Shopping, sex, and lies: Mimong/Sweet Dreams (1936) and the disruptive process of colonial girlhood

ABSTRACT

In the early Korean film we follow the melodramatic life of an unfaithful housewife. Sweet Dreams situates itself at the heart of the Korean colonial experience with urban Seoul as the backdrop to a narrative of deceit, adultery and consumerism. This article will explore how Sweet Dreams functions both as a warning about the perils of modern womanhood and, simultaneous to this, a vision of consumerist pleasure and delight. This article examines how the actions of lead character Ae-soon constitute a process by which the adult women is rendered girl via her positioning at the locus of female visual pleasure. I use the term girl as a process rather than a static category since, as will be explored, the attributes of girlhood with relation to Sweet Dreams are both expansive and fluid. In this way girlhood can be appropriated for transgressive purposes, not only in terms of a visualization of a desiring femininity, but also as a marker of colonial dissent. I argue that Sweet Dreams uses the interplay between the categories of woman and girl to disrupt the colonial drive towards a productive body in favour of the delights of consumption.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• colonial
• cinema
• girlhood Korea
• Japan
• modernity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Kate Taylor-Jones is Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. She is the co-editor of International Cinema and the Girl (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has published widely in a variety of fields including a forthcoming edited collection entitled Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Visual Media: New Takes on Fallen Women (Palgrave Macmillan). Her latest monograph study, Divine Work: Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy is published with Bloomsbury Press (2017). Kate is editor-in-chief of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture now entering its third year of publication.

Notes

1 Although the official occupation date was 1910 Japan had controlled many aspects of Korean trade and international diplomacy since the Japan-Korea treaty of 1876. The Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905 was the final act prior to occupation that saw Japan take control of the military and political life of Korea.

2 Whilst a few upper-class women received classical scholarly education, few lower/middle-class women had any formal educational experience. This would also include what we would now call domestic science and health education. This was something the Japanese authorities would implement in their educational reforms.

3 The loss of a lot of early cinema makes concrete figures hard to achieve. From magazines, screening bills, official records etc. you can make approximate figures.