title: Feminine Technologies, Women Users, and Female Bodies in South Korea, 1950–2000
Creators: name: Lee, Youngju
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2024

description: This dissertation investigates the active involvement of South Korean women with technologies related to three female bodily experiences: menstruation, contraception, and vaginal discharge, through the second half of the twentieth century. The technologies include not only intrauterine devices (IUDs), oral contraceptive pills, and tubal ligation, but also homemade fabric menstrual pads, disposable menstrual pads, tampons, spermicides, the rhythm method, douches, and so-called feminine washes. 
To this end, the term “feminine technology” is used as a conceptual tool and the concept of “affordance of technology” as an analytic tool. Feminine technology refers to material artifacts and methods associated with women’s biology. With this approach, the abovementioned mundane things and methods can be viewed as technology and ordinary women as users of technology. The materiality of individual female bodies differs from the ideal body imagined by product manufacturers and developers. Thus, users of feminine technologies must find the gap between their bodies and the body inscribed in a technology and adjust it accordingly, rather than simply buying and using it. 
The concept of affordance of technology and its mechanisms are employed to capture the nuanced interactions between female users and feminine technologies. According to the concept of affordance of technology, a certain technology does not force its users but instead nudges them by demanding and requesting certain actions. A user who chooses a certain technology that allows specific actions can accept such demands or requests from technology but can also reject them and select alternatives. Given such options, although the range of actions is always constrained by the material and sociocultural context in which the user is situated, the concept of affordance can lead to a better understanding of the relationship between users and technologies beyond collective decision-makers of a certain technology. 
Throughout the 1970s, as more girls became students and workers and their bodies moved beyond their homes, they chose manufactured disposable menstrual products instead of homemade menstrual pads. The new menstrual technology allowed them to handle their menstruation more conveniently. However, a preexisting idea that menstruation should be concealed shaped the pad as an artifact that requests a series of actions to conceal it from its users. At the same time, female users soon found out that they had to modify the portable and standardized menstrual products to suit their individual bodies. By the 1980s, most women, in particular female adolescents, considered menstruation a normal biological process and saw their menstruating bodies as vulnerable and even susceptible to stress and disease. In this shift, women adopted alternatives to deal with their menstruation against physicians’ advice and manufacturers’ expectations.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, through the national family planning program, the South Korean government promoted IUDs, oral contraceptive pills, and laparoscopic tubal ligation. Korean women who had already wanted to control their fertility willingly embraced these contraceptive technologies. IUDs and oral contraceptive pills allowed some women to conceal their contraception from their husbands and their parents-in-law, who sometimes opposed contraception. For couples who decided to have no more children, tubal ligation allowed safe, permanent contraception. However, the technologies brought changes, big or small, in users’ bodies—in other words, side effects. Women users either accepted the side effects, stopped using contraceptives, or found alternatives. In the 1980s, as more husbands assumed responsibility for contraception, vasectomies and condoms were added to the list of alternative contraceptives, which allowed married couples to decide on a suitable contraceptive technology among a broader range of contraceptives beyond just those for women.
From the 1960 to the 1980s, vaginal products called “feminine washes,” or “vaginal cleansers” appeared in South Korea. Their manufacturers selectively appropriated inconsistent medical discourses about the ideal vagina produced by experts and promoted these products as a technology that would allow women to treat illness, enhance sexual pleasures, or prevent disease, better than preexisting methods such as warm water used by women for vaginal cleansing. At the same time manufacturers appealed to women’s bodily experiences with contraception, menstruation, and changes in the vaginal environment. The establishment of the feminine hygiene product market in the 1980s was the result of women’s interpretation of medical discourse about the ideal vagina and their own bodily experiences in choosing these products. The fact that women readily abandoned these technologies when they considered them unsuitable for their bodies or returned to more fitting alternatives such as warm water, demonstrates that their choices were not simply uncritical adherence to advertising narratives.
The engagement of female users with feminine technologies shows how various technologies were interconnected and how users created a technological landscape in which several technologies co-existed. At the same time, the technological landscape, the shift in women’s social position, and the idea of their menstruating, fertile, and discharging bodies were mutually shaped. In this sense, by involving feminine technologies in active and creative ways, female users—in other words, ordinary women—participated in the fabrication of South Korean society.