Ruth Barraclough's Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea breaks new ground in our understanding of gender and labor. Akin to Seung-kyung Kim's English-language ethnography of young women factory workers in the Masan Free Export Zone of the 1980s and Kim Wŏn's study of 1970s' factory girls (yŏgong), this book intervenes in male-centered labor history by placing factory girls' experience, selfhood, and sexuality at the center of the violent shift to industrial society in Korea.7 Unlike the previous ethnographic and historical studies, however, Barraclough focuses on what she calls “factory girl literature,” literary works about and by factory girls published from the 1920s to the 1990s.
Following Nancy Armstrong's influential study of Victorian novels, Desire and Domestic Fiction, Barraclough posits that modern gender norms play a key role in making middle-class ideology, and that modern fiction functions to disseminate these norms beyond the...
