South Korean Feminist Poetics: Gender, Han, and the Violence of the Archive (Mundan)
- Celine Choi
- College of Arts & Sciences, Department of English, Department of Political Science
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Student Creative Production Grant
South Korean Feminist Poetics: Gender, Han, and the Violence of the Archive (Mundan) is an exploration of contemporary South Korean feminist poetics that resist patriarchal structures. Using Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation,” Celine Choi will create a dual project: a poetry collection inspired by feminist Korean poets and an academic paper examining the erasure of women’s voices in Korean literary history. The work interrogates the Korean “mundan,” the patriarchal gatekeeping mechanism in literary culture, and highlights how feminist poets subvert traditional frameworks to articulate new voices. Research will be based in Seoul, primarily at Ewha Womans University and Seoul National University. Archival work will uncover erased narratives of Korean women poets and place Korean feminist poetics in conversation with African American poetics, decoding shared narratives of resistance and reinvention. Additional ethnographic fieldwork will further enrich the project – connecting with literary open mics and Gen Z writing communities, interviewing leading feminist poets– ensuring the project reflects the voices shaping Korea’s feminist poetic revolution.