Chaebol Affect: Emotional Capital and the Interiority of Wealth in Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid and The Taste of Money

Abstract:This article examines the affective relationship between currency and human interiority in Im Sang-soo's films about wealth, The Housemaid (2010) and The Taste of Money (2012). Drawing on feminist critiques of Bourdieu's model of capital as well as emotional capital, it argues that these films give value to emotions and affects in convertible terms. In the process, they complicate questions of motherhood and matriarchal desire in Korean cinema, which were previously defined by familial notions of patriarchy, not in economic terms. By interiorizing the corporate chaebol structure in domestic settings, the films reimagine emotional capital as integrally related to other forms of capital.