Unmarried women's bodies and sexuality
Recently I have become interested in how one-person households and the number of never-married people have increased, but many such people have been implicitly and explicitly discriminated against and alienated. My hypothesis was that with regard to the body and sexuality, unmarried people, especially women, must be going through hidden problems. I decided to start researching perceptions of the body and sexuality through the cases of four unmarried women (two under 45-year-olds and two women above 60 years of age) through an in-depth interview from a feminist liberation theological perspective. I was very glad to get to know these four women so that I could share my own experiences with them and be positively influenced by them. We became like friends.
I tried to understand women’s bodies and sexuality positively and actively as a medium of divine creation and divine body in line with Lisa Isherwood, a preeminent academic in England. In Western philosophy, the traditional dichotomy of man and woman, mind and spirit versus the body and sexuality, and humans versus nature has long been prevalent in people's thinking. Women have been connected to the body, sexuality and nature, which are the inferior ones of each pair.
Such perceptions also apply to Korean traditional customs, too, as women have been discriminated against in almost every aspect of life, including their bodies, sexuality, minds and reasoning. The body is neither natural nor neutral. The body is differently formed and understood according to social, cultural, legal and gendered understandings. This happens from the very early days of people’s lives. Women’s bodies have traditionally been perceived as deprived, inferior, fickle, negative, dirty, seductive, and passive, as well idealized as docile, thin and beautiful.
Isherwood argued that so-called church fathers’ theology from the 2nd to 4th century, influenced by Greek philosophy of Aristoteles, developed very limited and negative views of the body, woman and food. Further, she said that the image of God or divinity in the Western culture is nothing but the embodiment of unchangeable, hard, upright and hegemonic masculinity.
Only in the 20th century has Western thought and theology begun to discuss the body in ways that give it positive significance, affected by the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead, affirming the body as a medium of divinity and criticizing traditional negative perceptions of women’s bodies.
Many women have been objectified and separated from their own bodies in various ways in modern society. Many women experience not self-esteem or self-love but self-denial and self-hatred, bent on limiting food or obsessed with losing weight, trying to have or maintain a thin body.
In this context, the four unmarried women I interviewed have shown dissatisfaction, resistance, giving up and frustration about their own body and sexuality for many reasons. Nonetheless, all four said that they are generally satisfied with their lives as unmarried women. One woman told me that she has seen so many married women who are not happy because of reasons ranging from raising children by themselves, money problems or tough relations with their in-laws or family. I think that unmarried life is not something negative or a passive deviation from the rule, but one positive, active way of life among many ways of life. Thus, the visible and invisible alienation and segregation experienced by unmarried people must be overcome.
Lee Nan-hee studied English in college and theology at Hanshin University.