Blueprints of Patriarchy
Gender, Space, and National Anxiety in Korean Cinema
Thesis
Domestic architecture in Happy End, House of Hummingbird, and Parasite functions as an ideological site where gendered norms are naturalized, negotiated, and sometimes transgressed. Drawing on Tim Cresswell’s concepts of place, doxa, and transgression, we show how spatial arrangements within the home—such as isolated kitchens, passive living rooms, and vertical hierarchies—materialize post-IMF anxieties about masculinity, care, and class. These spaces do not merely reflect socio-economic changes; they actively reproduce patriarchal values by scripting what is considered appropriate, visible, and possible for women. Yet moments of spatial disruption in these films also expose the fragility of these norms, making domestic space a contested terrain of power and resistance.
House of Hummingbird (2018)
Directed by Bora Kim
House of Hummingbird opens with Eunhee knocking on the wrong apartment door, calling for her mother. The identical doors reflect how Korean apartments, built for efficiency, erase individuality and emotion.
This uniformity embodies what Cresswell calls doxic space—a place so normalized it goes unquestioned. The mistaken knock becomes a quiet transgression, exposing how domestic space, though seemingly equal, often silences and disorients those within it.
Significance of corridor-style high-rise complex
Efficiency and speed
These apartments could be built rapidly to meet the demands of mass urbanization during Korea’s compressed development era.
The apartment featured in House of Hummingbird is the real-life Eunma Apartment (은마아파트), a corridor-style high-rise complex located in Daechi-dong, Gangnam. Built in 1979 during Korea’s post-industrial modernization boom, Eunma has become a deeply symbolic site—representing not just middle-class aspiration, but the standardized domestic imagination of urban life in late 20th-century Korea. The corridor-style apartment—where multiple units share a long external hallway—is a defining feature of 1980s–1990s Korean housing. This layout reflects both economic and ideological concerns of the time.
Surveillance and exposure
The shared corridor layout reduces individual privacy. Doors face each other; windows open to collective airshafts. Intimate life is always potentially visible, overheard, or judged.
Bedrooms
The bedrooms reinforce patriarchal family structure through spatial hierarchy:
The parents' room is close to the balcony—symbolically oriented toward the outside world (public life, status).
The brother's room has a distinct, spacious layout—his gendered authority over the household is reflected spatially.
Eun-hee and Soohee share the smallest room, near the front entry, lacking privacy or symbolic power. This physical proximity to the threshold (entry) ironically mirrors their liminal social status—always adjacent, never centered.
Eunhee and Soohee are quite literally placed near the exit but without access to escape. Their bedroom becomes a site of discipline. This effectively underscores how the domestic space trains them for emotional self-suppression and compliance.
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In this dimly lit shot, Eun-hee and her sister sleep on the floor, barely distinguishable from the darkness that surrounds them. The warm, brown-orange hue mimics comfort, but the overwhelming shadow suggests emotional neglect and invisibility. Eun-hee is placed in the corner—literally and figuratively sidelined within the family structure. The lack of distinct light isolates the room from the rest of the house, reflecting how the girls’ presence is contained and dimmed, rather than recognized.
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The lighting in the parents’ room is slightly brighter, but it is a congested light—artificial, yellowed, and heavy. It creates an oppressive warmth, illuminating the father sitting upright while the mother lies beside him. The light reflects authority and surveillance, not openness. Eun-hee, in the foreground and in shadow, is an outsider here—watching, not participating. The contrast between her silhouette and their illuminated figures underscores the power asymmetry within the home.
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Eun-hee lies beside her boyfriend in her brother’s bed, surrounded by soft natural daylight. The daylight washes over her face, but her expression is unreadable—quiet, suspended. The light here doesn’t provide clarity; it illuminates emotional ambiguity. Her position in a masculine-coded space hints at a quiet transgression.
Kitchen
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the kitchen is a physically marginal yet emotionally central space. One key scene captures Eun-hee sitting at the kitchen table after a brutal argument between her parents. As she quietly eats breakfast, she gazes into the living room, where her mother and father laugh together watching TV—as if nothing ever happened. This spatial framing is deeply symbolic: Eun-hee, seated in the kitchen, is both included in the domestic structure yet excluded from its emotional core. The open layout allows her to witness this carefully reconstructed normalcy, but it also underlines her alienation. The kitchen here becomes a site of emotional dissonance, exposing the disconnect between routine care and genuine intimacy.
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The kitchen is also where the family comes together—not necessarily out of affection, but out of obligation. Mealtimes are among the few shared rituals, and they occur in a space marked by silence and unspoken tension. Eun-hee’s mother, while emotionally distant, continues to prepare food—a minimal but consistent parental gesture. This performance of care reflects what Tim Cresswell might describe as “appropriate practice”—acts that appear nurturing but are shaped by social expectation rather than genuine connection. The kitchen thus reveals the invisible labor of motherhood, where warmth is maintained at the surface level but emotional needs remain unmet.
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Characters in the film often express vulnerability around the kitchen table. Eun-hee’s brother cries here—not in private, but in a shared, everyday space. This reveals the latent emotional charge of the kitchen, tied to food, survival, and maternal presence. In Korean culture, food symbolizes the will to live, and is closely associated with warmth and feminine care. But in House of Hummingbird, this association is complicated: food is present, but comfort is partial; care is performed, but connection is missing.
Living Room
The morning-after scene reflects how Korean society before the IMF crisis prioritized keeping things intact over questioning what was breaking. In the living room, the parents laugh together as if nothing happened. The violence from the night before is not addressed. It’s absorbed into the space and buried beneath routine. This is not reconciliation. It’s erasure.
The scene mirrors a larger cultural habit. In the mid-1990s, Korean families were expected to stay intact, no matter how strained. Emotional fractures were not talked about. Fathers remained dominant. Mothers endured. Children watched from the edges. The home had to appear functional.
The parents’ behavior reflects a social logic of denial: to keep the family—and the nation—“in place,” conflict must be swallowed, violence silenced, and appearances preserved. The bright, orderly living room becomes a visual metaphor for pre-crisis Korea: emotionally repressed, ideologically stable on the surface, but bracing for collapse.
Happy End (1999)
Directed by Ji-woo Jung
Radial-Plan Apartment Complex
The circular configuration of the apartment complex in Happy End—visually captured from a high-angle, almost surveillance-like shot—echoes the architectural logic of the panopticon, a term coined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham and later theorized by Michel Foucault. In this configuration, all units surround a central open space, giving the illusion that everyone can be seen by everyone else, at all times.
The film is set in 1999, immediately after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. This period saw a dramatic loss of male economic power and authority, while women like Bora increasingly became breadwinners.
This shift didn’t liberate women—it re-entrenched patriarchal surveillance in new spatial and psychological ways. Bora's husband, now unemployed, lingers at home, surveilling her routines; the home becomes a site of passive domination, where the man’s physical presence reasserts itself not through action, but through withdrawal, observation, and eventual violence.
In this context, the radial layout of the apartment becomes symbolic of:
The exposure of gender roles under stress,
The pressure to maintain respectability in tight living quarters,
And the way economic collapse converts public crisis into private discipline—particularly of women.
Kitchen
In this scene, Bora confronts her husband Minki, asserting that he should take responsibility for housework because she is the one earning income. Here, Bora sits facing the kitchen, reinforcing her position as someone who moves between economic activity and domestic oversight.
Minki, on the other hand, is seated closer to the kitchen, almost absorbed into it—spatially aligned with the feminized space of unpaid labor. His physical proximity to the kitchen underscores his economic displacement and gender role reversal in the wake of the IMF crisis.
But this spatial order shifts. After feeling guilty for her affair, Bora returns to her maternal duties, and the roles reverse. Now it is Minki who sits further from the kitchen, speaking about his plan to start his own business—a sign of re-entering the public, masculine domain.
Bora, with her back to the camera, faces the kitchen again. The camera captures this reversal without fanfare, but the symbolism is clear: the kitchen is not just a space of labor—it is a moral compass and gendered anchor. Who sits closest to it, and when, reflects not only emotional dynamics but also broader national pressures to restore traditional gender hierarchies disrupted by the crisis.
Bedroom
The bedroom is the final zone where order is restored by eliminating disorder. Bora, as an economically active, sexually autonomous woman, has become “out of place” in every sense of the word. Her death spatially re-contain her back into the private sphere—not as a mother, wife, or worker, but as a corpse. The home returns to its previous silence, and the patriarchal gaze reclaims the space through violence.
This spatial logic parallels the broader sociopolitical climate of post-IMF Korea, in which women’s increased visibility in the workforce was met with both necessity and backlash. The bedroom murder scene captures that ambivalence—progress punished, autonomy silenced, and crisis resolved not through negotiation, but erasure.
LIVING ROOM
Minki’s presence in the living room does not signify domestic authority—it signals domestic redundancy. He sits under the glow of a small lamp, surrounded by clean surfaces and carefully arranged furniture. Everything around him is still functioning. Only he is not.
Minki lies on the floor next to his infant child. This image is not about fatherhood. It's about the illusion of paternal presence. He is there, but he is not legible as caregiver or protector. He is structurally irrelevant to the post-crisis family.
The fact that he ends up on the floor, beside the baby, without resistance or rage, suggests that post-IMF masculinity in Korea did not respond to crisis with transformation. It responded with inertia. The burden of adaptation—emotional, economic, spatial—was displaced onto women, while men, like Minki, collapsed inward without naming the collapse.
Unlike women in the film—who move between rooms, between labor, between pain and endurance—Minki becomes a figure of stillness. His refusal or inability to move spatially reflects the broader inability of Korean post-crisis masculinity to evolve ideologically. His body remains at the center of the home, but he is no longer central to it.
Parasite (2019)
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
This window doesn't open onto a skyline or a courtyard. It opens onto a curb, where stray water collects and the only passersby are sanitation workers and deliverymen. The socks obscure the already limited light.
It reveals a world that has shrunk, where even light, air, and dignity must be rationed.
Bong Joon-ho uses the banjiha to dramatize a key truth about inequality in Korea: that people don’t just live in different economic classes—they inhabit different vertical layers of space. The Park family lives in a bright, expansive home on a hill. The Kim family dwells underground, half-submerged in concrete.
Kitchen
Lack of Shared Meals Reflects Disjointed Family Routines
In Parasite, we rarely see the entire Kim family gathered at the kitchen table. Most scenes show individuals—often Ki-taek—sitting alone, eating or reading. Even when all four family members are present, they are shown eating quickly, not enjoying prolonged family time. This suggests that the kitchen is not a space for shared routines or bonding, but for necessity.Multipurpose Use of Kitchen Area Indicates Space Constraint
The kitchen area is heavily multitasked. Ki-taek uses the table to read forged documents; earlier, it’s where they fold pizza boxes for income. It doubles as a workspace, which tells us that the apartment’s design forces functional overlap—cooking, eating, and working all happen in the same small spot.Kitchen Placement Limits Social Interaction
From wide shots of the semi-basement unit, we know the kitchen is tucked into the back corner of the apartment. It doesn’t open into a central communal space but is more of an enclosed zone. This layout restricts flow and reduces chances for spontaneous interaction. Unlike modern apartments where open kitchens connect to living spaces, this one fragments movement and visibility.
LIVING ROOM
Living Room as a Site of Labor
This scene shows the entire family folding pizza boxes together in the living room, surrounded by stacks of cardboard. This activity transforms what is traditionally a communal resting area into a makeshift factory. The floor becomes a workbench; the walls are lined with accumulated materials.
This setup blurs the boundary between domestic life and labor. The space that should offer relief instead enforces productivity. It reflects how low-income households are often forced to commodify every inch of space just to stay afloat.
Because there is no clear spatial boundary between labor and family life, this living room doesn’t nurture bonding the way a middle-class family space might. The family operates as a unit of survival, not as individuals with space to breathe or relate meaningfully. Their togetherness is driven by economic necessity rather than emotional connection.
BEDROOMS
1. Bedrooms: Lack of Privacy and Overlapping Functions
In the first and second images, the bedroom is not a place of rest but a space for multiple overlapping activities: sleeping, knitting, storing goods, and navigating daily tensions. The floor is used as a bed, workspace, and storage area. There are no partitions or personal boundaries, which reflects the collapse of individual autonomy in the face of economic precarity.
Implication:
The absence of designated, personal space undermines each family member’s psychological security and privacy. It also collapses traditional gender roles. The mother knits, the daughter lounges, and the son invades the space without hesitation—gendered uses of space dissolve into generalized survival behaviors.
Gendered impact of the IMF crisis reflecting spatial shifts in the domestic sphere
Living Room
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House of Hummingbird
The living room is a symbol of paternal authority. It is where the father dominates with presence and where conflict occurs under his gaze. It is centrally located, and movement through it reinforces the father’s visibility.
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Happy End
The living room becomes a site of collapse. The unemployed husband drifts in and out of it. He watches TV, he sleeps, but he no longer commands. His presence is ghostlike.
Women still don't claim it, but they now orbit it. It reflects their emotional labor: they clean it, they pass through it—but never rest there.
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Parasite
The living room has shrunk and flattened. It is barely distinct from the rest of the semi-basement. It holds a table, some bedding, a TV. It is not about presence—it is about survival.
No one owns it. The living room becomes a neutralized zone.
Kitchen
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House of Hummingbird
The kitchen is slightly removed from the living space. It is clearly a maternal zone, often isolated and dim. Women work there silently. It is a space of discipline, not expression.
The kitchen reflects hidden care work—central to the home and unacknowledged.
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Happy End
The wife, though economically active, is no longer confined to the kitchen. This reflects role reversal: the kitchen no longer controls the woman, but its irrelevance suggests that care work has been privatized or offloaded.
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Parasite
The kitchen is barely visible. The space shows that care labor has become mechanical/ The kitchen is part of the infrastructure of survival, not of family life.
Bedrooms
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House of Hummingbird
Bedrooms are ranked and separated: the father and mother share a room, the son gets his own best-positioned room, and Eun-hee shares a cramped space with her sister near the entrance.
Bedrooms reinforce gender and age-based hierarchy, keeping women on the margins.
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Happy End
The master bedroom is emotionally charged. It is where the wife takes control (sexually, financially), and where the husband's authority erodes.
The bedroom becomes a space of gender tension, where power shifts but cannot be sustained without consequences.
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Parasite
Bedrooms lose definition. Everyone sleeps wherever there’s room. Space is fluid and degraded. There's no hierarchy—only improvisation. Bedrooms no longer symbolize safety, rest, or privacy. They are sites of exhaustion, reflecting how precarity collapses all forms of emotional structure.
How to make it ideal.
Film-by-Film Floor Plan Limitations & Implications
Designing Resistance: Corrective Spatial Strategies
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Remove single-point focal objects (TV, desks, armchairs).
Use modular, circular seating.
Introduce multiple, soft light sources instead of a single overhead bulb.
Add threshold blur: connect the living room with the kitchen and dining area to reduce performative dominance.
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Place kitchen at the center of the home—not at the edge.
Open it up with a low island or a counter that allows interaction with other rooms.
Make space for seating in the kitchen, turning it into a social hub—not just a site of service.
Use windows and ventilation to ensure the kitchen isn’t a claustrophobic “labor cave.”
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Provide equally sized rooms for each child, with movable partition walls to accommodate different family structures.
Avoid “master suite” as a concept. Instead:
Two mirror-image bedrooms, each with access to a private or semi-private bathroom.
No “primary” parent ownership of space.
Introduce a shared multipurpose retreat room: reading, journaling, napping. Not attached to productivity.
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Use curtains, bookshelves, or half-walls to create zones of privacy without hard borders.
Allow for overlap—no room is “off-limits” to certain members unless for protection (e.g., trauma or rest).
Redesign bathroom access: private bathrooms, but not enclosed within master bedrooms. Avoid the territorial logic of en-suites.
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Create a “common nest” space: not a living room, not a study.
Quiet, soft-surfaced, with low lighting.
Free of tech. A place to cry, nap, talk.
Located in a central, but buffered area—like between two bedrooms or adjacent to kitchen.
IDEAL FLOOR PLAN
Why This Floor Plan Is Ideal:
A Spatial-Cultural Analysis
1. Centralized, Accessible Kitchen: Dismantling Gendered Labor
What we see: The kitchen is placed centrally with wide access to both the dining and living areas.
Why it matters: In Parasite, the kitchen is cramped and marginal, often used in isolation, reinforcing the traditional burden of domestic labor on the mother. In contrast, this layout encourages collective participation—cooking becomes visible and shareable, not hidden.
Impact: This diffuses the gendered expectation of food preparation and promotes shared responsibility and interaction across generations and genders.
2. Living Room as Communal Anchor: Encouraging Togetherness
What we see: A spacious, light-filled living room sits at the heart of social interaction, directly connected to both bedrooms and dining.
Why it matters: In House of Hummingbird, the living room is often emotionally distant or militarized (e.g., the father's scolding). In Parasite, the living room doubles as a workspace, not a space of leisure.
Impact: This plan reclaims the living room as a restful, bonding space, where power hierarchies flatten and all family members can co-exist comfortably—this resists the emotional hierarchy shown in Happy End and Parasite.
3. Two Bedrooms with Equal Access and Privacy: Rewriting Spatial Hierarchies
What we see: Bedrooms are positioned to provide privacy without hierarchy—neither bedroom is spatially privileged.
Why it matters: In Happy End, the master bedroom (and its attached bathroom) reinforces a male-dominated domestic order where the man sleeps, sulks, and kills. In Parasite, the family’s beds are fragmented—stacked, cornered, or improvised.
Impact: This design implies equal entitlement to personal space, resisting class and gender hierarchies encoded in private bedrooms.
4. Two Bathrooms (Near Bedrooms): Supporting Dignity and Autonomy
What we see: Bathrooms are conveniently located and private.
Why it matters: In Parasite, the elevated toilet is a source of humiliation, framed visually and narratively as degrading. Shared toilets in confined layouts erase bodily autonomy.
Impact: Multiple bathrooms restore a sense of dignity and self-care without constant negotiation of space. This is particularly important for caregiving, menstruation, and aging—traditionally feminized domains.
5. Common Nest & Multipurpose Room: Flexible, Non-Hierarchical Spaces
What we see: These transitional spaces (library, playroom, workspace) serve no singular function.
Why it matters: In the three films, there's often no neutral space—rooms are either oppressive (classrooms in Hummingbird), violent (Happy End), or over-utilized (Parasite). This layout resists that.
Impact: These in-between rooms allow occupants to redefine their use depending on emotional and practical needs—this supports care work, study, therapy, or play without assigning them gendered labels.
6. Open Sight Lines & Natural Light: Combatting Psychological Enclosure
What we see: Large windows, unobstructed sight lines, and soft materiality throughout.
Why it matters: Parasite’s half-basement visually restricts and socially humiliates. Happy End uses walls as emotional partitions.
Impact: This plan prioritizes openness—both literal (glass, no unnecessary partitions) and emotional (shared rooms, visibility)—which fosters empathy and defuses isolation.