Claiming Colonial Masculinity: Sex and Romance in Ch’ae Mansik’s Colonial Fiction

Abstract

This chapter explores the representation of erotic desire and romance in the works of one of the most influential authors of colonial Korea, Ch’ae Mansik (1902–50), focusing on his short story “Kwadogi” (Transition, 1923) and his novella Naengdongŏ (Frozen Fish, 1940), which revolve around sexual intimacy between Koreans and Japanese. It investigates the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality in colonial period literature, in particular, how Ch’ae fits Korean masculinity into the colonial hierarchy as regards encountering Japanese women in their private spaces. The chapter suggests that Ch’ae’s fictions reveal the tension between making a Japanese woman, on the one hand, an object of erotic desire for Korean men and, on the other hand, a respectable lady. This chapter shows that the male writers were not colonized subjects in crisis, as they have often been described in literary scholarship, but active participants and agents of Japanese and global imperialism.