Rethinking the Urban-Rural Dichotomy in the Modernization of South Korea: Focusing on the Gender and Race

This study attempted to dismantle the sexist and racist spatial imagination between urban and rural areas of Korea based on the theoretical approach to gender and racial relations between modernization and the urban-rural dichotomy. The results of the study are as follows: First, Korea’s modernization process created an ideological rurality with a patriarchal character and ethnic purity, which created contradictions with rural reality. Second, ideological rurality began to be threatened by the changing rural society due to the influence of modernization, and the fear of rural society evoked in this process was embodied as a suicide problem for rural bachelors. The death of a rural bachelor emerged as a nationwide social problem because it was linked to the maintenance of patriarchal authority and the Korean ethnics. Third, the rural bachelor marriage project, as a solution to the suicide problem, has marginalized rural areas into a feminine and racial space, following the sexist and racist genealogy of Korean urban women, ethnic women, and underdeveloped women. This study revealing the sexist and racist ways of representing rural areas today in historical and spatial contexts is meaningful in that it has opened up a new approach to understanding inequality in Korean rural areas.