The Origin of Koreanness: Understanding the Gender of Modernity in the Wartime Films of Late Colonial Korea, 1937-1945

This thesis investigates the popular origins of ethno-cultural subjectivity during the dawn of the cinematic age that, for Koreans, intersected with Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). More specifically, it looks at films produced during the time of mobilization for the Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific War between 1937 and 1945, with attention to how the complex process of turning the peninsula’s human resources into participatory subjects of the Shōwa Emperor (1926–1989) affected Korean productivity and reproductivity. The contradictions of war mobilization of Koreans by the Japanese Empire created common gender representations in late colonial Korean films. Mobilization of adolescent male fantasies, whose aspiration for filial piety and patriarchal restoration, suppressed by colonial discrimination, materialized in queerness. Through the use of gender, culture, and colonialism as analytical lenses, this thesis argues that colonial subjects have come to sustain the system that restrained them, believing instead in the promises of individual mobility.