Can We Hear Subaltern Woman's Experiences?: Im/Possibility of Representation in Postcolonial Context of South Korea

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the implication of feminist oral history as critically reexamining the relationship between hearer and speaker, representer and narrator, the said and the unsaid, and secrecy and silence. Based upon oral (life) history of military prostitutes in U.S. camptowns in South Korea (yanggongju), we tried to reveal the experiences of historically excluded and marginalized ‘Other,’ and then critically reevaluate the meaning of encountering ‘Other’ not just through the research process but also in the postcolonial society in Korea. Narratives of old women in kijichon ( formal prostitutes in U.S. military base) shows how women have navigated the boundaries between inevitability/coincidence, the enforced/the voluntary, prostitution/intimate relationship, and military prostitute/military bride while continually negotiating as well as conflicting with various myths and ideologies of ‘normative woman,’ ‘official nation,’ and ‘normal family.’ In addition, women’s narratives to cause the rupture of our own stereotypical images of military prostitute not only prove the possibility to reconstruct self-identity of subaltern woman, but also redirect the research focus from the object to the subject (hidden) desire to represent others. Therefore, we argue that feminist researchers to represent other’s experiences should inquiry ‘what/how we can hear,’ ‘why we want to know others,’ and ‘who we are,’ instead of asking whether ‘subaltern can speak or not, which shed light on what feminist oral history would be like.