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4 - Redrafting Democratization Through Women's Representation and Participation in the Republic of Korea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

By
Seungsook Moon
Edited by
Samuel S. Kim
Seungsook Moon
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Vassar College
Samuel S. Kim
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

Our society is undergoing profound transformation. Politically, it is building democracy, promoting gender equality and human dignity, and civil society has been growing. … The family master system perpetuates undemocratic family, subjugating family members to the male family master.

—Bae-hee Kwak

Conventionally ignored as a dimension of the ostensibly apolitical private sphere, the power relations of reproduction fundamentally conditions who we are (and who they are), how group cultures are propagated, and how groups/nations align (identify) themselves in cooperative, competing, and complementary ways. Insofar as these reproductive processes occur within the family/household, the latter is a crucial site of politics. … On this view, transformations in the family/household have consequences for nation-states – and vice-versa [emphasis in original]. (p. 7)

—V. Spike Peterson

Since the political transition from authoritarian military rule to an electoral democracy in 1987, democratization in Korea has drawn much attention from activists and scholars of the “third wave” of democratization in East Asia, Latin America, and the former Eastern Bloc. In a positive response to this global trend, Rose Lee and Cal Clark suggest that women take advantage of democratization for the empowerment that East Asian economic development fails to provide them. Although the term “democratization” is likely to evoke the hope for an open and egalitarian society, particularly for formerly marginalized social groups, the reality of political transition to procedural democracy and its aftermath seem to be far from this normative ideal.

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Korea's Democratization , pp. 107 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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