Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. xxii, 161 pp. (B&W illustrations.) US$80.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-7391-9025-8.
Youngtae Shin, a political scientist at the University of Central Oklahoma, conducts a social movement analysis of “secondary agents” in the democratization movement of South Korea (1970s–2000s). This focus permits Shin to move behind the front lines of primary agents (social movement activists and dissidents) and investigate the role played by wives and mothers in the care, support, and protection of primary agents. While these “Mothers of the Movement” initially engaged in the traditional role of family caretaker, they soon underwent transformations into political activists based on their encounters with the military state. Shin uses these encounters to challenge some assumptions within the social movement literature, as well as to provide a cultural and gender analysis of protest politics.
Based on over a decade of participant observations, interviews, opinion surveys, and primary document analyses, Shin’s study examines two social movement organizations (SMOs) founded by women (the Association of the Families of Democratic Movement and the Association of the Families of the Bereaved). Shin’s representation of these famous and anonymous “Mothers” provides an empirical voice that challenges two claims in the literature, namely that people join SMOs due to political beliefs, and that effective SMOs require professional organizers. In this case, most of the Mothers began their political activism seeking the recovery of their husbands or sons from jail or prison. Through meeting one another through these sites, the Mothers soon developed a political perspective on their family members’ arrests. While the Mothers often lacked formal education or professional expertise, they nonetheless formed SMOs that would engage in political activism for democratization and human rights.
In analyzing their stories, Shin argues the Mothers could conduct protest politics due to their capacity to wield the cultural armour of middle-aged motherhood. The Mothers applied moral pressure against state agents (police officers, prison guards, government officials) through cultural shaming. Rather than violate social and cultural norms against mother figures, many state agents complied or consented to their demands. When this form of moral pressure failed, the Mothers were not immune to using verbal, emotional, and physical power, as well. These moral and emotional strategies also worked with civil society in mobilizing resources for their SMOs. This cultural analysis of atypical political actors helps current scholars understand what can be gained when the research focus moves beyond “bean counting.”
While Shin’s findings represent a substantive contribution to the field, the monograph could have used additional editorial and peer review. Awkward sentence constructions and repetitive phrasings make for a rough read, while the attempt to blend three Romanization systems gives rise to numerous inconsistencies between Korean references in the text and bibliography. In chapter 7, “Mothers’ Stories,” Shin presents the written narratives of the Mothers divided by temporal divisions (1970s, 1980s, and 1990s). While one could argue the merit in letting the Mothers tell their stories across time, an academic audience expects some analysis beyond the diachronic presentation of raw data. Finally, more comparative attention to recent works focusing on women’s SMOs and political activism from Argentina to Palestine would have helped qualify some of her larger claims.
Twenty-eight years after the summer of 1987 and the overthrow of the Chun Doo-hwan military regime, Shin has added another layer to the events, moving beyond the public display of tear gas barrages and Molotov cocktails to the private networks of care and support that enabled the drive for democratization. This contribution provides social scientists a qualitative resource for analyzing how participants join, organize, and maintain SMOs based on cultural and relational networks. It also directs our attention to the emotional and cultural practices that enable non-traditional political actors to enact social change, even in the face of strong-arm states.
William Hayes
Gonzaga University, Spokane, USA
pp. 676-677