Female Diaspora and Shamanic Performance: A feminist reading on Jane Jin Kaisen's Community of Parting

Abstract

This paper aims to propose a feminist reading on the shamanic performativity of the folk tales of ‘princess Bari,’ which Jane Jin Kaisen(b.1980)’s film Community of Parting(2019) use as a central motif. Kaisen is a Danish visual artist who has consistently developed a body of work that draws from her own experience of transnational adoption and consistently gives voice to Korean women who have been excluded from historical memory. Community of Parting is an important work that attempts to write a counter-history of Korea's modern history, from the Japanese occupation, Jeju 4.3, the Korean War and division, the Cold War, industrialization and globalization, through the perspective of the female diaspora who were abandoned in those histories. This paper examines how diasporic women's repressed memories can be transformed into resistance activity by focusing on the myth of 'Bari' and the shamanic practice, which Community of Parting presents to confront patriarchal and hierarchical modernity. Whereas masculine forms of remembering and mourning are represented by memorials and commemorations, Kaisen's pre-modern women's religion, Jeju shamanic rituals, dismantles masculine boundaries and suggests an alter community that is temporary and fluid but mutually responsive to each other's grief. Through a feminist reading, this study aims to suggest the meaning and resistance of this feminine ethics of mourning and otherness.