Suzy Kim
On a visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter, North Korea) in 1977, two overseas visitors were told that sex before marriage ‘does not exist in our country’ (Halliday 1985: 50). This was in a meeting with representatives of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union — the official women’s organisation in North Korea — about the status of women and relations between the sexes. Other responses seemed just as implausible. The visitors were told that, ‘[a]ll women in our country want children’ (Halliday 1985: 50); and ‘[t]here is nobody in the family who refuses to do something that should be done’ (Halliday 1985: 53). When asked about the availability of contraceptives and abortion, the representatives denied the existence of policies on birth control, denying that there could be instances of rape that might require an abortion. Such answers are difficult to take at face value, but they are significant, nonetheless, for what they reveal about North Korea’s official conceptualisation of sexuality. Family is regarded as the building block of a deeply collective society, and marriage and sexuality are understood strictly within the confines of the heterosexual nuclear family. How can we make sense of such conservative policies and attitudes, especially in a country claiming to be one of the last bastions of existing socialism, a philosophy which traditionally attacked the family as an oppressive institution? The answer goes back to the years immediately after Korea’s liberation from colonial rule (1910—45) when North Korea instituted the major reforms that were to shape its modern history (on gender and sexuality in pre-1945 Korea, see also Barraclough in this volume; Choi in this volume).
Japan was defeated at the end of the Pacific War on 15 August 1945, terminating its 35-year rule over Korea. Despite the jubilance of liberation, Korea was compelled to take two divergent paths. The United States proposed (and the Soviet Union conceded) to divide the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel into two separate occupation zones — the United States in the south and the Soviet Union in the north — to disarm the Japanese troops while preparing a provisional government in Korea. Negotiations between Moscow and Washington toward a unified Korean government, however, failed as the cold war loomed. The American occupiers saw most Korean political movements as too radical and suppressed them in the South while unprecedented social reforms were carried out swiftly in the North, aided by the Soviets (Cumings 1981). The two separate states were not officially founded until 1948, but both sides competed for legitimacy from the beginning, claiming to represent the entire country. Toward that end, a thorough land reform was instituted in the North in March 1946, confiscating the land from landlords without compensation and distributing it to the peasants who actually tilled the fields. Major industries, which in many cases had been owned by the Japanese, were nationalised in August 1946. Amidst these reforms, North Korea passed the Law of Equal Rights for Men and Women (Namnyo p’yongdUnggwon pomnyong; hereafter, the Gender Equality Law) on 30 July 1946. It was a sweeping measure for its time, raising the ire of conservative patriarchs in both the North and the South, and became the basis for gender relations and the role of sexuality in post-liberation North Korea.