From Side Streets to Center Stage: Reframing Street Food in South Korea
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 7th Seong-Yawng Park GRD ’65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies
Introduction
Street food in contemporary South Korea is vibrant, fiercely competitive, innovative, and performative, attracting both domestic and international audiences. Once undervalued and stigmatized as urban eyesores—and largely operated by women—street food has been transformed into fashionable cultural icons and trendy multisensory experiences. How did this transformation occur? This lecture examines the gendered history of street food, tracing its evolution through war, poverty, industrialization, and nation-branding within a neoliberal economy and a global media landscape. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis, it foregrounds the life histories of street food vendors to offer new insights into enduring and emerging gender dynamics amid shifting geopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions. By historicizing both continuity and change in the politics of gendered culinary labor, the lecture positions street food as a critical lens through which to examine the intersections of the private, the public, and the global.
About the Speaker
Hyaeweol Choi is the Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies at the University of Iowa and served as President of the Association for Asian Studies (2024–25). Her research interests span gender, empire, modernity, religion, food and the body, and transnational history. She is the author of Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (2020), New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (2013), and Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (2009). She is also co-author of Gender in Modern East Asia: An Integrated History (2016) and co-editor of Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Modern East Asian Gender History (forthcoming). Her current book project, “Food and the Life Politics of Domesticity in Transpacific Korea,” invites us to reconsider cooking and eating not merely as everyday routines but as powerful sites where the private, the public, and the global converge.