What the Body Owes
- Minnie Kim
- Weitzman School of Design
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Independent Creative Production Grant
What the Body Owes is an animated short film that translates historical and scholarly research on Korean gender politics into a visual narrative, tracing how the state has regulated women’s bodies from the Chosŏn dynasty—when women’s subordination was codified through Confucian legal and moral systems—through Japanese colonial modernity and into the present day. Characters inspired by historical texts, including dutiful Chosŏn women, educated “New Women,” working-class “Modern Girls,” and the silenced trauma of comfort women, embody uneven paths toward agency shaped by intersecting hierarchies of gender and class. The film culminates in contemporary South Korea, where expanded pronatalist fertility policies have renewed questions about how women’s reproductive labor is framed as national responsibility rather than personal choice. Drawing on archival research and interviews with scholars and individuals affected by these conditions, the project uses animation as both research method and artistic medium, inviting audiences to reflect on how inherited systems of power continue to shape Korean women’s lives today.