Description
Book SynopsisIn Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women''s movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN''s International Women''s Year.
Kim centers on North Korea and the East to present a new genealogy of the global women''s movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women''s Union (KDWU), part of the global left women''s movement led by the Women''s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed no peace
Trade Review
Among Women across Worlds is a significant addition to the history of socialist women in North Korea in relation to global women's movements for peace and national and social liberation. In the same vein as Chandra Talpade Mohanty's criticism of Western representations of Third-World women as a homogeneous group of victims trapped by culture, Kim challenges the conventional understanding of North Korean women as victims of a monolithic state system and Confucianism-influenced patriarchy. She instead demonstrates their diversity and agency, in many ways liberating them from patriarchal oppression in which women are assigned the same simplistic designation.
* Acta Koreana *
Suzy Kim's book Among Women across Worlds is a tour de force that will upend the long-standing silence about the vibrant complexity of Marxist feminisms that has pervaded scholarship on the transnational women's movement. Asian history, women's history and international relations scholars may be surprised to learn about the leadership of left women from the Global South to anticolonial and feminist global networks in the second half of the twentieth century. Kim's book ensures we cannot overlook these remarkable women entirely.
* Journal of Social History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Decolonial Genealogies
Part 1: War and Peace
1. Women Against the Korean War
2. Anti-Imperialist Struggle for a Just Peace
Part 2: Third World Rising
3. Struggle Between Two Lines
4. Women's Work Is Never Done
Part 3: Cultural Revolutions
5. Aesthetics of Everyday Folk
6. Communist Women Around the World
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
