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AGONY IN PROSPERITY: The growing participation of women in highly conservative religions around the world has presented a fascinating sociological "puzzle," raising some important issues in religion and gender. Why do so many women, across classes and cultures, enthusiastically embrace religions whose beliefs and practices seem designed to perpetuate their subordination? Recently, a number of social scientists have begun to address this topic, with studies ranging across a variety of religious and cultural settings, including those of evangelical Christian and Orthodox Jewish women in the United States, Pentecostal women in Latin America, and traditionalist Muslim women. Even so, the absence of a more culturally wide-ranging research has left our understanding less than fully developed. My study is an ethnographic investigation of women's involvement in highly conservative evangelicalism in contemporary South Korea. In recent decades, South Korea has witnessed an extraordinary level of evangelical participation by women, especially those of the middle class. Based on in-depth fieldwork I conducted in two Protestant churches for a year and a half in Seoul, my study seeks to deepen the understanding of women's continued attraction to religious traditionalism in the modern world by analyzing its meaning and impact in this unique and under-studied cultural setting. Evangelical Protestantism was introduced in Korea by a group of American missionaries in the late 1800s. After growing in fits and starts during the period of Japanese occupation (1910 to 1945), evangelicalism exploded in South Korea in the three decades since the beginning of the 1960s. Together with Catholicism, evangelicalism had, by the late 1980s, surpassed Buddhism to become the largest religious group in the country, comprising some 25 percent of the population. Evangelicalism in Korea, however, is not only notable for the rapid expansion of its membership, but also for the mammoth size of some of its churches. By the mid-1980s, the world's largest church was located in South Korea—Yoido Full Gospel Church (a church with an estimated half a million members)—as well as the world's largest Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. One of the most notable features about Korean evangelicalism, however, has been the predominance and centrality of women within the churches. Women not only make up the majority of church membership—about two-thirds—but what has been truly remarkable about the religiosity of Korean evangelical women has been the particular fervor and dedication with which they have approached the religion since the beginning, and their pivotal contribution to the church's growth. But despite this fact, the subject of female involvement in Korean evangelicalism has hardly been tackled. Recent analyses of women and traditionalist religions have focused on two major issues: women's motivations for religious involvement, and the impact of this involvement on their lives. Regarding the first issue, most analysts have interpreted women's turn to religious traditionalism in the contemporary world as a response to the problems and tensions of modern family and gender relations, as these have been experienced in individual societies. Women's recent turn to religious conservatism in the United States, for instance, has been seen as their attempt to deal with the confusion and instabilities of the post-1960s gender and family order, while women's attraction to conservative Protestantism in Latin America has been viewed as their effort to cope with poverty and the breakdown of the family structure brought about by the machismo culture. In both cases, traditionalist religions, with their clear rules and resources for reordering and reconstituting the family, have been seen as highly appealing to women. In their treatment of the religions' impact, many of these studies have, however, highlighted something more unexpected: the surprising role these religions play for women as resources for gender negotiation and struggle. In the American evangelical and Orthodox Jewish contexts, some researchers have shown, for instance, that female submission, far from being a simple capitulation to patriarchy, often represents women's "conscious" and "strategic" efforts to pursue their domestic interests and renegotiate marital relations, while others have brought to light the ways in which women's religious views and practices are actually informed, and even transformed, by feminist perspectives.1 Studies of Latin American Pentecostal women have been particularly notable for emphasizing the "feminist" dimensions of women's religiosity, focusing on Pentecostalism's effects on transforming gender relations, especially by reforming male behavior. Indeed, one scholar has gone so far as to call Colombian evangelicalism a "revolutionary" and "strategic" form of female collective action, even more effective in some ways than Western feminism in raising female status and altering "sex role behavior." Through my study, I seek to help deepen the understanding of this subject matter and further its theorization. Although recent interpretations, with their attention to the issues of female agency and dissent, have given us a more complex framework in which to understand women's religious activity, it's not clear how useful they are in comprehending a wider range of cases. What I will illuminate, through my investigation of Korean evangelical women, are the ways in which the character of women's religious involvement takes shape within the context of a distinctive patriarchal system and its contradictions. In addition to showing how a special set of gender dilemmas faced by Korean women sets the stage for the unique forms of their religious appropriation, I will account for the ways in which the particular complexities of feminine subjectivities as constituted within the Korean family and gender system shape the nature and consequences of women's religious engagement, which are highly contradictory. My argument, then, runs roughly as follows: I suggest that a good place to begin understanding the recent conversions of South Korean women is to view them as women's response to a crisis of family and gender in contemporary South Korean society—more specifically, the contradictions of the modern Confucian-patriarchal family. Rooted in many ways in the problems of South Korea's recent social and cultural transformations, these contradictions have posed particularly severe dilemmas for women. Within this context, I will show that one of the most important roles played by evangelicalism for women is as a spiritual and institutional resource for coping with and resisting domestic conflicts, although women's efforts to resolve these conflicts also result in their serious recommitment to the principles and practices of the traditional family. Given that the patriarchal family is so much the source of women's current problems, this appears particularly ironic. In examining the meaning of women's submission in the Korean context, I suggest that while submission, as highlighted in some of the other cases, may indeed be viewed in some ways as a kind of strategy—especially for negotiating domestic relations—insofar as submission also involves dimensions of powerful normative consent on the part of women, it is also something far more complex, requiring a closer exploration of women's motivations. In the final part of my presentation, I explore the issue of women's "consent," focusing in particular on the nature and source of Korean women's conservative desires for preserving the existing family structure, as these are shaped within the ideological and structural configurations of the Korean family and gender system.
In the last few decades, South Korea—along with the other so-called "Asian Tigers"—has become noted for its economic achievements. Since embarking on an intensive export-led industrialization in the early 1960s, South Korea has emerged from the rubble of the Korean war (1950-1953) and the socioeconomic distortions of 35 years of colonial rule under Japan to become an ostensibly prosperous and modern nation. But despite these successes, the single-minded pursuit of development has had its costs; it has engendered a society characterized by tremendous cultural contradictions, rooted particularly in acute conflicts between the forces of what one might call "tradition" and "modernity." Such contradictions are nowhere more apparent than in the realm of gender and family. Although a great deal of change has occurred in the sphere of family and gender in the last few decades—especially with the decline in fertility rates, a trend toward the nuclearization of the family, and the spread of Western values—it is currently an arena characterized by an enormous degree of internal tension, tension that is kept alive both by the conscious policies of the state and the endurance of the traditional culture. One major source of such tension has been the increasing discrepancy between the powerful norms and demands of the contemporary patriarchal family—on the one hand those that strictly support traditional gender roles, the maintenance of gender hierarchy, and the privileging of parent-child relationship over that of the married couple, and on the other the ideals of more modern gender and family relations. While such a situation generates conflicts for everyone involved, it has become a particular source of dilemmas for women. In the last few decades, Korean women's unprecedented participation in both mass and higher education has produced some important changes in their basic status and outlook. Reflecting Korea's ongoing preoccupation with educational attainment—some might call it "obsession"—Korean women, along with the men, have become an exceptionally well-educated population: While both male and female literacy rate is almost 100 percent in South Korea, as of 1990, almost 25 percent of women were enrolled in institutions of higher education, along with 50.8 percent of men. Despite these changes, Korean women find themselves caught in a family system that, while modernized in certain respects, still subjects them to a remarkably traditional set of ideals, norms, and demands, generating a set of acute contradictions and conflicts in their domestic lives.2 Let me begin with two conversion narratives, offered to me by a couple of church members, which express some of these central conflicts and dilemmas. What was really interesting for me was that when I asked women to tell me how they became involved in the church, what I generally got were stories like these, hours and hours of narratives about the details of their domestic lives and problems preceding conversion. The first narrative is from Mi-Won, a 45-year-old college-educated housewife, with two children.
What happened was that upon marrying, I had to live with my husband's family. This meant that for 13 years, I had to take care of all of my husband's family members, all 14 of them. To make things worse, my mother-in-law became seriously ill. Of course, being that my husband was the only son, everything became my sole responsibility. And because she was sick, I also had to take charge of the entire household. Then I had babies of course. So as you can imagine, from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until I went to bed, I had no life of my own. But because I was so young when I got married, I thought that this was how it was for everyone—I just didn't know any better. And I was so fragile in mind and emotion that I tried to accept everything. Well, after about 13 years of this, I went into a deep depression. I couldn't eat, became totally anxious and nervous. But I couldn't tell anybody. I secretly saw shrinks by myself. Then one day, there was a deacon of a church near me and I received an invitation from her to go to church. What struck me about her was that she was always saying that she was happy, and that she had no fear of dying. So I asked her why she believed this and she said it was because she knew that she was going to heaven. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about, but the statement that she had no worries intrigued me, and I started going to her Bible study.
But things didn't turn out that way. From the beginning, my mother-in-law treated me very badly. When my husband was sent abroad for a year by his company, she started treating me worse, finding all kinds of fault with me. My mother-in-law has a horribly sharp tongue; she is the type of person who just spits things out without thinking of the consequences, how it'll hurt other people. I have the opposite personality. I tend to keep things to myself because I am afraid to talk and afraid of how it'll affect other people. And you see, my husband, he always took his parents' side from the beginning. You've got to understand; my husband is the most traditionally Confucian man. When we first got married, he said to me that his parents were like his limbs, irreplaceable and with him forever, but I was like clothing, disposable and interchangeable. My husband's way of thinking is that the wife is an inferior member of the family, so there is no need to respect a woman. He just did whatever he wanted. And his personality—it gets more difficult to deal with the longer I stay married to him. . . . But I am the only one who accommodates. It's so hard for me. I still have so many scars from him, do you know what I mean? (And I won't get divorced either. . . . If I got divorced, it'll follow me around for the rest of my life.) So you see, without God, I wouldn't be able to continue with my life, I couldn't live. One of the identifiable consequences of women's education and the recent ideological transformations of Korean society is women's enhanced expectation for a better family life, one based on greater equality and spousal respect. Conflicts arise, however, when daily realities of married life that women encounter upon marriage clash with their expectations. Although most Korean women still enter marriage fully accepting of their marital obligations, many women find that companionate marital relations are difficult to achieve, especially when their marriages were arranged or semi-arranged with men with whom they turn out to be incompatible. Profound disappointments and conflicts often occur when women discover that their spouses are a great deal more "traditional" than they had anticipated, and for the majority of women, conflicts with mothers-in-law still represent a major source of personal suffering, as do the demands of the day-to-day burdens of a Korean marriage, which often requires a great deal more sacrifice than women were prepared for. Furthermore, subtle changes in female upbringing and socialization in recent years don't seem to prepare women adequately, psychologically or practically, for the kinds of obligations they are expected to fulfill upon marriage, producing what one observer has called "the marriage shock." The problems of Korean women—which center ubiquitously around the themes of loveless marriages, intense conflicts with mothers-in-law and husbands, and stresses of unexpected domestic burdens—are, then, all expressive of some of these fundamental contradictions of the modern Korean family and gender relations. While conversion is a highly complex process involving an interaction of various factors—religious, psychological, and social—my findings strongly suggest that these experiences of domestic crisis constitute a major background factor that plays a large part in predisposing women toward conversion.4 Another important aspect that lends support to my interpretation are the surprisingly frequent accounts of short- and long-term illnesses that women talk about as having preceded their church attendance. These illnesses—which range from conventional diseases such as tuberculosis to various types of psychosomatic disorders, such as migraine headaches, stomach ailments, facial and bodily paralysis, fainting spells, and claustrophobia—are often those that the doctors are unable to diagnose and usually chalk up to "nervous disorder." While no one said that they began going to church in a direct attempt to cure these illnesses, most women certainly interpreted their physical problems as symptoms of their domestic anguish that they felt had to be addressed, and they turned to the church especially after other methods to cure themselves had failed. As one woman related:
In what follows, I will explore two central aspects of women's religiosity—spirituality and institutional participation—and discuss the role evangelical religion plays in women's domestic struggles.
One important way to understand how evangelicalism helps women negotiate their domestic dilemmas is to examine their spiritual lives. In recent social scientific studies of women and traditionalist religions, the role of spirituality—particularly as an emotional and psychological resource for women—has been rather under-explored (with some notable exceptions). For Korean evangelical women, however, my evidence overwhelmingly indicates that spiritual experience, which lies at the heart of evangelical women's religiosity, is at the center of their efforts to deal with their problems, especially as a vehicle of emotional release and healing. I will describe three major ways by which these are achieved. Religious conversion, in general, is understood as a process involving a fundamental transformation of a person's worldview and identity, but for Korean women, the first and most important step in conversion begins with what I call "opening up." As a believer begins to forge an individual relationship with God, "opening up," as I describe it, is a process in which one learns, for the first time, to reveal one's inner self and concerns to God, seeking God's help in dealing with them. For women whose psychic distress has its source as much in the silent, long-term repression of their sufferings as in the problems themselves, this act of release appears to be tremendously significant in their efforts to achieve healing. For Korean evangelical women, prayer—continually stressed by the church as one of the most central activities to being an evangelical—is one of the primary vehicles by which such release is pursued. Whether carried out individually, or in group contexts, for instance in numerous gatherings held throughout the week in a typical Korean church—such as daily dawn prayer meetings, all-night evening prayer services, fasting prayers, or even prayer gatherings held in special retreats located outside of the city—prayers serve as an important medium of ongoing emotional release and self-expression for women, as well as for pursuing charismatic experiences. As one woman said to me: "I found a God who responds to all my cries, however small, a God that watches over me, who consoles me when things are difficult and painful. I always felt so pressed down (neulida) and had no means to express myself, but now I can." In Korean churches, such "opening-up," is pursued, however, not only through prayer, but through group settings as well, such as cell meetings. Cell meetings are weekly, typically gender-segregated gatherings held in the homes of church members for the purpose of Bible study and fellowship, central to most Korean churches as a way of fostering small group interaction and interpersonal bonding among members. What I have discovered was that for women, these weekly gatherings were often essential as a venue for enabling collective sharing and emotional ventilation.5 For Korean women, an important source of healing lies in another major part of the conversion process, namely, self-surrender. In evangelicalism, the act of surrender is generally considered a crucial turning point in the conversion process, but for Korean evangelical women, I have found that surrender has particularly important implications for furthering the healing process. One of the notable aspects of the concept of surrender in Korean evangelicalism is its exceptionally pronounced emphasis on the notion of self-abandonment, that is, the idea of a total relinquishment of the self and one's will to divine control, along with unquestioning obedience.6 While the detractors of Korean evangelicalism have claimed that such beliefs lead to dependent self-conceptions among women, I have found that for many of them, the act of surrendering, especially through the act of "entrusting" everything to God, held key significance as a way of attaining profound psychic unburdening, especially from daily worries and problems.7 The third aspect of the conversion process that is pivotal to the healing and coping efforts of Korean women is the experience of divine love. In evangelicalism, to be reborn signifies a reconstitution of identity, most importantly as someone who learns to live in the knowledge and experience of God's love. But while the felt experience of God's love can be salutary for any believer, one reason that this seems to be so important for Korean women is that it appears to fulfill a crucial emotional need in their lives: the need for love and emotional intimacy. In my research, I have found that a major source of psychological injury for many Korean women is the problem of emotional deprivation in marriage, especially the felt absence of marital love, intimacy, and spousal respect, all of which reflect the realities of arranged or semi-arranged marriages that are still pervasively practiced in Korea, set against women's expectations for conjugal love. For many women, the experience of God's love facilitates healing both by alleviating emotional pain and through a kind of ongoing, empowering experience that helps transform their sense of selves—for example, by bringing about an enhanced sense of self-worth, confidence, and inner autonomy that better equip them to deal with their domestic situations and defend against emotional harm. As one woman said: "You know, I never felt like I received much love from anyone. But this was all compensated for by God. For the first time in my life, I felt loved, blessed, and special."
Another major aspect of Korean women's religiosity that functions as a critical resource for domestic coping is institutional participation. For anyone who attends a Korean church for any length of time, one thing that becomes obvious fairly quickly is the role the church seems to play as the locus of female social gathering. Indeed the church is constantly buzzing with women's activities, and women come together in the church every day for a dizzying array of reasons: to attend Bible classes, choir practice, prayer meetings, and special seminars, and to volunteer for church tasks and evangelizing missions. According to my sample, it wasn't unusual for women to come to church five or six times a week, and for many women, it formed the center of their social lives. Now, Korean women have always been, and are, undeniably subordinated within the church structure; not only do women still not have the right to be ordained in the majority of the denominations, aside from a limited range of lay leadership roles, such as deaconships, women are generally kept from positions of higher authority and relegated in many cases to support-level tasks, laboring under the image of, as one observer put it, "helpers (bojo-ja/do-um baepil)" and "service workers (bongsa ja)." In fact, many women would privately complain to me of being treated by the church as just a "herd of kitchen slaves," in one woman's words, forced to do the same things in the church that they do at home, like clean and cook. One woman said to me: "You know, I come to church to get away from home. And what do I have to do here? Same things I do at home." And working the kitchen, in a typical Korean church, is no small matter because after every Sunday worship service, women have the task of preparing, cooking, and serving a full-course, hot lunch for all of the congregants, which often number in the hundreds, and of course, cleaning up afterward. Another woman referred to her gender as the "army of laborers for the church." Despite this, what I have found is that church participation is a meaningful activity for so many women because it also represents an important set of "opportunities," especially for attaining social autonomy and empowerment. Although there is little doubt that most women go to church with the genuine belief that they are pursuing God's work, one of the most important "latent" institutional functions of Korean churches is as an extra-domestic, female-centered community that serves as a crucial source of female autonomy. For many women, this was very significant. Not only did attending church provide a measure of respite from domestic pressures and demands—many women actually described the church as a place of "escape" from home—it was also an important means of combating domestic oppression. For instance, one woman with a history of chronic illnesses that she interpreted as arising from marital suffering convinced her husband that the only way her illnesses would be kept under control was for him to let her attend the church whenever she wanted to, and she did, spending almost all of her time outside working hours in the church and becoming known as one of the most devoted members, even converting her husband later on. Another important way church participation helps women deal better with domestic challenges is by serving as a means for exercising non-domestic talents and skills. Although married Korean women continue to derive considerable satisfaction from their domestic roles, it's not difficult to see, especially for those who are well educated, that the restriction of their energies to the domestic arena is often a source of much hidden frustration. In fact, one of the things I distinctly sensed from my conversations with a number of women was an underlying but pervasive sense of disappointment from thwarted ambitions. So even though women are often consigned to support-level roles in the church, and advised, as one member put it, "to be quiet and do as one is told," church work nevertheless provides important opportunities to pursue extra-domestic achievement, even to "exercise the mind," particularly in a society where there are few other such avenues available for women outside the domestic arena. Becoming a leader of a cell group, for example, is one role that serves in particular as an important means of fulfillment for many women, especially as it allows them to exercise leadership abilities and acquire a certain degree of prestige within the church. In some churches, where being chosen a cell leader requires intensive training and study, it is seen as a particular sign of achievement. For other women, performing church work, however menial, is experienced as significant because it becomes an important source of recognition and reward within the church. Indeed, many women told me that receiving "recognition" from others, but most of all from the pastor, was one of the leading motivations for enthusiastically taking on church work, even if they often felt overburdened and exploited. My distinct impression was that for most women, receiving recognition within the church was so meaningful because it was a way of getting validation for things achieved outside of the home, and a way of feeling compensated for the lack of appreciation many often felt at home. As one woman observed:
One of the most perplexing questions about the religiosity of Korean evangelical women is the willingness of so many of them to re-embrace the principles of the traditional family as a domestic solution. Given the fact that the patriarchal family is the source of so many of women's current problems, and that the ideology of gender and family advocated by the Korean church reflects a particularly traditionalist, in many ways a culturally specific, interpretation of the Bible—that is, one that tends to reaffirm the basic principles of Confucian gender relations, including the idea of male superiority and female inferiority, and the necessity of women's "obedience" and "endurance" as the fundamental principle of conjugal relations and pre-condition for domestic harmony—this phenomenon appears particularly puzzling. I would now like to turn to the question of women's submission, examining its specific meaning and implications in the Korean context. As has been noted in some recent studies, I found that in the Korean setting as well, we can, at an important level, start by understanding women's accommodation to religious patriarchy as a strategy, a means employed by women to improve their domestic situations that can have unexpected consequences. I have found, for example, that many women initially embraced submission (even if they weren't entirely convinced of it) because they saw it as an important means of reforming the behavior of others, especially the husband. The belief here was that through their own perfect adherence to the image of the virtuous female as held up by the church, the wives could "inspire" the husbands to change and behave better. Many women said, for instance, that through their own diligent effort to become more ideal wives, particularly by becoming more gentle and less assertive, they were successful in transforming what they described as "dictatorial," "self-centered," and "stubbornly Confucian" husbands to become more "respectful," "tender," and "open." Some women said that they were able to reform their husbands to become more domestic, which enabled them to redraw the boundaries of gender roles. For others, gender bargaining was pursued through more radical means, which turned submission into a weapon of passive resistance. For example, I have found that by employing a strategy of radical subservience—or what I also call "obeying with a vengeance"— submission became a subversive means of enforcing upon others, such as husbands or mothers-in-law, the debt of long-term gratitude. As one woman put it: "You know, if I didn't obey, and just ran off like I wanted to, would my husband have the gratitude he now has for me, for what I've endured in the past?" A strategy of perfect submission also becomes a weapon of internal resistance by enabling women to feel a sense of moral superiority, even gain greater domestic status and power. But insofar as submission in the Korean evangelical context also signals women's profound acceptance of the legitimacy of traditionalist ideology of gender and family—that is, of its inherent validity and legitimacy as the proper and effective principle for guiding and ordering the gender and family relationships in the world—viewing submission simply as a strategy, or as a kind of hidden gender struggle, is inadequate.9 Women's submission in the Korean context, in other words, is a highly complex process that involves dimensions of real normative consent to patriarchy as much as resistance, requiring a closer exploration of women's motivations. What I would like to do in the rest of the presentation, then, is to explore briefly the issue of consent among Korean evangelical women, and conclude by discussing the implications of my analyses for the study of gender and religion. In my view, one of the central means of comprehending Korean women's willingness to accommodate to patriarchy is to understand the sources of their conservative desires, especially for maintaining existing gender arrangements. On the first cut, we can say that women's interests in maintaining the status quo arise out of the constraints they face in society—for example, their lack of life options outside of marriage—which compels them to defend their places within the system. However, I have found that in Korea an important key to understanding women's resistance to change is to grasp how it arises, not simply from lack of choice, but also from women's positive desires for preserving the family system, desires that are shaped within the ideologies and structural configurations of the Korean family system and the particular gendered subjectivities to which they give rise. I will mention three aspects of this. One way to begin understanding the conservative yearnings of Korean women is to recognize their powerful, continuing attraction to, and identification with, traditional gender roles. Despite the intense forms of subjugation to which women were traditionally subjected in the husband's household, one of the distinctive features of the Confucian family system was the provision of certain well-defined opportunities and rewards for women within the domestic sphere. The most central of these were the tremendous value and power placed on women's domestic roles, especially as mothers of sons, which we can say has served as a kind of compensatory mechanism for women in an intensely patriarchal family system. Despite recent modernizing changes, the value and importance accorded to women's roles—especially as sources of reward, status, and identity—still holds true in Korean society today, rendering domestic roles highly desirable for women (despite the problems).10 In Korea, another important source of female conservatism can be found at even deeper levels of women's subjectivity.11 A central aspect of Korea's highly family-centered social system is the tremendous energy the society invests in maintaining family cohesion, a task for which women were traditionally given primary responsibility. Viewed as the "guardians of the household," Korean women were not responsible simply for meeting the physical and emotional needs of the family, but also for its ultimate integrity and survival. One consequence of this, as I see it, is that in Korea, women have, as a group, not only come to evolve intensely domestic- and family-oriented identities, but also an extraordinarily strong sense of moral responsibility and commitment to preserving the family structure, and to fulfilling their roles within it, which works in significant ways to countervail emancipatory impulses. In fact, along with frustration, one of the most common emotions expressed by Korean women in regard to their domestic situations is guilt, guilt over their sense of what they view as their failure to properly fulfill their roles as mothers because of marital conflicts and their feelings of unhappiness within the marriage. One final aspect of Korean women's desires regarding the family is related to another distinctive facet of the Korean family system, what I refer to as familism. In the Korean context, I define familism as an overriding centrality of the family to the organization and ethos of society, and by extension, to the welfare, status, and identity of its members. At the level of subjectivity, one way such a system for women is significant is that it is productive of a desire not only to defend the family but also to advance it as a unit. And given that Korean women have traditionally been, and still are, crucially responsible for the task of enhancing the family's well-being and status, women not only serve as active participants in maintaining the integrity of the family, but also as its staunchest promoters. When we view women's submission in this light, we can see it in a more complex way: Submission is embraced by Korean women as more than simply a strategy for resolving domestic conflicts, or even for furthering themselves within the family; it is a way of pursuing the deeply held goals of promoting family integrity, and fulfilling their obligations within it. When we look at the larger picture, we can then perhaps understand women's church involvement in the following way: as a response to a set of two distinct and conflicting feminine desires, one, to resist the oppressions of the patriarchal family, and two, to preserve its integrity. In response to these contradictory yearnings, the evangelical church serves a double role: While providing women with the means with which to cope with domestic distress, it enables women to fulfill their obligations via the family by revalidating their conservative longings and to combat their internal ambivalence. Although it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of the churches' efforts will be, it is perhaps this dual role of Korean evangelicalism, as both a vehicle for helping women negotiate their domestic frustrations and for re-domesticating them for the family, that has made it, for now, an effective instrument for maintaining the cohesion of the current family and gender system.
In conclusion, I would just like to say a few words about what I think are the main implications of this study for religion and gender. Most generally, I believe that what my research on Korean evangelical women has shown is the need to modify the present framework for understanding women and traditionalist religions, a framework that is based on a limited number of cultural cases. What we need, in particular, is to move beyond interpretative approaches that overly emphasize "instrumentalist" and "feminist" aspects of women's actions—approaches that are based on a narrow set of assumptions about women's interests and desires—to ones that can take into account a wider range of the motivations and consequences of women's religious participation. What I have illustrated with the Korean case is that where the ideological and structural logic of the family and gender system, and its specific problems, engenders a highly conflicting set of desires in women, the forms of their religious engagement and its consequences can be far more complex. More specifically, what we have seen in Korea is that while women's efforts to alter their situations through evangelical involvement can result, to be sure, in certain transformative consequences, these effects are, at the same time, countered in some important ways by women's willingness to cooperate in sustaining the family and gender system. In terms of gender, this calls attention to two major points: first, the necessity of moving toward a more culturally embedded approach to analyzing gender dynamics and transformation, and second, to a more complex model of feminine gender identity and subjectivity that can account for the ambiguities and contradictoriness of women's intentions and behaviors across societies, in particular the willingness of women to participate simultaneously in reproducing gender hierarchies and to resist them. This would involve moving beyond any simplistic notions about female emancipatory impulses, to addressing how the very meanings and goals of gender liberation might vary across social settings, and the ways in which women's actions are shaped by the complexities of feminine subjectivity and consciousness as these are structured within each culture. Kelly H. Chong was a Visiting Scholar at HDS's Women's Studies in Religion Program in 2003-04.
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