Artist Saimdang was selected to feature of the 50,000-won banknote to raise awareness of gender equality within Korea. However, this choice caused great controversy amongst many feminist commentators, who saw the selection as a way for the government to promote historic Confucian notions of gender identity and patriarchal expectations of women.
Have you ever found yourself overthinking things? Or perhaps you spend more time contemplating than moving? To better understand my world, I moved. These days, however, I seem to spend more time thinking. “But isn’t that normal?” you might ask. Maybe, but it isn’t the only way to make sense of the world.
It seems impossible to deny the ubiquity of sexualised forms of violence against gendered bodies, and that things need to change. We need to keep talking about it.
The construction of modern sexuality emphasises the sameness of biological gender between sexual object and sexual subject, which did not operate in Japan as it could not accommodate these existing gender constructions. The intense connection of the Nikkō Tōshōgu to the Tokugawa meant that it was intrinsically connected to a time that was becoming increasingly demonised as deviant.
