The Future of Korean Families in Gong Jiyoung’s Good Woman

Renowned writer of the 1990s Korea, Gong Jiyoung is also famously known for her feminist novels. Go Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn published in 1993 is acknowledged as a novel that popularized feminism, making it a social phenomenon beyond a movement of progressive activists and intellectuals. Then in 1997, Gong wrote Good Woman to provide a fuller vision of a feminist future, in which a couple of women form a family like community in opposition to the heteronormative patriarchal family. The progressiveness of this vision was not fully acknowledged at the time, but recently Gong’s feminist novels have been reevaluated in a positive light, reading them as informative in queering Korean families. This paper takes this discussion further to explore the underlining Confucian understanding of selfhood in Gong’s vision, and how her literary imagination can contribute to the ongoing discussions on reinterpreting Confucianism to be more just and inclusive.