발화될 수 없는 삶들―탈북 여성, 재난, 그리고 증언의 정치― = Unspeakable Lives―North Korean Defector Women, Disaster, and the Politics of Testimony―

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article offers a critical analysis of the survival strategies employed by North Korean defector women during the state-orchestrated famine and systemic collapse of the 1990s, while interrogating the discursive and material conditions under which their lives have been articulated and represented. Rather than construing these women solely as passive victims of deprivation and hunger, the study conceptualizes them as complex, intersectional subjects shaped by layered structures of oppression. Positioned at the nexus of a divided political system, gendered hierarchies, affective governance, and subsistence economies, these women emerge not merely as casualties of structural violence but as agents of endurance and negotiation. Adopting this framework, the article examines the modalities through which their experiences become narratable—through documentary films, autobiographical narratives, and published testimonies—and explores how these narrative forms are entangled with mechanisms of political authority, affective capital, and state surveillance. Special emphasis is placed on the act of “testimony,” approached not merely as a medium of truth-telling, but as a dispositif that is subject to commodification, affective regulation, and institutional framing within the broader dynamics of biopolitical governance. Simultaneously, the article foregrounds the resistant subjectivity of defector women, which exceeds reductive paradigms of victimhood and gestures toward the ethical and political significance of unarticulated suffering. Through this lens, the study seeks to theorize the representational conditions under which “lives that cannot be spoken” might nonetheless be rendered speakable—at the intersection of the politics of voice and the regimes of representation.