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KOREA Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. By SEUNGSOOK MOON. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 254 pp. $79-95 (cloth), $22.95 (paper).
Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea situates South Korea's transformation into a modern industrialized state in the historical context of colonialism and nationalism in the twentieth century. It traces South Korea's development from the early 1960s to its peak in the 1970s and its decline in the late 1980s as it revolved around militaristic values and practices that were forged around the ideologies of anticommunism and national security. The first three chapters explore how the modernizing South Korean state deployed disciplinary techniques of surveillance as well as institutionalized violence to remold its citizens into useful, docile members of the state. The last three chapters then examine the decline of militarized modernity with the rise of various social movements-particularly labor and women's movements. While the book is a welcome contribution to the growing number of monographs about postwar Korea and the Park Chung-hee era (1961-79), of which there are still only a few works in English, the theoretical and methodological treatment of militarized modernity in South Korea raises more questions than the book answers.
In the first half of the book, Moon locates the core elements of what she terms "militarized modernity" in the disciplinary power of the modernizing state that involved construction of the Korean nation as the "anticommunist self at war with the communist other" (p. 24). The militarization of national identity as such thus revolved around the ideologies of anticommunism and national security, and Moon shows how the state thus employed "disciplinary techniques of surveillances and normalization, as well as institutionalized violence, in its remolding of individuals and social groups" (p. 25). For men, this process included, most notably, the implementation of male conscription, which fostered the birth of the civic republican idea of military service as citizens' duty (p. 45-46). Women, on the other hand, were mobilized to become biological and domestic reproducers through the cult of...