Korea University

Lee Soyoung (Department of Law, Korea University) received her doctorate degree in August 2010.  From 2010-11 she will conduct post-doctoral research at the Center for Korean Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, as the recipient of the Blaise Pascal Excellence Award. She specializes in legal philosophy, in particular the social history and literary criticism of law, and legal anthropology. Her recent studies focus on the narrative of minorities: to disclose, to discover, and to recover yet-to-be unearthed subject issues of human rights through postmodern literary criticism and micro-historical methods.  Her doctoral dissertation was on adopting a postmodern mode of thought to legal studies, to the field of social history of law, and to the deconstruction of the ideology of paternal legal protection. In the next few years she plans to examine how fixing minority subjects to the role of stereotyped victims in social states is by itself an ideological effect, and how it shatters the polyphonic voice of minority subjects, confining them to refined political effects. She will examine problems of representation of child and adolescence narratives in legislation designed and provided for their well-being. She will carry out genealogical analysis of the legal discourse of protection, through which she aims to deconstruct the dichotomy of tradition/modernity as well as the hypothesis of suppression and the presumption of human right progress in the historical conceptualization of the healthy family. In addition she hopes to continue her research on literary criticism of law and literary works of young Korean novelists published in past decade, to illustrate the allegory of law as the father in literature of the time.