Postcards of Korean women with exposed breasts, staged in a Japanese photo studio, 1890s. Source: The William Elliot Griffis Collection, University Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

Some of the most controversial photographs from the late nineteenth century are the sexualized images of Korean women. These images of bare-breasted Korean women were widely circulated during the period and criticized in later scholarship as evidence of an awful prism of gendered imperialism. Some of these images (like those above) were staged; others were taken outdoors in more natural settings. Many foreign observers of the period commented in their travelogues about low-class women’s loose, short jackets, which often exposed part of their breasts. Today the practice of wearing loose upper jackets and the consequent exposure of breasts is recognized as a functional as well as a psychological sign of motherhood. In practical terms, the fashion eased frequent breastfeeding of babies, in particular baby boys, in public. The male-centered Confucian society valued male infants much more highly than females, and breastfeeding boys in public was a point of pride. Some images staged women of all ages indiscreetly revealing their breasts, as seen here. These visual documents placed Korean women completely out of cultural context and objectified them as powerless sexual beings living an exotic, premodern life, a lens through which Korea itself was also gendered vis-à-vis the masculine West or Japan.