Is A Lone Room (Oettanbang) Labor Literature? An Intellectual Female Writer's Record of WorkingClass Women's Sexuality

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on Sin Kyongsuk's autobiographical novel, Oettanbang (A Lone Room), in which the protagonist factory girl aspires to become a writer. I argue that the protagonist achieves her dream by escaping from her status as a factory girl, the object of sexual violation and stigmatization, and by becoming a middle-class author representing the sexuality of the "factory girl." At the height of Korean labor literature in the 1980s, the sexuality of women workers was a taboo subject. Oettanbang arrived late on the labor literature scene and broke this taboo. There are repeated episodes in the novel where the author's former colleagues (factory girls) plead with her to write about their stories as well. I argue that the repetition of these episodes reveals the discontent of working-class women with intellectuals speaking on their behalf, as well as the author's own anxiety about appropriation in representing their sexuality.