Description
Book SynopsisForever Girls explores girlhood manifest in contemporary South Korean cinema within the conflicting socio-political forces that shaped the nation: coloniality, postcolonial and postwar traumas, modernity, and democracy. Author Jinhee Choi reorients the direction of current scholarship on contemporary South Korean cinema from patriarchy, masculinity and violence, to instead consider girls as a social imaginary. Drawing on the depiction of girlhood from the 1970s as a reference image, including that of low-wage working-class girls, Choi explores the extent to which the form of girlhood represented in the millennial South Korean cinema still resonates with such an image. From the popular teen pictures and male auteurs' work of the 1970s; to a contemporary film cycle on military sexual slavery (wianbu); to Bong Joon-ho's girl trilogy; and to South Korean independent cinema of 2010s directed by women, Choi focuses on girls' sexuality, labor, and leisure, and demonstrates how girls in cont
