Introduction

Author(s): Jungmin Seo and Seoyoung Choi

Source: Journal of Asian Sociology , December 2020, Vol. 49, No. 4 (December 2020), pp.
371-398
Published by: Institute for Social Development and Policy Research (ISDPR)

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Journal of Asian sociology
Volume 49 | Number 4 | December 2020, 371-398
DOI 10.21588/dns.2020.49.4.001 Special Issue

Introduction

Jungmin Seo | Yonsei University

Seoyoung Choi | Yonsei University

Why Korean Feminism?

In 2015, South Korea society saw a “feminism reboot”1 (Sohn 2015) and the
popularization of feminism to a remarkable degree. Since then, amid the
expansion of feminist movements worldwide, Korean feminist movements
have on their side been constructing with astonishing velocity a narrative that
challenges patriarchal hegemony in every aspect. This special issue is an
invitation to feminist scholarship around the world to engage in a
conversation on Korean feminism from a transnational perspective by
locating the current feminist movements of South Korea within the local
context and exploring the possibilities of comparative analysis of worldwide
feminist movements. The global wave of neoliberalism, the emergence of
digital technology that connects the world with remarkable speed and scope,
the greater globalized awareness of its users, and the changes they are making
in the political landscape of different societies intersect with the similarities
and differences of feminist movements around the world, introducing
multiple possibilities for comparative analyses. Neither woman nor patriarchy
can be homogeneous categories and concepts, and in order to understand
feminist movements it is necessary to acknowledge the difference and
diversity between women and to situate the experiences of women within
their specific context and politics (Mani 1990; Mohanty 1991, 2003). The

1
Sohn (2015) takes the Hollywood term “reboot” that refers to when a film “resets the continuity
of an established film series” while it “throws out in favor of a new status” (Vox September 16, 2015)
and coins the expression “feminism reboot” to explicate the new phase of Korean feminism that
began in 2015. According to Sohn (2015, p. 15), this expression alludes to the continuities and
ruptures between existing and current Korean feminist movements, and that the capitalist rhetoric
embedded in the term “reboot” reveals the post-feminist conditions from which a “feminism
reboot” that also involves the features of a cultural movement, emerged.

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372 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

differences and commonalities, as well as the connections and interactions

between nationhood, race, sexuality, and gender under global capitalism can
provide a comparative perspective that does not “just subside into multiple
differences” (Reed 2015, p. 146) or fall into cultural relativism (Grewal and
Kaplan 1994; Yuval-Davis 1997; Mohanty 2003). While it would be crucial to
locate the current feminist movement in Korea within the complex layers of
Korean society and to recognize its particularity, a drawback of exploring the
possibilities of a Korean feminist discourse and practice would be to take “the
Korean” for granted and fall into cultural essentialism, which itself requires
further deconstruction.
This special issue presents an analysis of recent Korean feminist
movements since 2015. The authors of this special issue show why and how
recent Korean feminist movements are making cracks in patriarchal
hegemony and forming a narrative far removed from the mainstream
political and social narratives and timeline that are constructed upon the
national missions of democratization and economic development. In this
temporal progress, “important political events” in the conventional sense are
insignificant and irrelevant. It is within this narrative, based on the timeline
of Korean women, that we locate each article. The primary purpose of this
special issue is to offer critical insights into the recent politicization process of
online and offline feminist movements, including the LGBTQ movement,
and subsequent reactions from various spectrums of Korean society.
Contributed articles analyze how the newly emerging feminist movements
are responding to androcentric and heteronormative social inertia and, at the
same time, addressing the dilemma of divergent voices within the
movements themselves in Korea.

Korea’s Feminist Movements

The meta-narratives of nationalism and democratization arose from the
colonial experiences under the Empire of Japan and the military dictatorships
that followed liberation in 1945. Korea is often located within the Confucian
sphere, but its Confucian patriarchy was further reinforced by the state-led
modernization project under postcolonial conditions. A “reactionary
response to the masculine process of colonialism” (Kim 2005, p. 183), the
capitalist developmental state of Park Chung-hee’s regime was, according to
Han and Ling (1998, p. 54) a “hybrid hypermasculinized state” that “ex-
aggerated its mantle of local patriarchal values by evoking an unquestioned

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Introduction 373

hegemony of classical Confucian paternalism and manhood while locking

society into a hyperfeminized identity” (Kim 2005, p. 183). The gendered
image of the state and society “based on familism has been widespread up to
the present time” (Kim 2005, p. 184), enforcing gendered power relations and
the concept of the normal family. The military conscription system, the
resident registration law, the family planning project, and the deployment of
female labor and sex for rapid industrialization institutionalized patriarchy,
androcentrism, and heteronormativity in every corner of society.2
The influence of this order made no exception for the pro-democracy
movements. The student movement that was the core of the pro-democracy
movement was itself “saturated in militarism” and operated by privileging
masculinity and trivializing femininity (Kwon 2005, p. 30). As Hur (2011, p. 182)
states, the women’s movement that started as a segment of the national
liberation movement in the 1940s continued to be considered as a part of the
democratic movement under military dictatorship. Under the greater causes
of national liberation and democratization, women in the movement were
regarded as a homogeneous category and identity, as members of “the nation,
the state, and/or of the working class” (Hur 2011, p. 182). For instance, sexual
violence was yet to be recognized as a gender issue since sexual violence
committed by the police was a matter of state corruption and oppression,
while sexual violence within movement was silenced (Shin 2004, p. 280).
Since Korea’s democratization in 1987, women’s movements have
developed their own path, publicizing issues of violence against women (Shin
2004, p. 274). However, the major narratives continued to be nationalism and
pro-democracy. As Chizuko (2004) criticized, the “comfort women” issue
that became a major agenda of the women’s movement in Korea since the late
1980s, was treated with patriarchic and nationalist grammar, not as sexual
violence but as national violence against Korea by its colonial master, Japan.
Meanwhile, the neoliberalization that intensified following the 1997 Asian
financial crisis reinforced the gendered social order. Discriminatory layoffs of
women based on sex upon restructuring, the irregularization of female labor,
and the political discourse that regarded the crisis of economy as a crisis of
masculinity while burdening women with the double duty of “boosting the
morale” of their husbands and working to contribute to their family economy
marginalized women in the labor market and imposed on them a fixed
gender role (Bae 2009, pp. 40-41). Despite women’s high levels of educational
attainment, female labor remains vulnerable in Korea as it is concentrated in

2
Also see Moon 1997; Moon 2005; Cho 2016.

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374 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

low-paid jobs, as well as suffering due to sexual discrimination upon

employment and re-entry to labor market, and wage discrimination (Bae
2009, pp. 53-55; Kim 2018, p. 123). In 2019, South Korea had the highest
gender wage gap in the OECD and ranked lowest in The Economist’s annual
Glass Ceiling Index (The Diplomat June 14, 2019). According to a 2019 report
by the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, the gender wage gap has been
widening.
Nonetheless, since democratization in 1987, Korean society has
witnessed remarkable progress in gender equality. Women’s movements
started to focus on gender issues, actively publicizing issues like sexual
violence, domestic violence, and issues encompassing Japanese “comfort
women” (Shin 2004, p. 271). Women’s studies flourished on campuses and in
bookstores in the 1980s and the 1990s. The public was quite united in
improving the legal, institutional, and social status of women vis-à-vis men.
In 1987, the Act on Equal Employment was enacted. In 1994, the National
Assembly promulgated the Act on the Punishment of Sexual Violence and
Protection of Victims that strengthened punishment for perpetrators of
sexual violence and outlined special procedures and regulations for
investigation and prosecution to protect victims who are disproportionately
women. Between 1997 and 1998, the Prevention of Domestic Violence and
Protection of the Victim Act was enacted. In 1999, the Act on the Prohibition
and Remedy for Sexual Discrimination was enacted, though it was later
abolished in 2005. In 2001, the Ministry of Gender Equality was established
to lead comprehensive policies for women. In 2005, the Constitutional Court
found the hoju system, a family register system that had buttressed the
patriarchic social order, unconstitutional. Institutionally and legally, the social
status of Korean women seemed to have drastically improved in less than two
decades after democratization. Meanwhile, women’s movements of the time
are criticized by lesbian activists such as Park-Kim et al. (2007) for their
heteronormative orientation that excluded queer issues from their agendas
and that viewed lesbianism as a foreign import rather than an issue relevant
to the movement.
While the women’s movement institutionalized quickly and gained
socio-political power since the mid 1990s, “new feminists” or the so-called
Young Feminists, became prominent in the 2000s. Young Feminists rose
to prominence by criticizing the assumption of the single category of
“woman” presupposed by conventional women’s movements and attempted
to (re)construct women as fluid and fragmented subjects of resistance (Jeong
2015). This was a new phase of the women’s movements in that they began to

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Introduction 375

recognize the multiple identities of women including “marginalized women

such as irregular workers, migrant workers, sexual minorities, and disabled
women” (Hur 2011, pp. 182-183) and to contemplate intersectionality and
essentialism based on feminine identity politics (Jeong 2015, p. 42). Though
the Young Feminists’ movement has been largely (dis)regarded as a cultural
movement, that is, a sub-category of larger women’s movements, by feminists
belonging to previous generations (see Chung 2020), it is more and more
becoming recognized as a movement in itself. Jeong (2015, p. 39) argues that
it was a movement that criticized women’s movements for viewing women’s
or gender issues as subordinate to class and nation, and that attempted to
resist the meta-structure outside institutions and in everyday politics through
sexual politics that reexamined the category of woman.
In the 1990s, the student movements that had formerly focused on
democratization, started to diversify—the Young Feminists being one result
of such diversification. Dissenting from student unions that maintained the
student movement over the women’s movement, Young Feminists identified
themselves as feminists and sought solidarity beyond campuses, not as
students but as women (KwonKim 2017, p. 22). According to Shin (2004,
pp. 292-293), by denouncing sexual violence on campuses and the way that
student unions historicized sexual violence by police as oppression of
students rather than as a gender issue, and by demanding a new
conceptualization of sexual violence, these women who sought sexual politics
led the enactment of university statutes for the eradication of sexual violence
on campus. However, as Mihyun Kim will discuss in this issue, the campuses
where feminist politics sprouted were to be replaced by the depoliticized
campuses of the neoliberal era.
For Young Feminists, PC Communication, and later the internet, was a
space of challenge (KwonKim 2017, p. 18). Young Feminists carried out
progressive and experimental activism on the net and on campus by
advancing feminist issues and confronting misogyny within digital
communities (Shin 2004, p. 294; Jeong 2015; KwonKim 2017). In 2000, an
anonymous group of Young Feminists launched the Hundred Persons
Committee for the Eradication of Sexual Violence in Social Movements to
investigate sexual violence cases in student unions, labor unions, and other
progressive organizations and released the list of 16 perpetrators on the
online board of the progressive network ChamSesang (True World)
Community. This incident opened the floor for active discussions on the
concept of sexual violence. It highlighted the different perceptions among
women and men and introduced debates on the need for victim-centered

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376 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

approaches and the expansion of the concept of sexual violence. Most

important of all, these Young Feminists politicized sexual violence (Shin
2004, p. 295).
In the 2000s, however, feminist movements became less and less visible.
With the acceleration of neoliberalization that the state had led following the
1997 Asian financial crisis and that had intensified with the 2008 financial
crisis, Korean feminism seemed to have entered a phase of “post-feminism”
(McRobbie 2004) and/or anti-feminism. Despite the fragile economic
realities of women shaped by the two financial crises and the consequent
anxiety of young women (Bae 2009), neoliberalization accentuated the socio-
cultural representations of young women as “alpha girls”—winners in
competition with men, and consumers with purchasing power (Lee 2016,
p. 85). On the other hand, neoliberalism prompted men’s fear of weakened
masculinity (Sohn 2015, p. 22). As will be discussed further in Jihyun Choo
and Mihyun Kim’s articles, such fear created an anti-feminist discourse
among young men that advocates “equality over equity.”3 In the following
section, we provide the context on the digital environment of Korea, which
became one of the major battlegrounds for, and site of, the “feminism reboot”
in 2015 and the evolvement of feminist movements from then on.

Accumulation: The Path toward Gangnam Station and the Rise

of ‘Megal Feminists’
Cyberspace Misogyny

Defying Haraway’s (1991, pp. 149-182) expectations that cyberspace would

become a space of liberation where gendered power relations and patriarchal
oppression will be abolished, online space has proven to be a space where
gender differences are highlighted and misogynic violence prevails.
According to Cortese (2005, p. 90), who analyzes hate speech in the
American context, women are silenced and objectified in the hostile male-
dominated online space where men make the rules and grammar, and where
sexual assaults that reflect gender power relations are amplified through
digital technology. Korea’s cyber space is no exception to such analysis. In

3
Social economist Naila Kabeer (Kabeer 1994, p. 86) distinguishes gender equity “based on
recognition of difference than similarity” from equality of opportunity i.e., “formal equality” and
emphasizes the need for equity over equality.

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Introduction 377

fact, as one of the most wired societies,4 Korea could serve as a precedent that
shows the correlation between the development of the digital environment
and that of feminist movements.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, according to KwonKim (2020, pp.
57-58), Korean male internet users and Korea’s male-centered society
experienced how women could be rendered into consumable content and not
be equal users of online space. In a society where rape culture was already
widespread, connection through cyberspace facilitated the circulation of
illegal nude photography, rape videos, and non-consensual illegal video
recordings such as revenge porn, hidden camera recordings of a sexual
nature (the so-called molka or spy cams), and deepfake videos among male
users. Distribution of such contents that sexually exploited and objectified
women “flourished” as IT companies that had witnessed the failure of
American and Chinese dot-com companies in 2000 realized that these
contents targeting male users guaranteed profits (KwonKim 2020, p. 65).
Soranet, Korea’s largest illegal pornography website that was shut down in
2016, where male users conspired to commit gang rape and shared non-
consensual illegal video recordings, started operating in this context in 1999.
It is true that the Young Feminists who envisaged an alternative space
where sexual, class, racial, and national differences would diminish also
occupied cyberspace and led active discussions on feminist agendas by
creating feminist and queer online platforms (Yoon 2014; Kim 2018).
Nevertheless, online sexual harassment that extended offline and other
online abuse targeting women were common. Indeed, the gendered and
misogynic discourses of Korean society were amplified online. For instance,
when the Constitutional Court ruled the military service reward system to be
unconstitutional,5 male online users launched massive attacks on female users
and the websites of women’s organizations. As Bae (2000, p. 93) points out,
the online attacks were an intensified reproduction of discourses commonly

4
According to government statistics, more than 90% of the population is connected to the
internet as of 2019. From 1997 to 2000, following the world-wide dot-com bubble, the IT industry
boomed in Korea introducing networks known as PC Communication to the wide public (Korea
Times January 30, 2011; Korea Herald August 14, 2013).
5
The military service reward system that provided extra points to men who completed military
service upon application to office was ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in 1999 on
grounds of discrimination against women and the disabled. The ruling offended the vulnerability of
Korean men to most of whom the military conscription is a self-defining narrative, especially in the
age of neoliberalism where women and men engage in harsh competitions, and in an era when
young men started to perceive the burden of mandatory military conscription as limited to those
who did not have the means to avoid it (Bae 2000).

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378 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

circulated in Korea’s online space: witch hunts against women’s organizations

and feminists, and accusing competent and affluent women of stealing the
bread from poor men who had to complete their military service. These
discourses are still common among young Korean men, as will be shown
further in the articles of Jihyun Choo and Mihyun Kim.
In the early 2000s, the internet seemed to have become a male-
dominated space. Female-dominated platforms were oftentimes “trolled” and
“flamed” by male users, while female users were increasingly considered as
either content in themselves or consumers of commercial websites
(KwonKim 2020, pp. 55-63) rather than active creators of online culture. If
they chose not to stay in the female-dominated platforms, female users would
oftentimes choose to hide themselves behind a male identity. DCInside.com,
a male-dominated platform representative of Korea’s online subculture, has
constructed a misogynic grammar that infiltrated into popular culture.
Korean portal services, where the majority of Koreans access the news, are
one such platform where this misogynic grammar is circulated through news
comments, as will be explored by Sooah Kim in this special issue. On DC
Inside, women are objectified as sexual objects and stigmatized with modern
sexual stereotypes as they are interpellated with vocabularies such as kimchi-
nyeo, which refers to “a Korean woman who is sexually promiscuous,
extravagant, and tends to live off men’s financial means” (Um 2016, pp. 207-
208) or doenjang-nyeo.6 Platform users disseminate misogynic stereotypes by
referring to women as -nyeo (girl). Women who the male users think are
subservient to patriarchy and perform the modern gender stereotype are
referred to as tal-kimchi-nyeo or gaenyeom-nyeo7 (Um 2016, p. 212). On the
other hand, feminists are generalized as abnormal and lacking common sense
in the inimical discourses about feminists, women’s student councils and
organizations, and the Ministry of Gender Equality produced by users of
male-dominated communities (Kim and Choi 2007, pp. 27-28).
Ilbe, a former sub-board on DC Inside started in 2010 and an
independent website since 2011 that gained notoriety for its far right-wing

6
Doenjang-nyeo, or soybean paste girl, refers to women “who live frugally (on [soy]bean paste
stew) so they can save up for designer handbags and shoes” (The Korea Times May 29, 2012), that is,
selfish and vain.
7
Tal-kimchi-nyeo means women who are not kimchi-nyeo anymore, as tal- means “to exit.”
Gaenyeom-nyeo means a woman who does not lack common sense. Both words refer to women who
split the check without making men pay everything, who are frugal and diligent, and who “prepare a
warm meal” once married (Um 2016, p. 213).

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Introduction 379

orientation during the period leading up to the presidential election in 2012,8

has been the exemplary online space for hate speech, including misogyny and
homophobia. The website can be regarded as one of the most important
phenomena of anti-feminism (or backlash) in Korea as it provided a platform
to formulate coherent narratives against Korean women by assembling
scattered discourses and images of misogyny in Korean society. Of course,
Ilbe was not the cause of misogyny but rather a consequence of it.
Nevertheless, the narratives assembled on and by Ilbe provide us with the
current map of misogyny. Firstly, Ilbe discourses clearly express Korean
(young) men’s fears of weakened masculinity and failure to maintain their
superior status (Yoon 2013) by being the sole breadwinner of a normal
family.9 The two financial crises of 1997 and 2008 that accelerated economic
re-arrangements that favor labor flexibility and other neoliberal social and
economic policies are partial causes of the rise of such discourse. Second,
unlike traditional misogynic perspectives, Ilbe discourses perceive young
Korean women as selfish predators who steal men’s property (which had been
regarded as family property) by utilizing the progressive government’s pro-
women policies or by forcing men to spend more money than they can afford
(Yoon 2013; Kim 2015).
Ilbe discourses were initially regarded as typical losers’ discourses amid
intensifying competition in the labor market. Yet, numerous surveys
indicated that Ilbe discourses were broadly shared among young men and
drew attention from the media and academia. Both the media and academia
noticed that the widespread misogynic discourses found on Ilbe were
fundamentally different from traditional misogyny. During the period of
industrialization and modernization,10 women were often disciplined for
inappropriate behaviors, that is, participation in politics, pursuit of her own
career, or refusal to reproduce for the maintenance of the patriarchic family
order. Nevertheless, the misogyny of Ilbe presumes the victimhood of average
young Korean men11 who are alienated from Korean women (because they
believe that young Korean women prefer rich men or white men over the
average Korean man) and have to endure disadvantages in the job market due

8
Ilbe, the abbreviation of ilgan best jeojangso (daily best storage) is particularly notorious for its
disparagement of the 1980 May 18 Gwangju Democratic Movement and the late president Roh
Moo-hyun.
9
Though it has never been the case according to various statistics. For instance, see Bae 2009;
Hwang 2018.
10
For this theme, see Moon 2005.
11
See Kim and Lee 2017.

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380 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

to their compulsory military service. At the same time, it should be noted

that Ilbe, which is the acronym for ilgan best (daily best) started as a board to
round up the best daily posts on DC Inside. Rather than through serious
debates, Ilbe discourses are accumulated through the playful competition for
more attention from other Ilbe users, making misogyny a game and
spreading “misogyny like air” as Korean women call it.
Korean intellectuals were alarmed by the sudden proliferation of Ilbe’s
misogynic discourses to online spaces and dismayed by the fact that they
could not find appropriate analytical tools with which to address them.12
Academic communities were helpless in the face of the new online syndrome,
being unable to figure out the realities let alone provide interpretation and
analysis. Young Korean women, surrounded by omnipresent misogyny
spreading from online to offline and from subculture to popular culture, were
silenced by incessant hate speech. Some reproduced the misogyny within
themselves to silence other women and self-censored in order to not become
a kimchi-nyeo but a gaenyum-nyeo (Yoo 2016, p. 34). To survive in such a
popular culture, many women could not help but start their sentences with “I
am not a feminist, but—,” until 2015.

2015, Feminism Reboot

In February 2015, the hashtag “#na-neun_pe-mi-ni-seu-teu-ib-ni-da (#I_am_

a_feminist)”13 began to trend on Twitter. This was after a male columnist
wrote that “brainless feminism is more dangerous than ISIS” (Grazia Issue
No. 48 February 2, 2015) following the disappearance of an 18-year-old
Korean boy who was suspected to have joined ISIS after tweeting “i hate
feminists. So I like the isis [sic]” (The Kyunghyang Shinmun February 16,
2015). After the incident, the word feminist became a trending keyword. In
response to the columnist,14 numerous Twitter users started to declare
themselves feminists and to share their past experiences of and reflections on
sexual discrimination in Korean society. The hashtag movement lasted for a

12
In 2013, the Korean Association of Women’s Studies tried to organize an academic conference
to discuss the Ilbe phenomenon but failed due to the lack of applicants (Kim 2016).
13
On this issue, see Kim 2017.
14
The columnist Kim Tae Hoon argued that contemporary Korean feminists who were asking for
more even after achieving enough gender equality were brainless. One example was the extra point
system for military service. Kim’s analysis was that unlike the feminism of the past that was part of
the social movements of the 1960s, contemporary feminism was the cause of the rise of men’s rights
movements and misogynic online spaces (Ohmynews February 13, 2015).

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Introduction 381

few months, and those who had made their feminist declaration online
started to meet up on the streets. This was the beginning of a “feminism
reboot” as online resistance to misogyny but also the advent of a feminist
politics for survival by women mobilized online, that raised questions about
misogyny, women’s safety, women’s reproductive and health rights, and
women’s citizenship in democracy online, in popular culture, and on the
streets (Kim 2018, pp. 100-101). Feminist scholars including Sohn (2015, p. 45)
also diagnosed the phenomenon as “the collapse of the post-feminist myth”
in Korean society.
In August of the same year, a counteroffensive against the rampant
misogynic internet sub-culture in Korea came in a very unexpected way but
on a grand scale. Women who “refused to be silenced or instigated by misogyny
appeared” (Yoo 2016, p. 53) on the online scene with Megalian.com (or
Megalia). Earlier in spring, upon the outbreak of Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome, false rumors spread that two young Korean women infected with
the disease had refused to quarantine and instead continued shopping in
Hong Kong, triggering harsh misogynic reactions in male-dominated online
communities such as Ilbe and DC Inside. As female users of DC Inside
started to articulate the disproportionate level of criticism against the actual
first patient of the disease, who was a man, the MERS Gallery—a board
formed on DC Inside to share information about the epidemic—grew into
the battleground for an unprecedented counterattack against male internet
users.
Using this so-called mirroring tactic,15 female users switched the subject
of existing misogynic phrases from male to female and devised new words
that twisted and countered the misogynic vocabulary used on male-
dominant websites to create a new context (Yoo 2016, p. 64). For instance,
“Women should stay home and be docile” was mirrored as “Men should stay
home and be docile,” “Women should be beaten up every three days” as “Men
should be beaten up every three days,” and “Women should be ditched once
screwed” as “Men should be ditched once screwed.” Kimchi-nyeo was
mirrored as kimchi-nam (kimchi man), and mam-chung16 (mother worm) as
hannam-chung (Korean male worm). Hearing the news that women were

15
Megalians (Megalia users) called their strategic appropriation of Ilbe’s misogynic grammar that
parodied and revealed the absurdly pervasive degree of misogyny “mirroring (tactic)”. In using the
mirroring tactic, Megalians deliberately and actively deployed extremely vulgar and nasty language,
including swear words and slang (Jeong and Lee 2018, p. 711).
16
Also translated as mom-roach, mam-chung is a misogynic term that refers to young mothers
that “cause a nuisance” with their children.

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382 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

“joyfully beating up” males, combative female internet users from other
female-dominated platforms swiftly gathered in the gallery and continued to
appropriate the “masculine” language of profanity, sexual organs, and
assessments of external appearance formerly prohibited to women who were
supposed to be obedient and well-behaved (Yun 2015; Yoo 2016, pp. 106-
107).
Female MERS Gallery users exited DC Inside in August 2015 and
regrouped to create their own website, Megalia, a term coined by combining
MERS Gallery and Egalia’s Daughters, the title of a feminist novel. Since then,
the new website became the center of extremely radical feminist expressions
that were unimaginable for established feminist scholarship or NGOs for
women’s rights. The vocabulary used on the website became sensational in
mass media, and subsequently, gave an excuse for mainstream media and
scholarship to criticize the vulgarity of this new phenomenon. Nevertheless,
what really mattered for concerned feminist scholars was not the vulgar
content of the website but the newly constructed grammar through which
women became the subject of misandry instead of being the object of
misogyny. The new language of misandry, ironically, explicated the width and
depth of misogyny in Korean society because it intentionally and directly
adopted the grammatic structure of misogyny.
Megalia quickly became the symbol of young feminists who have less
been contaminated and restrained by traditional Korean patriarchy. It was the
first organized resistance against the problematic Ilbe phenomenon and led a
number of successful campaigns for feminist agendas.17 Feminism, which had
seemed to be remote from the popular imagination of Korean women during
the 2000s, was “rebooted” amid the incidents that ensued online in 2015. The
events that followed prompted an even larger number of young Korean
women to identify as feminists, referring to themselves as “Megal(ian)
Feminists,” and being referred to as “Young Young Feminists,” “Net Feminists,”
and “Twitter Feminists.”

17
Megalia’s activities include denunciation of misogynist popular culture, demands for the
eradication of molka, the closure of Soranet, and donations to women’s organizations.

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Introduction 383

Explosion and Evolution

Gangnam Station Murder

In May 2016, a man with schizophrenia murdered a woman in a public

bathroom near the Gangnam subway station, one of the busiest districts in
Seoul. Though the criminal confessed that he had committed the murder
“because women looked down on him,” the police concluded the
investigation by deeming it wanton murder. On May 19, two days after the
murder, hundreds of mourners gathered in front of the exit 10 of the subway
station, protesting against the misogynic nature of Korean society. The
protest grew both offline and online, and Park Wonsun, the mayor of Seoul,
visited the memorial site and promised that the city would pursue assertive
policies on crimes against women and preserve the mourning sites.
The murder at Gangnam Station on May 17, 2016 decisively altered the
path of Korean feminism. Firstly, whereas Megalia and other insurgencies
against the patriarchic social order in Korea largely remained online or in
academia, mourning for the victim of the murder at Gangnam Station
occurred in real world, at exit 10 of Gangnam Station. Thousands physically
participated in the commemoration by leaving post-it notes or participating
in marches. Feminists mobilized to define the crime as a misogynic crime or
a femicide (Kim 2018, p. 116). Further, feminist mourners and anti-feminist
Ilbe users made their very first face-to-face confrontation as Ilbe users also
protested on site against feminists’ claim that the murder was caused by
misogyny. Second, the murder symbolized the vulnerability of Korean
women against misogynic crimes, even at a place where the majority of
population had felt safe, a restroom near the busiest subway station in Korea.
Ever since the tragedy of the Sewol Ferry in 2014, Korean society had begun
to perceive security not as a personal matter but a political affair. The murder
at Gangnam Station politicized young Korean women as they started to see
themselves as a collectivity that shares a sense of insecurity in everyday life.
Furthermore, the shared cumulative experiences of being neglected by the
police upon reporting stalking, spy cameras, and sexual violence politicized
these women under the “realization” that state power was not there to protect
its female citizens.
Since the murder, taking direct action has become the principle for
young Korean feminists. Numerous feminist groups that were organized
following the murder and that led the mourning have been mobilizing

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384 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

women as a political force (Kim 2018, pp. 6-7). For example, they led protests
against the abortion ban that was ruled to be “not consistent with the
Constitution” in 2019 and denounced the misogynic language and conduct of
the progressive movement against the Park Geun-hye government in
November 2016, by creating “femi-zones” in the demonstration area. On
social media, the tal-koreuset movement (Remove the Corset movement) that
refuses to conform to the beauty standards imposed on women in Korean
society spread among young feminists.18 As more and more women decide to
resist patriarchy, the Four Nos movement that refuses heterosexual dating,
sex, marriage, and child-rearing is gaining popularity.19 Along with the
popularity of biological essentialism among young feminists that will be
further discussed by Hyun-Jae Lee, both the Four Nos movement and
political lesbianism have been gaining more interest in recent years. As male
internet users appropriated feminist knowledge through information shared
on Namuwiki, a Korean wiki that is widely used but also produces misogynic
information, women launched Femiwiki to correct such information and
spread feminist knowledge. Young women mobilized to confront digital
sexual crimes themselves by successfully investigating, reporting, and
publicizing the hideous crimes conspired and committed in online spaces.20
Furthermore, young Korean women’s rebellion against the patriarchal
social order evolved around the issue of political subjectivity or women as a
political category. A little before the murder at Gangnam Station, an intensive
debate had started on Megalia over whether sexual minorities, especially gay

18
On this issue also see Lee 2016.
19
According to Femiwiki, at the foundation of the Four Nos Movement is the rejection of
patriarchy, male-centered sex, and the economic structure in which men gain money through the
circulation and sale of non-consensual illegal videos (https://femiwiki.com/w/4B).
20
For instance, DSO (Digital Sexual Crime Out) that was established by a dozen of women
publicized and reported the website Soranet where thousands of non-consensual illegal video
recordings of sexual nature were shared among millions of viewers, by urging the press, the police,
and the legislature to act. The organization continues to monitor and report platforms similar to
Soranet to eradicate digital sexual crimes (Women News March 7, 2017). Another prominent
example is the activism against the Telegram Nth Room Case, a criminal case that involved sex
trafficking, sexual exploitation, and blackmailing of women and young girls, and circulation of
sexually exploitative contents on the messenger app Telegram, among 15,000 members as confirmed
by the police. Two female university students first investigated the case under the team name Team
Flame in July 2019 (Korea JoongAng Daily March 31, 2020). In December 2019, anonymous women
mobilized on Twitter to investigate, report, and publicize the crime (Kookminilbo April 1, 2020). As
the case gained public attention, more than five million people signed National Petitions that
directly address the presidential office calling for the punishment and disclosure of perpetrators’
identities (Korea JoongAng Daily March 29, 2020).

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Introduction 385

men and transgender women (MTF), should be the targets of mirroring or

misandry. The polemic was sparked amidst discussions on cases of fake
marriages by gay men with heterosexual women, the misogynic culture and
discrimination against lesbians in gay communities, and as Megalians
mirrored the misogynic expressions used in a gay community (Kim 2017,
p. 112). One group emphasized a united front for women, sexual minorities,
and all minorities in general against the hegemonic hetero-patriarchic social
order while another argued for an exclusive coalition among biological
women including heterosexual women and lesbians. In favor of the former,
the Megalia operators filtered demeaning terms used to disparage gay men.
Hundreds of Megalia users left the website and founded a new internet
community, WOMAD (woman + nomad) in early 2016. WOMAD quickly
became notorious for its extreme and explicit content that assaults any type of
male objects, including children, animals, independent movement heroes,
and deceased progressive political figures such as Roh Moo-hyun and Roh
Hoe-chan. The website was also filled with claims of murders targeting men,
descriptions of abuse of male pets, and criminal hidden camera videos, all of
which supposedly mirrored content from male-dominated websites.
The content and strategies of WOMAD were not well received, even
among progressives and mainstream feminists. Nevertheless, WOMAD’s
essentialist definition of “woman” has shown the possibility or the existence
of entirely subverted gender relations. Unlike mainstream feminism or
feminism found on Megalia that aims at the dismantlement of the hetero-
patriarchic social order, WOMAD depicted a world where women replaced
men’s position in the gender hierarchy.21 It is not certain whether WOMAD is
deploying “strategic essentialism” (Spivak [1985] 1996) to reveal unendurable
social realities for “liberated” women or becoming “another Ilbe” by
immersing itself in a grotesque world for social losers. At very least, it has
shown the degree of discomfort that arises when women’s gazes are
disconnected from the state, nation, and society.
In spite of the instability of woman as a category, it is evident that Korean
women have shown the possibility of being a collective subject of social
movements. A series of protests against molka and gender-biased
investigations ensued (ABC News August 5, 2018). One of the largest female-
only protests and post-impeachment protests that drew roughly 300,000
21
However, the essentialist strategy of WOMAD to produce a counter-society may create a
simulacrum of the existing power structure, then reinforce the existing categories. This would be a
tragic result because hegemonic order is sustained not necessarily by changed hierarchy but by the
unchanging categories themselves (Kristeva 1981 referred to by Kim 2018, p. 21).

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386 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

participants started with a WOMAD user posting a nude photo of a male

model taken with an illegal hidden camera on May 1, 2018. The police began
their investigation on May 3 and made an arrest on May 10. The female
suspect was prosecuted on May 24 and found guilty with the sentence of 10
months in prison on August 13. All the processes were extremely speedy, and
the sentence was perceived as unjust by women because similar criminal
cases with male perpetrators usually end up with no prison time but with a
suspended sentence or a fine. Female-dominated online communities,
Twitter, and Facebook immediately filled up with posts arguing that the case
was treated unfairly with a speedy investigation/arrest and a heavy sentence
because the culprit was a female. With this incident, the perception that state
power does not stand by women but is eager to punish them while turning a
blind eye to sexual crimes committed by men spread among Korean women.
In addition, with the surge of the Me Too movement that started in the
beginning of the same year, women were well aware of the prevalence of
sexual violence against women and the rigid gendered social structure that
allows for the pervasiveness of sexual crimes.
Women who had endured molka (criminal spy cameras) as an everyday
threat and were angered by the disproportionate reaction of the police, who
had shown lukewarm responses to women’s reports of the same crime,
quickly mobilized (Park and Lee 2019). The very first protest was held on
May 19 and, subsequently, five more protests were organized until the end of
2018 under the name Uncomfortable Courage. The size of protests grew
rapidly. According to the organizers, the first protest mobilized around
12,000 participants, the second (June 9) 45,000, the third (July 7) 60,000 and
the fourth (August 4) 70,000 participants. Though it started with the demand
for legal impartiality, the protest evolved into the demand to eliminate the
everyday threats of spy cams22 and, further, sexual and gender discrimination
by the state in general.

The #MeToo Movement

Amid increasing awareness of the sustaining patriarchal social structure,

Korean society witnessed another wave of the feminist movement, the Me
Too movement. On January 29, 2018, only three months after the Me Too
movement first started in the United States, public prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun

22
The most conspicuous slogan during the fourth and fifth protests was “My Life is Not Your
Porn.”

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Introduction 387

revealed her experience of being sexually assaulted by a high-level prosecutor

in 2010. This incident triggered hundreds of subsequent revelations and
accusations of sexual harassment, rape, and assault of female subordinates by
their powerful male superiors. Prominent figures in Korean society including
film/stage directors, actors, singers, politicians, and professors were indicted
or, at least, disgraced by this movement. Two accusations of sexual
misconduct were particularly revealing for Korean society, one against Ko
Un, a poet who had long been regarded as a potential winner of the Nobel
Prize for literature23 and the indictment on criminal charges against Ahn Hee-
jung,24 the governor of South Chungcheong Province, who had long been
regarded as the strongest contender for presidential in the next election. The
court sentenced Ahn Hee-jung to three years in prison. As will be discussed
by Sooah Kim, however, news reports and news comments on portal websites
caused and aggravated secondary victimization, and such a phenomenon was
not limited to the case of Ahn.
Prior to the Me Too movement, Megalia and Twitter had already
become spaces where women could safely and without shame share their
experiences of sexual violence and come together in solidarity. As the hashtag
“#sexualviolence_in_xx” spread, Korean women started to publicly report,
discuss, and archive sexual violence and misogyny in different industries,
such as the photography, film, and theatre industries and the literary scene.
What followed public prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun’s accusation were reports from
the theatre and cinema industries. The experience of individuals through the
online hashtag movement made it easier for people to feel connected, and to
publicly disclose their experiences of sexual assault (KwonKim 2020, pp. 131-
132). As KwonKim (2000, p. 188) points out, considering how the patriarchic
culture of Korea had silenced victims of sexual violence, making the offense
harder to prosecute, the outpouring of testimonies by women that claimed a
collective victim identity was a revolutionary change that shook the
androcentric structure that had been maintained by their silence.

23
Ko filed a charge against the accuser for defamation. The court of first instance found the
accuser not guilty in February 2019. Ko appealed but the appellate court upheld the judgment in
November 2019 (JoongAng Daily November 8, 2019).
24
Ahn was found not guilty in the first court trial in August 2018 but found guilty in the appeal
court in February 2019 with three-and-a-half-year prison term. In September 2019, the Supreme
Court confirmed the sentence (The Kyunghyang Shinmun September 10, 2019).

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388 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

Backlash: “Reactionary Korean Progressives and Young Men”

If recent developments of combative discourses of feminism were the result
of a countermovement against the increasing tendency towards misogyny on
the internet, the strongest backlash against Megalia and WOMAD came from
left-wing and progressive political communities as shown in the so-called
“Megalia - Justice Party Incident of 2016” (BBC News August 14, 2016). A
voice actress who worked for a large Korean game company posted a selfie on
Twitter, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Girls Do Not Need a Prince”
printed on it. The t-shirt was made by Megalia for fundraising purposes.
Thousands of game users complained to the company for hiring a “radical
feminist.” Surprisingly by global standards, but not so surprisingly by Korean
standards, the company fired her. The controversial gender issue then
became a labor issue. A progressive and labor-friendly party, the Justice Party,
made an official comment that protested the company’s rushed decision to
fire the voice actress claiming that “it is unfair to be excluded from work due
to her/his political opinion.” Thousands of Justice Party members, however,
objected to the comment and threatened to defect from the party, and indeed
a few hundred did just that.25 The Justice Party then officially withdrew its
comment and fell into chaos as both female and male members of the party
protested against the party leadership for being pro-Megalia or anti-feminist
(JoongAng Daily August 3, 2016). In the meantime, a progressive/left-wing
magazine, SisaIn, published an article in support of the voice actress that
criticized the culture of misogyny (SisaIn Issue No. 467, August 2016). The
article resulted in a loss of thousands of subscribers.
Both of the incidents mentioned above explicate the uncomfortable
relationship between feminism and left-wing or progressive politics in Korea.
During the Justice Party crisis in 2016, party members searched for and
hunted down Megalia-sympathizers within the party and demanded that a
few party leaders declare their position on Megalia. SisaIn subscribers
conducted a manhunt for the reporters who wrote the provocative article.
Unlike far right-wing Ilbe users who ridiculed feminists for sport,
progressives in Korea harshly reacted to the advent of unruly feminists.
Protesters in the Justice Party and disgruntled SisaIn subscribers commented,

25
580 defected according to an unofficial report by the party. One year later, a Justice Party
lawmaker mentioned that the controversy cost 3,000 in party membership, around 10% percent of
total party membership (NoCut News April 20, 2017).

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Introduction 389

almost without exception, that they support feminism and feminists but
reject Megalian feminism because it is filled with hatred directed against
men. This sentiment is broadly shared among progressive voters and
intellectuals, whereas feminists, both moderate and radical, were left to
wonder why men should determine which forms of feminism are acceptable
and which are not.
Another conspicuous backlash against the advent of unruly feminism is
the withdrawal of young male voters’ support for the progressive government,
which resulted in an unprecedented ideological division along gender lines
among Korean youths. Korean voters in their twenties and thirties were an
important power base of progressive politics in Korea. In particular, Korean
male voters in their twenties and thirties, along with female voters in their
twenties, were staunch opponents of the conservative president, Park Geun-
hye even before her political scandal came out in October 2016. Nevertheless,
a more recent survey from February 2019 shows an interesting change.
Whereas 60% of Korean females in their twenties support the current
progressive president, Moon Jae-in, only 35% of Korean males in their
twenties approve of the president’s performance. Defying the generational
factor, their approval rate is even lower than it is among Korean men in their
60s.26
These unusual findings drew broad media attention and both academics
and journalists have been busy interpreting them, especially the defection of
the males in their twenties from progressive political camps. Numerous
media reports pointed at the tougher job market conditions in recent years,
but this does not explain why Korean females in their twenties had been
enthusiastically supporting the current government until recently. Scholars in
gender studies, however, explain that the very conditions that produced Ilbe
are influencing Korean male youths as a whole (Kim and Choi 2007; Kim and
Lee 2017; Kim 2018)—the perception that they are the victims of feminist
policies, the fear that they are losing the competition in the job market
because of obligatory military service, and the discomfort caused by the
elitism of the progressive media and intellectuals.

26
According to another recent survey of Korean young people (in their twenties) done in
December 2018, 57% answered that gender struggle is the most serious social problem whereas
seventy six percent of males stated that they “oppose” feminist movements. (Realmeter December 17,
2018)

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390 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

Conclusion
Young Korean women seem to be less interested in why men in their twenties
withdrew support for the progressive government. The androcentric political
culture—regardless of left or right—the series of decisions made by the police
and the judiciary on sex crimes, and the misogynic atmosphere of Korean
society made women grow more conscious of the necessity of feminist
politics and solidarity. The launching of the Women’s Party is one swift
materialization of such feminist politics. On March 8, 2020—International
Women’s Day and only slightly more than a month before the 21st General
Elections of Korea—the Women’s Party was launched with more than 6,000
members that had gathered within a week. As the first women’s agenda-only
party that advocates feminist politics since Korea’s democratization, it won
0.74% of general election turnout. The Women’s Party and its supporters are
waiting for the next general election, that is, for when the ballots of the 10.7%
of teenage supporters from the straw poll will actually count. Feminist
movements are influencing the daily lives of Korean women through feminist
lectures, books, films, and other cultural contents that spread feminist
concepts such as misogyny and sexual objectification. As women look for a
distinct feminist genealogy and language,27 they are creating an independent
narrative that refuses to embrace and to be embraced by the meta-narratives
of Korean society.
However, feminist politics are not without their own drawbacks and
polemics. As we see a visible rise in feminisms, there are active struggles
among women on the definition of woman as a category, as will be explored
by Hyun-Jae Lee. In February 2020, the renouncement of enrollment by a
transgender woman who had been admitted to Sookmyung Women’s
University due to strong oppositions from trans-exclusionary radical
feminists and the debates that followed clearly illustrated the diverging paths
of feminisms. Alongside this, discussions on queer life and rights are
burgeoning. Queer resistance has been growing as an intelligible force in
Korea and the expansion of Korean Pride parade(s) is one indicator as will be
discussed by Seoyoung Choi and Jungmin Seo. Meanwhile, the recent gay
bashing that ensued following media reports that unnecessarily linked a
27
Among the most popular feminist books published in Korea in 2019 and 2020 were Lee Min
Kyung’s Uriegen eoneoga piryohada: ibi teuineun peminijeum [We Need a Language: Feminism that
Makes You Speak] and Uriegedo gyeboga itda [We Also Have a Genealogy: Feminism That Isn’t
Lonely].

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Introduction 391

COVID-19 outbreak in a clubbing district to gay clubs confirmed the

widespread homophobia in Korean society (CNN May 13, 2020). The
proposed “comprehensive anti-discrimination act” that includes protections
from discrimination based on sexual orientation, awaits to be enacted as it
continues to face harsh opposition from conservative Christians as it has
since 2007.
Yet at the same time, anti-feminism is growing in proportion with
feminism. As thought to prove such tendency, in 2018, women’s student
councils were abolished through student referendums at three major
universities, leaving no women’s student councils remaining on any of the
campuses in Seoul, as will be further explored by Mihyun Kim. While more
women are facing the misogynic grammar that proliferates online and offline
with an increased feminist awareness, they are also increasingly realizing the
extensiveness of the battle that they fight. President Moon Jae-in sending a
wreath to Ahn Hee-jung’s mother’s funeral and major politicians visiting the
funeral to salute Ahn seemed to send a message to Korean women that solid
political connections could outweigh track records of sexual crimes. The
decision of the judiciary to not extradite Son Jeong-woo, owner of the child
sexual exploitation dark web site Welcome to Video, to the United States
seemed also to tell Korean women that the state will continue to take
lukewarm measures when it comes to sexual crimes. With government’s plan
to revise the abortion ban that was ruled to be “not consistent with the
Constitution” by the Constitutional Court in 2019 to permit termination
pregnancy before the 14th week, women are again out on the streets, fighting
for their right to autonomy over their bodies.
The five articles that make up this special issue provide analyses of
aspects of Korean society that make these subjects resist as well as how their
resistance unfolds with success and limits. These feminist subjects cannot be
understood in discontinuity with feminist movements from before 2015, but
also need to be analyzed in their specificities and within the global context.
In the first article, Sooah Kim analyzes news reports and portal news
comments on the case of sexual abuse by former governor Ahn Hee-jung.
According to Kim, secondary victimization of sexual violence victims caused
by the media and news comment sections is a phenomenon unique to Korea’s
digital environment. As she examines how Korean media and news comment
section users aggravated secondary victimization during Ahn’s trial, Kim
underscores the need for feminist intervention in what she calls “online
comment culture” that produces and reproduces negative stereotypes of
sexual violence victims and suspicions about the victim’s testimonies into

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392 Journal of Asian sociology, Vol. 49 No. 4, December 2020

public opinion.
In the second article, Hyun-Jae Lee offers a critical analysis of the
identity politics based on the idea of “biological women” that has recently
been advanced by Korean radical feminists. She argues that the competitive
young Korean women resist misogyny in the urban imaginary, but not
biological dichotomy itself. This is because for these women, a reversal of
position—from object to subject—in the existing frame is more
advantageous. As a result, women aim to become subjects by excluding not
just men but also transgender women as objects. Lee concludes her article by
suggesting a feminist politics based on the politics of recognition in
accordance with the “status model” which can provide Korean women with
the possibility of guaranteeing equal parity for women, without falling into
the trap of exclusion.
The third article by Mihyun Kim discusses the abolition of women’s
student councils at three top-ranking universities in Seoul, a series of
incidents that took place in 2018 and that was regarded as a “backlash”
against the “reboot” of feminism in Korea. For Kim, the case is symbolic in
two ways. First, it is symbolic in that it deteriorated the feminist movement in
the midst of its popularization and second, in that it emerged on a
depoliticized campus where political activism was rare. By analyzing the
process of abolition, Kim reveals how the languages of feminism and
democracy, and of digital activism (a major feature of recent feminist
activism) were appropriated and divorced from their context to justify the
abolition of women’s student councils, and to finally eliminate feminist
activism from the campus by way of university referendum, despite feminist
opposition.
In the fourth article, Jihyun Choo considers the issue of mandatory
military conscription for men that is at the center of feminist versus anti-
feminist debates. Choo analyzes the reasons behind Korean society’s failure to
make expansive criticisms of its gendered military system and militarism,
both of which construct gender. Choo argues that underlying this failure are
the precarious life conditions of the young generation that are constituted by
neoliberalism. Amid increased anxiety about the future caused by
neoliberalism, the period of compulsory military service came to be
perceived as a loss of opportunity for career management. As a result, the
traditional gender norm that men should serve in the military has weakened
over the generations. However, unlike the older generations that nevertheless
comply with the traditional norm, the young generation—both women and
men—refuses such a norm and understands gender not as a social structure

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Introduction 393

but as an individual identity. According to Choo, such a perception enhances

the self-protection strategies of young people. Instead of criticizing militarism
and the gendered social structure, a large number of young men call for
women to endure the same amount of suffering caused by military service,
and young women standing against anti-feminism resort to identity politics.
Finally, Seoyoung Choi and Jungmin Seo discuss the queer movement in
Korea that has been progressing alongside, and separately from, Korea’s
feminist movements. Choi and Seo attempt to theorize the resistance of
Korean sexual minorities at Pride parades by analyzing the three phases of
Seoul Queer Parade in light of Judith Butler’s concept of vulnerability as a
condition of resistance. In doing so, they argue that the LGBTQ of Korea that
were once an unintelligible force of resistance, entered hegemony and are
challenging hegemony by deliberately exposing their bodily and normative
vulnerability at Pride parades.

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JUNGMIN SEO is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Yonsei

University. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and has
published over thirty articles in prominent journals such as Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies, New Political Science, Korean Political Science Review, among
others. His most recent publications include “Theorizing the Park Chung Hee Era,”
“Park Chung Hee’s Nationalism and Its Legacies,” and “Intellectual History of China
Studies in Post-Colonial Korea.” Address: 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, 03722, Seoul,
South Korea, Yonsei University, Department of Political Science and International
Studies [E-mail: [email protected]]

SEOYOUNG CHOI is currently pursuing an MA/Ph.D. Joint Degree in Political

Science at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. She completed her BA in Political
Science and International Relations at Yonsei University. Her research interests are in
comparative politics, postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, and critical
international relations theory. Address: 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, 03722, Seoul,
South Korea, Yonsei University, Department of Political Science and International
Studies [E-mail: [email protected]]

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