Description
How does gendered domination inscribe itself onto women's bodies, and how do those same bodies become sites of resistance? Drawing on six interviews and six autobiographies by North Korean women, this paper adopts an embodied feminist framework to examine how women contest and reshape political order through everyday bodily practice, in North Korea and after.
In North Korea, the state regulates women's bodies through daily rituals and naturalised gendered norms. Women internalise these as simply "how one is meant to live," what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. Yet bodies do not comply perfectly. Small transgressions, styling hair, riding a bicycle, speaking back, constitute Scott's quiet resistance: rarely named political, but pushing back against embodied domination nonetheless. After migration, embodied capacities expand across national borders. Women enter new civic and labour spaces, and engage in retrospective naming: reinterpreting past experiences as indoctrination and gendered violence. When this moves into autobiography and public testimony, private memory becomes shared feminist narrative, opening new possibilities.
The paper argues that in authoritarian East Asian contexts, the body is both the primary site of political control and the first terrain of bottom-up feminist politics, with implications for how we understand gender, cooperation, and tension across the region.