of times in 1970s, minutely analyzed 4 movies well showing lower-class women's life, and examined space they occupy, social status, and social movement to search for their life belonging to the lower-class hidden under sexuality.
<Woman of Fire>(Hwanyeo) showed discords between a lower-class woman who was employed as a kitchen maid and a middle-class family, breakdown of maid's desire to be raised in social rank, and family-breakdown caused by the maid and settled down by the ideology of patriarchal system. <Yeong-Ja's Heydays> (Yeongja-ui jeonseongsidae) focused on lower-class woman's will to be independent in cities by attaining technical skills, their failure in going into the public area, tries to seal possibility of her danger as a lower-class woman by returning her to home. <Manless Street> (Yeojadeulman saneun geoli) examined area-division of men and women owing to the idea that women are inferior to men and reeducation of lower-class women by men. <The Man I Left> (Naega beolin namja) analyzed that the patriarchal system let free women live in peace in their private space.
It was examined that causes of lower-class and patriarchal system worked as a mechanism oppressing lower-class women. Dissensions between lower-class women who came up to Seoul from agricultural communities that became impoverished by the policies of low-priced agricultural products & industrialization and city women and women whom they met are one side of discord between city area and rural area. Therefore, lower-class women's failure in being raised in social rank implied the failure of agricultural communities in city·ruralness feud.
However, what we should pay attention to is lower-class women's subversive power. Even at the moment that unfair elements oppressing women were found, their will and energy toward life made the whole text read in a resisting direction. The ideology shown in movies expressed social capacities by resisting against structural tension and potential power existing in the society with inequality and revealing those powers.
In spite of various limitations, this study is important because it focused on lower-class women that have been neglected in the existing theses.