Join us for the Trena Gillette Memorial Lecture with Dr. Hyaeweol Choi on "Street Food Recipes for Everyday Life Politics in Global Korea". Discover the cultural and political stories behind Korea’s most beloved street foods. Happening May 22, 2025, from 4–5:30 PM at the Native American Student Community Center (Room 110). Free and open to the public—registration is recommended: https://shorturl.at/ajhv7
Bio:
Hyaeweol Choi is the Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. She serves as President of the Association for Asian Studies (2024-25). Her research interests include gender, empire, modernity, religion, food and the body, and transnational history. She is the author of Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea; New Women, Old Ways (2009), New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (2013), and Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (2020), among others. Her current research project, "Food and the Life Politics of Domesticity in Global Korea," examines the domestic as a confluence of local, public, global, and environmental structures, and aims to shed new light on everyday gender politics and performance through food ethics and practices in the current era of excess, inequality, and ecological crisis.
Abstract:
This lecture focuses on the gendered history of street food in South Korea, tracing how it has evolved through the forces of war, poverty, industrialization and urbanization, and nation-branding in the age of globalization. Like elsewhere, street food in South Korea has been dominated by women. Using archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and media analysis, I examine the everyday life politics in which women as street food vendors have entered the public sphere to survive, support their families, and empower themselves. I demonstrate how the female face of street food sheds new light on the boundary between the public and the private, and between invisible labor in private kitchen and performative labor for profit. I also attend to signs of change in street food in twenty-first century South Korea as young male entrepreneurs have begun to occupy the street food scene within the context of the neoliberal economy. In doing so, I contemplate both the sustaining and disruptive forces in the dynamics of gendered life politics.