Beyond the Court: Basketball, Colonial Modernity, and Women's Bodily Agency at Sookmyung Girls' High School in Colonial Korea

초록

The sociocultural significance of women's competitive sports in colonial Korea is demonstrated through the basketball team at Sookmyung Girls' High School. Introduced by American missionaries and the YMCA as an educational tool, basketball was institutionalized within girls' secondary education as a collective competitive sport. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the 'contact zone', the basketball court is reconceptualized as an embodied contact zone where missionary modernity, colonial power, and women's athletic practices intersected. Missionary records, YMCA documents, newspapers, and school periodicals reconstruct the competitive history of the Sookmyung basketball team and analyzes how female athletes negotiated colonial modernity through repetitive athletic practice and public competition. The findings demonstrate that Sookmyung played a central role in institutionalizing women's competitive sports under colonial discipline and as a contested arena where forms of bodily agency and collective identity emerged. More broadly, extending Pratt's concept of the 'contact zone' shows that colonial sports arenas operated as embodied sites where colonial subjects negotiated modern identities through athletic competition.

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