The aim of the paper is to investigate the structural and subjective roots of precarious life in the developmental state of the Republic of Korea, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The units of analysis are narratives by Korean factory women [여공yŏgong], which can be found in literary works, autobiographies, memoirs, and other publications. The paper starts by briefly deploying a theoretical framework for the study of subjectivity based on the psychoanalytic categories of drive and desire. These categories then serve as a blueprint to distinguish between, on the one hand, the objective form that capitalist social relations take at the textual level and, on the other, yŏgong’s transgressive appropriation of particular signifiers of modernity. The analysis of the dynamics of yŏgong subjectivity suggests that these workers’ struggle for modernity—their desire for education, fashion trends and labor activism—also unintendedly reinforced the compulsions of an immiserating developmental unconscious.