Short-haired modern girls
Colonial Korean women’s fashion as the standards of civilization
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6060797 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Minju Kwon (0000-0002-9763-5429, Chapman University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 561-585 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of International Relations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1354-0661 • E-ISSN: 1460-3713 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661251322652 |
| OpenAlex | W4408480002 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 57 |
This article revisits colonial women’s contributions to constituting a new standard of civilization during the interwar period with a focus on fashion, specifically Korean women’s short hair. Existing scholarship on the standard of civilization has paid little attention to the agency of colonial women. Focusing on everyday politics through fashion, I argue that gendered actors, especially colonial women, constituted the standard of civilization through contestations over the appropriate conceptions and agents of modern civilization. By analyzing social debates surrounding women’s short hairstyles via periodical magazines and newspapers, I demonstrate that the so-called Modern Girls played a crucial role in interpreting and practicing the standard of civilization under multiple hierarchies—a non-Western polity, colonized nation, and patriarchal society. The Modern Girls advocated for short hair’s economic efficiency, hygienic benefits, aesthetic worth, and social values for women’s liberation as the standard of civilization while facing ceaseless social degradation for unfulfilling “genuine” modernity. This study expands the literature on the standard of civilization and Global International Relations by highlighting women’s agency in non-Western and non-imperial societies and recasting the plurality of modernity through women’s fashioned bodies
Civilization · Colonialism · Political science · Sociology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law
Women and States
What Is Global History?
The Global Transformation
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
The Expansion of international society
A Companion to Japanese History
The Modern Girl Around the World
Samson and Delilah Revisited
International Society and its Critics
Re-imagining International Relations
Contesting International Society in East Asia
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945
Beyond the Anarchical Society
From International to World Society
New Women in Colonial Korea
Civilization and Empire
Global IR Meets Global History
Global IR, global modernity and civilization in Turkish Islamist thought
The Politics of Hair and the Issue of the Bob in Modern China
Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity
Body politics, modernity and national salvation
The ‘Standard of Civilisation’ as an English School Concept
Carrying the Load of Civilisation
How to Problematize the Global
The Standard of ‘Civilisation’, the Expansion Thesis and the 19th-century International Social Space
Problematising the Global in Global IR
Process sociology, the English School, and postcolonialism – understanding ‘civilization’ and world politics
Why is there no gender in the English School
Refashioning Femininity in Colonial Korea
The standard of ‘civilization’ in international society
Fashion and the Fleshy Body
Civilization’ and its subalterns
Worldmaking after Empire
Gender and Modernity
Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China
Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds
Thinking past 'Western' IR
Fashion as Methodology
The Modern Burmese Woman and the Politics of Fashion in Colonial Burma
Cosmopolitanism and the Modern Girl
Splitting Hairs
Hair
| Highly cited | No |
|---|