Never Fully Present: Family Normativity, Temporal Order, and Misogyny in 1980s South Korea

This paper explores how the discourse of the “normal family” in 1980s South Korea regulated women’s lives through a politics of time. As governance under the Chun Doo-hwan administration shifted from direct repression to the management of normality and self-regulation, the family was reconstituted as a central unit for reproducing social order. Rather than limiting misogyny to overt hostility toward women, this study conceptualizes it as a structural mode of exclusion that denies women full presence in the present by displacing them into a failed past or a threatening future. In this context, women in prostitution were fixed as irredeemable remnants of the past, while unmarried mothers were framed as preventable future risks. The so-called “normal family,” presented as the only legitimate form of social presence, was invoked both as a lost tradition to be restored and as a goal yet to be achieved. In 1980s Korean society, marriage functioned as the temporal hinge organizing women’s life trajectories, marking the legitimate sequence of sexuality, reproduction, and citizenship. By foregrounding the temporal logic embedded in family discourse, this paper demonstrates how the family normativity operated as a technology of governance that continually deferred women’s full civic presence.