【by Eun-Joo Kim, Dec. 2024】
When I try to write about feminism in South Korea, I feel a strange sense of responsibility and an unknown, overwhelming emotion. Like waves in the ocean that rise and fall, or dunes in the desert that scatter and reshape in the wind, things that happen in the name of feminism go up in smoke if not recorded.
On May 17, 2016, a woman was murdered “for being a woman” in a building near Gangnam Station in Seoul. Since that day, post-it notes of remembrance and solidarity began to appear at Exit 10 of Gangnam Station, marking the beginning of a mass feminist movement in South Korea. In 2018, the #MeToo movement grew into the #SchoolMeToo movement of teenage students, exposing the long-silenced reality of sexual violence and sexual harassment. In May 2018, the Hyehwa Station protest against concealed cameras and digital cartels, sparked by the MOLCA case and the prevalence of biased rhetoric, brought together up to 60,000 women. The decorset movement (4B), which resists women’s appearance norms, has developed and spread based on everyday life, leading to a mass wave.
Contemporary Korean fourth-wave feminism stems from online feminism combined with digital mobile technologies. Digital technologies propel the pace of communication and action, increasing the sense of responsiveness, immediacy, and velocity, leading to engagement in activism and the production of a particular kind of feeling. Online activism in contemporary South Korean fourth-wave feminist movements engages a new generation familiar with the use of social network services (SNS) as a driving force in the movement, creating a new subjectivization against Governmentality as they network with non-human actors and human actors.[1] The discourse of these networks functions as an alternative media beyond the reach of traditional media, performing “parrhesia”, a form of “radical-telling” and “truth-telling”.[2]
The contemporaneity of Korean fourth-wave feminism does not operate as a single generation of feminism that is disconnected from existing feminist movements or engaged online, but rather as a feminist mass movement that resonates with multiple wave narratives and builds non-linear narratives. This feminism is affective in that it is realized in discordant voices, rather than as a single harmonious voice. Affect operates as the glue that holds political themes together through shared feeling. By generating feelings, affect can form groups that lead to political action, forming a cohesive series of connections and arrangements. In this respect, contemporary Korean fourth-wave feminism is a feminist mass movement that operates not under a single banner, but in fact with heterogeneity and plurality as its driving force.
In 2024, with the decline of mass movements that came with the global pandemic, contemporary fourth-wave feminism in South Korea is facing a backlash, along with a crisis of democracy. The potential of digital technology, which has facilitated a significant expansion of online activism, does not necessarily guarantee a utopian future for feminism. As cyberbullying and trolling exploit women’s online participation, online activism is also subject to digital backlash through the technology of social media. In addition, South Korea still has a relatively low gender equality index compared to other countries, a spate of brutal sexual crimes against women, and an increase in incidents of misogyny.
Being a feminist has become a stigma in itself, but activism continues. A flame burns in the ruins of the backlash. Contemporary Korean fourth-wave feminism is still evolving, struggling, recovering, and remembering.
AUTHOR
Eun-Joo Kim is a research professor at the Institute for Urban Humanities at the University of Seoul in South Korea. She received her PhD in comparative studies of Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti from the Department of Philosophy at Ewha Womans University. Her research encompasses feminist theory, post-humanism and new materialism, with a current focus on the future of minorities.
NOTES
[1] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
[2] Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lecture at the College de France, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.