스킵네비게이션

BUSAN CARTOGRAPHY (KWON MYUNG-A X KWON DOO HYUN X KIM DAE SEONG)

2/24 (THUR) 17:00

• Institute for Gender and Affect Studies of Dong-A University was created with the goal of developing new research fields and methodologies which combine gender studies and affect studies. The Institute was originated from aff-com, an alternative study group that had been committed to transforming the way of academic reproduction in the Busan area. This program, prepared in collaboration with the Institute for Gender and Affect Studies, introduces the evolution of the discourse on corporeality, place, and space from gender geography to affect geography and looks into the placeness of Busan from an affective perspective centered on Eulsukdo island as well as the pattern of affective energy working behind the writings of female workers which became active in the 1970s and 80s.

• Lecture 1: The Politics of the Struggle and Shelter: the Developments in Gender Affect Studies and Corporeality/Place Studies The lecture introduces how the discourse on corporeality, place, and space has developed, encompassing ‘gender geography’ and ‘affect geography’ by way of gender affect studies

• Kwon Myoung-A (professor, department of Korean language and literature, Dong-A University & director, Institute for Gender and Affect Studies)

  Kwon Myung-A has studied the transition in Korea’s modern and contemporary history and the politicization of the minorities. She authored How a Family Story Is Created, Insanity of Literature, Historical Fascism: the Fantasy of an Empire and Gender Politics, Contemplating Post-Colonialism, Obscenity and Revolution, Infinitely Political Solitude, The Terror of the Throng of Women, and Gender Affect, and co-authored Promises and Predictions.

• Lecture 2: Affect Economy on the Periphery or the Affect Environment of Eulsukdo and the Museum Busan is born again every moment as a place where attraction and discardment intersect. What does migration into and settlement in Busan mean if that is the case? The placeness of Busan is diverse and multi-faceted and cannot be limited to Haeundae, Gwangalli, and the old downtown. Such placeness, which is entangled with bodies, is more affective than representational. In the eyes of affect, migration and settlement may be rethought not as a change in physical coordinates but as an existential transfer. The lecture attempts to rewrite the affect environment of Busan, focusing on Eulsukdo and the Museum of Modern Art Busan located on the island. Eulsukdo is where sediments, waste, and the museum are layered upon one another. It also is a space that belongs both to the outside and inside of capitalism. It refuses to remain a mere symbol of Busan and goes on to serve as a relational element that reveals ‘Dynamic Busan’ as an assemblage. In particular, the institution or environment of the museum located on the island connects the corporeality of migrants/residents with the multi-layered and multi-dimensional cartography through affective graphism that breathes with the contemporaneity. This again relates back to the attempt to see Busan in different eyes through the concept of peri-capitalist spaces via Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

• Kwon Doo Hyun (senior researcher, Institute for Gender and Affect Studies, Dong-A University)

  Kwon Doo Hyun’s research focuses on applying the frame of technology and assemblage to media, the relationship between Korean contemporary literature and culture, and Korean and Japanese TV dramas and pop culture.

• Lecture 3: The Encounter of Cheer and Jeer – Affect Politics of Korean Women Workers’ Writing Korean workers’ writing which became immensely active in the 1970s and 80s, has been treated as an anecdote as there was neither a precedent nor a relevant discussion afterward. The recent attempts to include Korean workers’ writing as part of the history of literature ironically reduce the significance of their writing by defining it, in a way, as incomplete, insufficient, or inadequate.
  
  It would be fair to say that the history of women workers’ writing represents Korean workers’ writing, but its significance has been recognized only in the sociological context of the women’s labor movement without any in-depth discussion as to the importance of the act of writing yet. The writing of women workers is full of affective energy that cannot be reduced to a literary discipline. In the factory dorms, night schools, and communal residences where their writing took place, an affective economy different from the industrial system was in play, centered on a mutual care system. The writing of Korean women workers became a tool for self-liberation, but at the same time, the more they wrote it, the more it was excluded from society or became a tool to insult them. The lecture attempts to read and understand the various aspects of the affective energy that flows in the writing of Korean women workers in detail through their writings.

• Kim Dae Seong (special researcher, Institute for Gender and Affect Studies, Dong-A University)

  Kim Dae Seong has had interests in the power and history of the non-mainstream and the undefined and is researching the writing of Korean workers. Kim has worked as a literature critic since 2007 and authored The Infinite One and Literature of a Shelter.