58 distances to buy and sell goods; and work spent on cultivating wasteland or fallow land in order to farm food on little patches of land or raising beds has come to be considered mainly a duty of women as well. Due to this heavy work and burdensome livelihood responsibilities, problems are also arising with regard to women’s health conditions. With cases becoming more frequent in which women abstain from scarce food in favour of their families, women are at high risk of developing malnutrition and various consequential diseases. Furthermore, because the famines have coincided with a qualitative decline of the medical distribution system, problems relating to pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare are also emerging. 4) Discoursive and ideological mechanisms and women’s human rights The relationship between the North Korean state and the people has been veiled as a reciprocal relation of gift and counter-gift: the state affords the people its care (social security) as a gift which the people compensate with a counter-gift (loyalty, work). This process of offering care and ‘compensation’ has been propagated by the patriarchal socialist ideology as a just exchange relation. The relationship between the dominating and the dominated was thus concealed as a reciprocal exchange relation, masking the logic of the dominating class. This masking was possible because the relation of care and compensation was conveyed at once through a logic and sense of ‘morality’. Morality disguised the relation of care and reward as ‘something honourable’ and through a metaphor of blood relations, but the political logic of the dominant class had been built into this relation. Following the postulation that the relation between the state and the people was one of ‘blood ties’, with the relation between the ‘Suryeong’ and the people one between ‘blood-related family members’, the raising of any doubts about this relation would immediately be regarded as an ‘immoral’ betrayal of one’s blood and family. Reducing social relations in this way to morality amounts to a kind of ‘quasi-religious moral system’. The injustice implied in the sacrifices of the people was concealed in this