The North Korean Diaspora and Korean Popular Culture: Gendered Migration in Defector Memoirs and Screen Media

Abstract

This study examines the gendered dimensions of the North Korean diaspora as represented and circulated in Korean popular culture through defector memoirs, interviews, K-dramas, films and digital and social media, situating these narratives in the contexts of transnational memory, historical tensions and migration studies. A large wave of displacement following the “Arduous March” famine of the mid-1990s—during which hundreds of thousands died—is framed by the legacies of Japanese colonial rule, the unresolved Korean War and the peninsula’s enduring Cold War-shaped division. Since the early 2000s, women have represented over 70 percent of defectors to South Korea, yet their experiences of sexual violence, human trafficking and forced marriage in China—where they are classified as illegal migrants rather than refugees—remain underexamined. This study analyses how female defectors construct survival narratives and negotiate visibility across transmedia platforms embedded in the Korean Wave. These narratives illuminate the intersections of personal displacement and East Asian geopolitics, while digital media amplify complex forms of witnessing for global audiences. Applying frameworks of trauma memory, witness narrative, and transnational media studies, the article demonstrates how women’s migration stories in Korean popular culture challenge conventional notions of victimhood, heroism and national belonging.

Focusing on memoirs such as The Girl With Seven Names (2007) and In Order to Live (2015), alongside interviews, K-dramas, films, and digital- and social media, this study analyzes how female defectors construct survival narratives and negotiate visibility across transmedia platforms embedded in the Korean Wave. These narratives illuminate the intersections of personal displacement and East Asian geopolitics, while digital media amplify complex forms of witnessing for global audiences. Applying frameworks of trauma memory, witness narrative, and transnational media studies, the article demonstrates how women’s migration stories within Korean popular culture challenge conventional notions of victimhood, heroism, and national belonging.