ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In South Korean society in the 2020s, care has emerged as a key social concern across politics, economics, welfare, healthcare, labor, and the humanities. This heightened attention stems from multiple intersecting factors: the rapid demographic shift caused by declining birth rates and population aging, which is expected to increase care demands while shrinking the care workforce, as well as the care gaps exposed and exacerbated by the recent pandemic. Against this backdrop, contemporary Korean literature has actively engaged with care as a central theme, illuminating the structural inequalities and emotional fractures embedded in care relations. This article analyzes Yudam Kim’s short story “The Caring Heart” (2020), Yi Hyun Jeong’s “On My Aunt” (2020), and Chunhwa Jeon’s “Bling Bling Mrs. Oh” (2020) from the perspective of care injustice. It poses the following questions: What position does care occupy in contemporary South Korean society, and how is it entangled with structures of care injustice? How must care relationships be reconfigured in order to envision an alternative future in which the values of care are placed at the center? “The Caring Heart,” which depicts the outsourcing of care by a middle-class working mother, exposes the marginalization of care values under neoliberal economic conditions while unsettlingly revealing a chain structure in which gender injustice surrounding care reproduces further forms of care injustice. Meanwhile, “On My Aunt” and “Bling Bling Mrs. Oh” capture the intersection between the outsourcing of care labor and the feminization of migration through their representations of ethnic Korean Chinese (Joseonjok) migrant women care workers. While the former highlights the processes of othering experienced by Joseonjok care workers through forms of cultural racism operating in Korean society, the latter foregrounds the subjective voice of a Joseonjok migrant woman to expose racialized care injustice. It further suggests the necessity of reconstituting care relationships based on care justice by transcending boundaries through a shared recognition of interdependence between migrants and non-migrants. Taken together, these literary engagements with care suggest that imagining an alternative future grounded in care democracy requires an ethics and imagination of mutual care founded on the intersectional justice of gender, race, and class.

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