Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

PhD Research

Gendering Discourse of Time in South Korean Self-help Literatures: Focusing on working longer and with more flexibility in labour ethics and their discursive effect on gender division of work

Under the postfordist mode of governmentality, which is taking over fordist project of self-regulation, individuals are made to assume new levels of “responsibility” for their lives. This mode of regulation relies far more heavily than its predecessor on marketized ordering mechanisms and it expands the scope of economic rationality. And the unparalleled popularity and huge number of success manuals reflects this cultural syndrome.

This thesis take popular Korean time-management self-help literature as the research subject regarding it is an important arena for contextualizing the new subject of postfodism who is responsible for managing his/her own human capital to maximal effect. Criticizing the idea of the 24 hours a day are the “inherent property” which is given to everyone “equally” is gender-blind as well as class blind, this paper will investigate that how the current time discourse is intertwined with individualization thesis and the notion of self-help.

There was no academic illumination on how the series of changes in labour like increases home-base work and working hours reduction (for example, five-day working week system have been introduced in Korean recently and gradually) affect to the daily life and time-management to women.

By elaborate investigation into popular time-management self-help literatures and its reception, this research try to make argument that the dominant time-management discourse is pro-capitalist in terms of justifying the present social inequality and more importantly unpaid labour time undertaken by married women by emphasizing individual responsibility on the whole individual’s life project including time-management. Also, this research will try to investigate how the audience negotiate or resist on the contractions between their reality and the dominant discourse on time/management.

Supervisor: Dr Cynthia Carter

Research Interests

Gendered cultural studies: popular self-help genre and culture and computer-mediated communication.