The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea is the first book-length study in English to examine the dynamic formation of Korean modern gender subjectivities within the context of Japanese colonial rule. Critiquing the masculine historiography of Korea and adopting the subaltern approach, Theodore Jun Yoo's meticulously researched book brings out a multitude of voices of women who navigated the prevailing mechanisms of male power embodied in colonial policies, the patriarchal family system, and nationalist mandates. His analysis is largely informed by a poststructuralist framework to show the power of discourse and everyday practices in fashioning gender identity in colonial Korea. He skillfully weaves a complex tapestry, bringing together many tantalizing stories of women as they were represented in popular magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. This, in turn, reveals both overt and covert mechanisms of the male desire to continue to subordinate women as either docile colonial subjects or the means for building the Korean nation. More importantly, Yoo pays close attention to how discourse intersected with the political and the economic by focusing not only on narratives but also on colonial state policies and market economies during the colonial era.

The book is composed of five chapters in addition to introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 provides a broad description of the historical and cultural characteristics of the Chosŏn dynasty that shaped its particular gender relations according to neo-Confucian ideology. Chapter 2 delineates colonial policy on women's education, which essentially aimed to engender obedient female imperial subjects. It further analyzes the new class of educated Korean women, who acquired the tools that enabled them to articulate their own modern identity through new fashion, hairstyles, and freedom in love, marriage, and divorce. Chapters 3 and 4 examine women's participation in the labor market, with particular focus on the birth of the yŏgong (factory girl) in the era of rural impoverishment and rapid industrialization. Yoo provides vivid descriptions of the horrific working conditions women were subjected to and the ways in which women workers ultimately confronted their maltreatment through protests and strikes. Chapter 5 focuses on the colonized bodies of women as the site for refashioning notions of women's health and sexuality. Deeply influenced by colonial and nationalist desires to utilize women as vehicles for reproduction to advance the empire or the nation, the competing discourses aimed to discipline and tame women's bodies and sexuality in the name of medical science.

Yoo's painstaking treatment of diverse narratives on modern womanhood greatly enhances our understanding of the history of gender in colonial Korea. There are some parts that could have been improved through better organization and elaboration. The first chapter is intended to provide a comprehensive historical sketch of the 500 years of the Chosŏn dynasty. To be sure, some readers would benefit from such an overview; however, the analysis is diffused over too many topics. Yoo puts forward a compelling argument about the “culture of dissent” as a response to the significantly lessened rights of women and greater control over women's bodies during the Chosŏn dynasty. Yet the analysis is not fully developed, and despite the author's suggestion that the culture of dissent “transformed its focus and agenda over the colonial period” (p. 13), there is no explicit explanation as to how it had an impact on the woman question during the colonial era. A more focused analysis of selected issues of direct relevance to gender in the colonial era could have rendered a better integrated argument.

Another quibble is that the author devotes two chapters to the issues of gender and labor, and both chapters center on factory women. No one would dispute the importance of women factory workers, and Yoo is to be commended for including the less educated women, a group that is often left out of the discussion of the new woman. However, the space devoted to them here seems rather disproportionate. Women in other labor sectors, such as teaching and service, were also an important part of the new configuration of gender, and they are given much less attention in Yoo's analysis.

Notwithstanding these points, this theoretically nuanced and empirically rich book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in gender history, social history, colonialism, and print culture. Yoo has done a particularly admirable job in making the complex history of women accessible by offering gripping narratives in a dynamic fashion. Its richness of data and its readability make the book an exceptionally useful resource that could be adopted not only for graduate courses but undergraduate courses as well.