Date: Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Location: Fayerweather 411

Time: 1:00 – 2:30 PM EST

Zoom link here.

This paper examines the shifting meaning of the two main conceptual categories through which Korean socialists had long imagined revolution, gender and class. Through an examination of issues such as the promotion of a universal socialist language, the gendered mobilization of labor, and consumption in newly built apartment homes, the paper argues that gender and class were emptied of their radical potential for critique after the war. In their place, a discourse developed focusing on the individual and culture that redefined the means of ‘struggle’ for socialism, helped to consolidate Party-state rule, and left little room for the critique of the postwar growth of gendered social hierarchies.

Andre Schmid is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. where he teaches modern Korean and East Asian histories. He is the author of Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, and North Korea’s Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965 (forthcoming).