Narrating selfhood and personality in South Korea: Women and social mobility

In this article I analyze the constitution of selfhood by exploring those narratives about personality that are at the heart of middle-aged South Korean women's social mobility stories. In this project I consider agency as a discursive phenomenon: it is not an asset but is instead a particular narrative convention. Thus selfhoods are variously fortified by agency or overdetermined by larger social and historical forces. This article thereby contributes to a narrative understanding of social transformation and the rendering of social justice over periods of rapid social change such as the recent past in post-Korean War South Korea.