Red Love in Korea: Rethinking Communism, Feminism and Sexuality: A lecture by Ruth Barraclough

Join us for a lecture by Ruth Barraclough, Lecturer in the School of Culture, History & Language at Australian National University.

In Korea the history of a socialist movement cannot be told withoutaccounting for the phenomenon of “red love”. Not only did thedelicious scandals of the love affairs of socialists do vital work topopularise socialism in the 1920s and early 1930s, it has defined therole of Korea’s early female communists ever since. These love storiesthat anticipated “actually existing socialism” remind us that eros andthe call to revolution have routinely gone together. In 1945 whenJapan lost its colonies and Korea was divided into North (undertemporary Soviet occupation) and South (temporary US occupation) theselove stories resurfaced as journalists went in search of the oldrevolutionaries who had disappeared in the late 1930s or spent the waryears in prison. Red love thus became a life narrative, punctuated byprison and child-rearing and even apostasy, but nonetheless a keyarticle that revealed the feminine (and sometimes feminist) qualitiesof socialism. This talk examines the love stories of some of Korea’smost famous communist women to look closely at the way desire wasstructured in the early communist movement.

Lecture will be followed by a discussion. Refreshments will be served. This event is jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Asiaand the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature atBoston University

When 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm on Friday, November 1, 2013
Location College of Arts & Sciences, 725 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 200