7 Cultural Policy and the 1988 Seoul Olympics: “3S” as Urban Body Politics

Lisa Kim Davis

NATIONAL LEGITIMACY, SPORT, AND URBAN BODIES n the autumn of 1988, Seoul, the capital of South , also known Ias the Republic of Korea, played host to two large international sport- ing events, the followed by the . Considering that had a per capita gross national income of less than U.S.$3,000 at the time and had experienced major political ruptures and state violence over the previous nine years, it has been seen as a real triumph of hard work and collective will, if not a miracle (or a victory for heavy-handed governance, or both), that the events themselves both went off smoothly. The darker side of the preparations for the 1988 Olympics included the banning of beggars and street vendors from sidewalks near sports competition venues and mass evictions in the name of beautifi ca- tion, with its aggressive program of urban renewal. The evictions and demolitions prior to 1988 earned public condemnation at the United Nations and even fueled the start of a nascent housing rights move- ment throughout the region. Neither the achievements nor the misdeeds of the 1988 Games and their related preparations seem as exceptional, however, when viewed in their wider historical context. In fact, the were known from early on as the era of the “3S” policy—“sex, sports, and screen”—in dis- sident and student underground circles. It was only later that the var- ied and disparate events and activities comprising the three S’s could be seen in retrospect as amounting to something tantamount to a coher- ent cultural policy. Here it is argued that as the disparate events of 1980s cultural pol- icy played out, the Games of 1988 coalesced as a pivotal moment Cultural Policy and the 1988 Seoul Olympics 107 in promoting the production of a new kind of body in the national imaginary, which would gradually come to replace both the peasant farmer and the factory worker grunt as the ideal national subject. This new kind of abstract body was in sharp contrast to the unruly demon- strating masses that thronged the streets regularly and fi lled the eve- ning news throughout the mid to late 1980s as the Chun dictatorship came to an early demise of sorts in 1987. The new, idealized body could not be in military uniform after the June 1987 “velvet revolution” or “people’s revolution,” as it was sometimes called. The new body was disciplined and obedient, athletically fi t yet capable of sensual excess, and an eager consumer of leisure and orderly spectacle. Those who spoke of “3S” policy with dread and sarcasm more than a quarter cen- tury earlier might never have predicted the contribution of such an ad hoc cultural policy toward the shaping of an ideal subject for twenty- fi rst-century global, urbanized society.

FRAMEWORK The decades before and after the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games are domi- nated by the story of the city. Here it is argued that the cultural policy and concomitant remaking of the built environment of the 1980s turns out to have been a turning point in shaping a city once composed of rural migrants into of the most heavily populated urban areas in the world, with a permanent urban populace who embraced an urban style of living and an urban consciousness. While the new dictatorship fought and killed citizens in the provincial city of Kwangju while con- solidating its hold, it was in Seoul that the struggle for legitimacy had to be won. The cultural policy, or set of policies, of the 1980s was an important component of keeping a superfi cial hold on that legitimacy, and by the time of the Olympics the transfer to a more democratic type of national government was well underway. The Frankfurt School conception of culture industry comes immediately to mind when the cultural policies of the Chun dictator- ship are examined. If entertainment is folded into culture as described by Horkheimer and Adorno, then spectator sports can be included as part of the culture industry.1 The Olympic Games, professional sports, a new pornographic fi lm industry, and new types of pop music using a Western vernacular all prefi gure orderly urban subjects with fi t, sensuous, but disciplined bodies that both watch and play sports. In linking bodies, nation-building, and sport, there is yet much to decipher in the study of South Korea’s urban culture and society. The 1988 Olympic Games has become something of a sacred cow, usually discussed mainly in terms of the late-twentieth century opening to the international community, this time in the context of neo-liberal glo- balization economics. Post-structuralist and feminist analyses fl ourish, yet radical deconstruction of male and female has barely begun; Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) just became available in Korean transla- tion in December of 2008. Nationhood as a category is privileged over