Fictional International Relations

Gender, Pain and Truth

Sungju Park-Kang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415718615
• eBook ISBN: 9781317970514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book proposes the idea of fictional International Relations (IR) and engages with feminist IR by contextualising the case of a woman spy in Korea in the Cold War.

Fictional imagination and feminist IR encourage one to go beyond conventional or standard ways of thinking; it reshapes taken-for-granted interpretations and assumptions. This takes the view that a dominant narrative of events might be reconstructed as a different kind of story, once events are placed within a wider temporal approach. The case of the woman Korean secret agent- who reportedly bombed a South Korean plane (Korean Airlines (KAL) Flight 858) under the instruction from the North Korean leadership to disrupt the Seoul Olympic Games- is chosen to serve as an effective example of fictional IR and feminist IR scholarship, which can be investigated through the research puzzles concerning gender, pain and truth.

Fictional International Relations has three main objectives. First, it investigates the way in which fiction-writing can become a method for dealing with data problems and contingency in IR. Second, the book examines how gender, pain and truth operate or interact in the case of the Korean spy and how this observation can strengthen feminist IR in terms of intersectionality. Finally, the author goes on to explore why this case has been so difficult to study openly and thoroughly. The aim of the book is not to refute the official findings; the point is to unpack complex dynamics surrounding truth—more specifically how the official account has been executed as 'the' truth—based on a feminist-informed investigation.

This book will be of interest to students of IR theory, critical security studies, Cold War studies, gender studies and Asian studies.

1 A mysteriously sorry story

‘Sister, I am sorry’, almost wept a woman leaning on an interrogator from the South Korean intelligence agency. It was winter in 1987. She had been arrested after failing to commit suicide in Bahrain and had been brought to Seoul for interrogation. With only one day to go before the presidential election, her arrival captured all the attention of the South Korean media and people. As a North Korean secret agent, according to the authorities, she had bombed a South Korean plane, under instructions from the North Korean leadership to disrupt the Seoul Olympic Games. 115 people were killed. According to the official account, this was the truth of the case of Korean Airlines (KAL) Flight 858. It was not just the families and relatives who had lost their loved ones who were shocked and grieved, but also the general public in South Korea. The bomber made her public confession at a national press conference. In contrast to the conventional image of terrorists, she looked beautiful, innocent and pained. Soon after the press conference, the US government designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism in reference to this case. With great concerns, the United Nations (UN) Security Council held an emergency meeting. She was sentenced to death by the South Korean court, but was immediately granted a special pardon by the government.

However, troubling questions about the truth began to arise: there were no dead bodies and the black box was never recovered. No proper wreckage of the plane was recovered either. Furthermore, the bomber’s statements had substantial contradictions that later resulted in reinvestigation campaigns by family members of the passengers; subsequently, the government reopened the case twice. It was also revealed that her first confessionary words during the investigation - ‘Sister, I am sorry’ – were made up by the South Korean spy agency as part of the government’s propaganda strategy. Meanwhile, a film based on the official findings was released in which she was described as a ‘virgin terrorist’. Since then, she has been a time bomb at the centre of the controversies and sensitivities on the Korean peninsula. Her name is Hyunhee Kim.

With a virgin terrorist story

This book aims to put forward the idea of fictional International Relations (IR) and to engage with feminist IR by contextualising the woman spy case in Korea. To put it simply, the book is about how to use imagination in IR and how to take gender as a worldview in the field. The above, virgin terrorist, story is puzzling enough to invite a detective-like investigation and what Cynthia Enloe (2004) calls ‘feminist curiosity’. Fictional imagination and feminist IR encourage one to go beyond conventional or standard ways of thinking; it reshapes taken-for-granted interpretations and assumptions. A standard interpretation of the case is terrorism-oriented, which is mainly about conventional security politics. For example, most of the related publications or academic research dealt with the case as an example of North Korea’s terrorism policy (e.g. DOS 1989; Oberdorfer 1997). In North Korean Special Forces, focusing on North Korea’s operations from 1984 to 1988, security analyst Joseph S. Bermudez (1998: 138) states that the most serious attempt to disrupt the Seoul Olympic Games was the bombing of KAL 858. The book problematises this view and joins narrative scholar Molly Andrews (2007: 11) in suggesting that a dominant narrative of events might be reconstructed as a different kind of story, once events are placed within a wider temporal approach. The case of KAL 858 is chosen to serve as an effective example of fictional IR and feminist IR scholarship, one which can be investigated through the research questions concerning gender, pain and truth that were suggested in the opening section. In doing so, this book will contribute to the field of IR in many ways, as will be discussed.

There are three main objectives in this book. First, I investigate in what way fiction-writing can become a method for dealing with data problems and contingency in IR. Second, I investigate how gender, pain and truth operate or interact in the case of KAL 858 and how this investigation can strengthen feminist IR in terms of intersectionality. Third, I investigate why the case of KAL 858 has been so difficult to study openly and thoroughly. The objectives are concerned with methodologies, concepts and the case respectively (but not exclusively). The first one is mainly about how to attend to methodological challenge in conducting research; the second is largely concerned with how to understand notions that enhance IR scholarship further; the third is related to (re)locating the case of KAL 858 as an explicit area of academic scrutiny. Alongside the research aims there are two main arguments that the book eventually attempts to make: one, that fiction-writing can be a method for IR (suggesting the potentiality of fictional IR) and, second, that the case of KAL 858 is gendered (showing the usefulness of feminist IR).

The basic and relevant discussion of the first argument is offered in Chapter 3. Fiction-writing is employed to deal with the methodological challenges of the book: the question of lack of data and the subsequent contingencies embedded in the case. As part of my writing strategy, before the main analytical chapters begin, I offer a fictional account of the case regarding gender, pain and truth. The reason for this is to provide readers with opportunities to reflect on each theme in advance in a flexible way, which is different from the relatively conventional way of writing in the main analyses. It can also be said that the fictional chapter might be taken as one way of making linkages between the main concepts, research aims and the case – by weaving stories. A character named Greys Han symbolises this attempt. She represents the families of KAL 858, who are mostly women. The name itself is part of the politics of pain and truth: Han means deep anger or grief in the Korean language and Greys comes from ‘grey’ referring to the vagueness of truth. Her story is juxtaposed with that of Hyunhee Kim as an attempt to make connections throughout the book.

With regard to feminist IR, the argument does not necessarily mean that pain and truth ‘explicitly’ have gender-related components. Throughout the book, the term ‘gender’ is taken as something to do with a gender-sensitive ‘lens’ or ‘worldview’ and, more broadly, as feminist-informed thinking (Peterson and Runyan 1993: 1; Keller 1995: xiii; Weber 2005: 89; Harding 2008: 114). For example, the theme of pain can be approached by emotion/body-sensitive feminist theorising. In this context, the book argues that the pain question can be placed within feminist IR research. Likewise, on the truth question, the aim of the book is not to refute the official findings; the point is to unpack the complex dynamics surrounding truth – more specifically how the official account has been executed as the truth – based on a feminist-informed investigation (for example, feminist accounts of objectivity or intersectional thinking regarding gender-pain-truth relations). At the same time, the book also investigates explicitly gender-related areas, such as ‘weak womanhood’ and ‘motherhood’ in the pain and truth chapters. To sum up, the book challenges one of the common misunderstandings about feminist research: it is not only about gender or an ‘add- women (gender)-and-stir’ approach, as Charlotte Bunch (1979: 20–1, cited in Boxer 1982: 682) characterised it. To paraphrase Christine Sylvester (1994a: 316), feminist research is about ways of activating various possibilities.

Before the book proceeds, I want to offer two basic explorations in the following sections: first, how fictional IR is different from related writings and, second, what the politics of gender, pain and truth refers to.

Fictional IR and related writings

In the field of IR, narrative approaches and, more broadly, an alternative way of writing seem to have gained growing attention in recent scholarship. Auto- ethnography might be taken as the first example. It is a way of writing and research, usually in the first person, that demonstrates multiple layers of consciousness, making connections between the personal, the cultural and the political (Ellis and Bochner 2000). The main aspect of this genre is related to the issue of the self. It is linked to the idea that researchers’ experiences can be used as a source in academic writing; it has been particularly developed by feminist writers (ibid.: 740–1).

Jean Bethke Elshtain, an influential feminist IR scholar who recently passed away, in August 2013, is a good example. Elshtain ([1987] 1995: 14) offers her ‘intensely personal’ account of her own political and scholarly formation in an early chapter of the critically acclaimed book Women and War. She eloquently and powerfully describes how her sense of international politics and images of civilians/warriors have been constructed since her teens. This intellectual and personal writing is based on a variety of sources, including Elshtain’s diary, films she watched and her family’s experience, amongst others. It ends with her son Eric Paul Elshtain’s registration as a conscientious objector in 1985 and Howard Hawks’ classic war movie Sergeant York, which is followed by the examination of war discourse throughout the rest of her book. Elshtain incorporates personal experience into an important piece of scholarly work and can therefore be remembered as one of the pioneering academics who paved the way towards narrative-personal writings in IR.

Roxanne Lynn Doty (2010: 1048) suggests that the self is always present in academic writing by virtue of its absence. Autoethnographic IR is an attempt to work on this problem of absence. It challenges conventional formats of IR writing that discourage authors who want to include their selves in their texts (Löwenheim 2010: 1029). By acknowledging that knowledge is relational and social (Brigg and Bleiker 2010: 791), feminist scholars and autoethnographers, in particular, share a similar understanding of knowledge production and writing processes. One of the criticisms made against autoethnography is the risk of self- indulgence. Indeed, the question of how to make the self have a presence without dominating the story is significant (Doty 2010: 1049). This seems to be a constant struggle.¹ However, the point I wish to consider is whether scholarly writing and debates could be considered as a way of storytelling (Brigg and Bleiker 2010: 790). In broad terms, fictional IR and autoethnographic IR can be regarded as an ally in this: they actively pursue the power of story and narrative.

Despite the similarity, however, there are differences between fictional IR and autoethnographic IR. First, there is a critical difference in terms of their position on fiction. Autoethnographic IR distances itself from fictional accounts or novels. Elizabeth Dauphinee (2010: 803), who presents an exemplary autoethno- graphic work and refuses to be a novelist, makes this position very clear by saying, ‘I don’t intend for my scholarship … to be dismissed this easily.’ Furthermore, she adds that ‘if I am a novelist, then I must be in the business of training a generation of novelists masquerading as social scientists behind me’ (ibid.). In other words, Dauphinee seems to make a case for maintaining a line between social scientists and fiction writers. To be fair, she carefully acknowledges the erosion of boundaries in a footnote (803). But still, according to Dau- phinee, novelists can hardly be academics as their evidence is anecdotal (817). This resistance against fictional accounts is shared by others. For instance, Oded Löwenheim (2010: 1031) mentions ‘a fictive reality’ as a method for protecting private information in autoethnography. Although I understand (and support) his good intention, I believe that the suggestion is based on a distinction between academic and fictional writings. By constructing a fictional account, an autoeth- nographic work could be legitimised as ‘academic’ writing.

Such a distinction might lead to unintended consequences. For example, it could underestimate various IR works that use fiction in their investigations (e.g. Weldes 2003; Neumann and Nexon 2006; Zehfuss 2007; Park-Kang 2011). As fiction does not fit into academic writing, in the end, IR works using fiction as a main source of analysis lack legitimacy as scholarly writing. I believe that IR autoethnographers do not intend this result, but the risk is nonetheless embedded therein. Fictional IR is an attempt to methodologically challenge this distinction. It embraces the power and insight of fictional imagination. More importantly, it stresses that there have already been traditions of fictional or imaginative accounts in IR scholarship. This needs to be noted as a key difference between fictional IR and autoethnographic IR.

Second, related to the above, there is a difference with regard to the main focus. Autoethnographic IR is deeply concerned with the self, while fictional IR is largely concerned with imagination. This does not mean that autoethnography is exclusively and narrowly focused on the self, excluding all other things – from my perspective, autoethnography engages in the self to make connections with others and the world. The self is regarded as a vehicle for exploring a socially and politically connected world (see also Doty 2010). What I argue is that fictional IR does not have to focus on the self, though using the self remains an option. Fictional IR might use personal experiences and place the self at the centre of the stage. That, however, is not the focal point of fictional IR. What makes autoethnography is the self, ‘auto’, which is not the case for fictional IR.

Nevertheless, I do not necessarily take the above differences or tensions as being negative. It could be regarded as a constructive tension to create a ‘partnership’. From a fictional IR perspective, there are still interestingly similar points that autoethnographic IR presents. Dauphinee (2010: 812) is concerned with the lack of verification and with speculative data; Löwenheim (2010: 1027) is interested in how to make others ‘feel’ IR by focusing on emotions. Fictional IR very much also cares about these issues. In this sense, I hope that conversations can be generated between what I would call potential allies. More broadly, the two both seek to formulate an alternative way of writing in the field of IR by actively using narratives and storytelling.

Another form of writing that is closely related to the self is autobiography. It is a politically and emotionally engaged mode of writing that mixes personal components with research expertise (Freedman and Frey 2003: 2). In the field of IR, the collective project Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR (Inay-atullah 2011) is worth noting. It challenges conventional academic writings that take the author’s absence as a prerequisite for objective and scientific formats. The project seeks to retrieve the ‘I’ and explicitly demonstrate its presence (6). In other words, it is concerned with ‘how personal narratives influence theoretical articulations’ (ibid.).

As the editor Naeem Inayatullah states, writing comes out of our own needs and wounds (8) and contributors engage in this proposition in their own ways. For instance, in comparing reading books about war and having a tangible experience of blood and death, Stephen Chan asks, ‘[s]hould academics talk and write on a basis so textually bound and so ontologically naive?’ (15). Lori Amy, for her part, talks about her fieldwork and seminar experiences (103–17). But the most interesting thing is the extent to which the contributors express their tensions about this unconventional autobiographical form of writing. Narendran Kumarakulasingam mentions nervousness about writing without a ‘map’ (30) and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson says that he just wants to tell ‘stories’ without trying to make any explicit connections, because that was why his previous attempts failed to produce a contribution to this project (161). Peter Mandaville, who writes the epilogue, addresses others’ angst and procrastination and confesses his own tension that led him to take the easier route to act as a commentator (196). Their testimonies demonstrate how difficult and experimental this form of writing is.

Like autoethnographic IR, autobiographical IR actively engages in the questions that Roxanne Lynn Doty (2004: 378, emphasis in original) asks: ‘Where is the soul in our academic writing? … Where are we as writers?’ The collection by Inayatullah directly situates scholars as storytellers (383). It attends to themes such as emotions and experience and makes the most of the power of story and narrative. In this context, autobiographical IR could be regarded as another potential ally to fictional IR.

However, just like autoethnographic IR, whose main focus is the self (’auto’), there is also a critical difference – that is, its position on fiction. Although the project acknowledges that ‘[a]cademic writing supposes a precarious fiction’ (Inayatullah 2011: 5), the editor makes it clear that the essays are not fiction (7). Rather, the project is described as both scientific and trans-scientific. It is important to note that the term ‘scientific’ is used, as this is one of the most common ways to distinguish academic writing from non-academic. Again, this is where fictional IR comes in. This book argues that fiction-writing can be used as a methodolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• A letter of survival
• 1 A mysteriously sorry story
• 2 The (too hot to be) cold war and KAL 858
• 3 Fictional International Relations
• 4 Fiction: Sister, I am sorry
• 5 Feminist IR towards intersectional politics
• 6 The gender bomb-shell in KAL 858
• 7 The pain mosaic in KAL 858
• 8 The truth trouble in KAL 858
• 9 Becoming an IR detective
• 10 Fiction as another conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index