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Forever Girls
Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood
by Jinhee Choi
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Book Presentation:
- First English-language monograph to focus on girlhood and South Korean cinema
- Expands the focus of South Korean cinema studies from a handful of art films directed by male auteurs to diverse eras and films, independent cinema, and works by women directors
- Employs new concepts not previously used in film studies, such as shelter writing and idleness
Forever Girls explores girlhood manifest in contemporary South Korean cinema within the conflicting socio-political forces that shaped the nation: coloniality, postcolonial and postwar traumas, modernity, and democracy. Author Jinhee Choi reorients the direction of current scholarship on contemporary South Korean cinema from patriarchy, masculinity and violence, to instead consider girls as a social imaginary.
Drawing on the depiction of girlhood from the 1970s as a reference image, including that of low-wage working-class girls, Choi explores the extent to which the form of girlhood represented in the millennial South Korean cinema still resonates with such an image. From the popular teen pictures and male auteurs' work of the 1970s; to a contemporary film cycle on military sexual slavery ("wianbu"); to Bong Joon-ho's girl trilogy; and to South Korean independent cinema of 2010s directed by women, Choi focuses on girls' sexuality, labor, and leisure, and demonstrates how girls in contemporary South Korean cinema are increasingly represented to have agency (albeit still limited); they are subjects who remember the past, experience the present, and envision the future, and whose interiority lies beyond their status as victims of sexual violence and national trauma. Choi further critically engages with the girlhood associated with unproductivity and dismissed as mere irreality. In contrast, she foregrounds how cinema could adequately mourn girls' deaths and grant them shelter and idleness as part of what is desperately needed: the very girlhood that has long been denied.
About the Author:
Jinhee Choi, Professor of Film Studies, King's College London Jinhee Choi is a Professor of Film Studies at King's College London, UK. She's the author of South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateur (2010) and has edited Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence (2018) and co-edited Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship (2014). She has published widely on East Asian popular cinemas, film and urban space, food and film, and philosophy of film in numerous journals and edited volumes.
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> From the same author:
Cine-Ethics (2016)
Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship
Dir. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey
Subject: Theory
Horror to the Extreme (2009)
Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema
Dir. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
> On a related topic:
The Late and Post-Dictatorship (2025)
Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea
Cinema under National Reconstruction (2024)
State Censorship and South Korea's Cold War Film Culture
The South Korean Film Industry (2024)
Dir. Junhyung Cho, Sangjoon Lee and Dal Yong Jin
Impossible Speech (2024)
The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film
The Korean War and Postmemory Generation (2023)
Contemporary Korean Arts and Films
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