ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

In contemporary Korean society, the language of hatred and exclusion has moved beyond the level of individual prejudice to dominate public discourse, especially around gender conflicts. Big-data analyses of major Korean news outlets over the past decade show that women and sexual minorities have remained at the center of hate discourse, while the circulation of hate has shifted from incident-centered reporting to structurally mediated diffusion through digital platforms. Against this backdrop, this article rereads the gyubang gasa Singajeon (申哥傳, “The Story of Sin-ga”) in order to elucidate the internal structures of hatred inscribed in the text and to explore the limited possibilities of coexistence that emerge therein. Focusing on the three main figures—the groom, the bride, and the mother Hanlimdaek—the study first analyzes how hatred circulates among characters. The groom, marked by grotesque appearance and sexual impotence, is reduced to a “voiceless body” and othered as an object of disgust. The bride, having internalized Confucian marital norms, transforms self-hatred into hatred of the Other as she displaces her own sense of pollution onto the groom. Hanlimdaek, whose aspirations for familial elevation become intertwined with conspicuous consumption, is ultimately stigmatized as the woman who destroys her household through luxury. Through these figures Singajeon reveals a totalizing structure of hatred in which all subjects oscillate between victim and perpetrator. The article then turns to the practices of compassion enacted by kin, nurse, and maid, which momentarily hold back self-destruction, and to the empathy of Buddhist monks who listen to and reinterpret the heroine’s story within a religious community. These scenes are read as articulating a “halfway coexistence” that delays but does not resolve the catastrophic effects of hatred. In conclusion, the article argues that Singajeon should be understood not merely as a tale of unhappy marriage but as a text that maps premodern emotional regimes of hatred and coexistence, offering a historical resource for rethinking today’s hate-driven discourse and for groping toward a language of coexistence.

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