Subaltern Women in Double Effacement - From Bhubaneswari to Sulli

This paper engages with Spivak’s approach to a gendered subaltern woman manifested in her reflection on the death of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri who lived as an oppressed subject in Colonial India as well as in the hegemony of patriarchy. According to Spivak, a subaltern woman’s experiences in the past and present is doubly effaced under the particular socioeconomic circumstances and long-lasting patriarchy. I compare the death of Bhaduri with the death of Sulli (Jin-ri Choi), a Korean celebrity who committed suicide in 2019 in South Korea. Prior to the analysis of the case of Sulli, I address a brief history of the term “subaltern” via Antonio Gramsci and Ranajit Guha. Then I describe neoliberalism as a continuing modality of imperialism in South Korea’s postcolonial era. Based on David Harvey’s research on neoliberalism, I will argue how rich celebrities could still be the subaltern in spite of their socioeconomic class. Hereafter, I will state the influence of the patriarchal hegemony that affected Sulli’s life and death to revisit Spivak’s question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”