James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies
Korean Studies Colloquium
Thursday, February 2, 2023 - 12:00pm
623 Williams Hall
While both feminism and pacifism may appear to have stagnated in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism, the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.
Suzy Kim is a historian and author of Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. Her latest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.