【by Jay Hee-jeong Sohn, Dec. 2024】
The “Belle Époque” and Young Feminists
Sometime near the end of November 2024, a male news commentator on a South Korean radio program stated that for Koreans, the 1990s is akin to a “Belle Époque.” Similarly, in popular television shows such as Reply 1997 (Eungdap Hara 1997) and other variety shows, the 1990s repeatedly appears as a nostalgic space to which the older generation of Koreans wishes to return. What significance does the 1990s hold for Koreans?
Following the large-scale democratization protests of June of 1987 and the subsequent establishment of direct elections for the presidency, the 1990s ushered in a promising new era of possibility. A plethora of social movements—such as feminist, green, queer, and disability rights movements—became increasingly visible in South Korean public life, seeking to deepen and strengthen the institutions of democracy. With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the age of politics receded, and the age of ethics arrived on a global scale, giving rise to the new age of culture. In the years before the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Korean consumers indulged in the fruits of consumer capitalism and engaged with the market as a means of exploring their identities. Simultaneously, the Internet was commercialized as a new public sphere and realm of communication. This description of the 1990s makes the characterization of this decade as a “Belle Époque” appear rather reasonable. However, another important development that emerged from the fertile ground of 1990s South Korea and came to exert a significant influence on society was the cultural movement of a new generation of radical feminist activists who are often referred to as the “young feminists.”
When defining the 1990s as an age of new feminism or the era of “young feminists,” it is important to avoid characterizing the preceding period as uniformly “old-fashioned” and patriarchal. Indeed, the victories that Korean women were already benefitting from in the 1990s—including the right to receive a high school education, the right to participate in the official labor market, and legal measures against various forms of sexual violence—all occurred within the larger context of the history of the Korean women’s movement. Moreover, in addition to the young feminists engaged in various initiatives on the periphery of universities, there were also other feminists active in different spaces of Korean society (Kim Sin Hyeon-gyeong, 164). In this sense, the history of Korean feminism must be approached from the perspective of continuity and interconnection. As South Korean feminist Jeon Hui-gyeong states, “Feminists are both products of context, as well as people who fight to create new contexts” (17).
Nevertheless, there is significance in dedicating a special issue of this journal to looking back on the history of 1990s Korean society, as an examination of this history can offer a clearer understanding of the particularities of South Korean society during this decade. Indeed, during these years, the keyword “culture” gained a new salience never before witnessed within the feminist movement, and the emergence of digital technologies and cyberspace generated an entirely new set of conditions for feminist organizing. These young feminists of the 1990s problematized the very culture of patriarchy and brought “issues related to sexuality and the body, including sexual politics and sexual violence, to the forefront.” Moreover, feminists “spoke to the public through cultural festivals that utilized various communications channels” and were “not hesitant to build online spaces as a means of developing the language of feminism” (Kim Sin Hyeon-gyeong, 169).
Cultural Feminism Meets Online Feminism
One particular event that symbolically marked the arrival of the young feminist generation in the 1990s was the formation of the feminist group Deulkkot (“wildflowers”). One day in May 1996, 500 male students from Korea University—which makes up the “K” in the acronym “SKY,” referring to the three most prestigious universities in the country[1]—infiltrated a festival being held at Ewha Womans University, turning the festival into a scene of chaos while using violence against female students who attempted to stop them. Following criticisms of the male students’ stunt, messages began popping up on anonymous message boards expressing sentiments such as, “It wasn’t a big deal,” “It was just a joke,” and “They [Ewha students] slept with Yonsei students while refusing to spread their legs for Korea University students.” What this incident clearly reveals is the general male-centric orientation of universities in South Korea at that time. In response, female representatives from various universities decided to form an organization, resulting in the birth of Deulkkot, which provided an opportunity for female students who had been involved in feminist organizing at their individual universities to make their voices heard by the general public.
In May of 1998, Du Ipsul (“two lips”), a group for independent women’s media at Yonsei University, began publishing their own magazine of the same name. The name Du Ipsul was inspired by the title of Luce Irigaray’s essay “When Our Lips Speak Together,” which implies that subversion in everyday life begins by opening one’s lips to speak about the pain and injustice that has gone unspoken. These young women established Du Ipsul as a group independent from the university in order to avoid issues around censorship and the need to obtain approval while also attempting to break away from the conventional framework adhered to by the women’s movement in South Korea. Reflecting the orientation of young feminists at that time, the chief editor of Du Ipsul, Yi Seon-ok, stated that they were seeking to build solidarity with women who felt “the women’s movement is something that has nothing to do with my life” by addressing issues such as “romance, independence, and shoes.”
Alongside Du Ipsul, another development illustrative of the cultural movement led by the young feminists was the publication of Dal nara ttal sepo (“moon world daughter cells”), which declared itself to be the first feminist webzine in Korea. The intention was to create a magazine that could support women fighting to overcome the discrimination and oppression they often faced alone in the isolated, lonely context of the university and workplaces; the webzine also sought to carve out their own space in the overwhelmingly male-dominated landscape of cyberspace. At the time, chief editor Yi Ga-eun stated the following: “The women’s movement, which is strengthened by its respect for diversity, still seems to emphasize ‘sameness’ over ‘difference.’ It needs to break away from the current formula of the women’s movement and adopt more varied forms of activism while transitioning from a focus on women as ‘victims’ to an ‘affirmation of womanhood’ and shifting from a women’s movement that prioritizes ‘joy’ for all over ‘sacrifice.’” Examples of such efforts included Geomi (“spider”), a radical feminist group engaged in information activism, Tolkkot (“stone flower”), which responded to real-life events using guerrilla tactics, Hysteria (Hiseuteria), which pursued cultural activism through translation, and Kirikiri (“like attracts like”), a radical lesbian activist group.
These movements also gave voice to criticisms of the inherent patriarchy of existing activist circles and progressive movements in South Korea. In particular, a May Day poster created by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1999 served as a catalyst that triggered an outpouring of discontent that had been growing within progressive camps. The May Day poster featured a male worker wearing a red vest and, behind him, a woman cradling a baby looking at the man’s back. That is, the independent labor union movement was imagined as exclusively male, with women appearing not as workers but rather as the wives of union members. Feminists attacked the poster and what it revealed about the patriarchal orientation of the KCTU. The controversy escalated further when a posting appeared on a message board for the Economics Department at Korea University stating, “Every feminist who criticizes this poster should be regarded as an enemy of the progressive movement” (Kwon Kim Hyun-Young, 35).
This critical consciousness regarding patriarchal attitudes within the progressive movement also led to the birth of the Committee of 100 to Eradicate Sexual Violence Within Progressive Movements (Undong Sahoe Seongpongnyeok Ppuri Ppopgi 100-in Wiwonhoe). This committee was formed in August of 2000 as a personal network of female activists who sought to problematize the rampant sexual violence within self-proclaimed progressive organizations. These combined efforts functioned to bring about qualitative change within South Korean society.
The Woljang Incident at the Beginning of the 21st Century and Beyond
The feminist cultural movement of the 1990s precipitated an expansion of feminist discourse in the 2000s. When discussing the feminism of the 1990s from the perspective of continuity, the so-called “2001 Woljang Incident” marks an important historical development that connects the long decade of the 1990s with the 21st century.
Woljang was a student group of cultural feminists at Busan University. In November 2000, before the occurrence of the Woljang Incident, a group of female students at Busan University held a “smoking protest” outside the main gate of the university. Busan in the 1990s was one of the more conservative regions of Korea, and it was not unheard of for a woman smoking on the street to be slapped by a man of middle age or older. In fact, in the 1990s, there were even rumors around the country that “women who smoke in places not covered by a roof can be arrested.” (Of course, no such law actually existed. I guess you could say the rumor was a form of “gaslighting.”) This smoking protest has been remembered as “a symbolic event that announced the existence of feminists.” Ten years after the establishment of a women’s studies program at Busan University in 1989, women’s voices were beginning to erupt into public spaces.
The spirit of the group Woljang at Busan University was encapsulated by their slogan, “Women’s voices! Let’s hike up our skirts and jump over the fence of patriarchy!” On April 24, 2001, the group founded their own magazine, also titled Woljang. Like Dal nara ttal sepo, Woljang reflected feminists’ proactive adoption of new internet technologies. However, immediately following the publication of its inaugural issue, Woljang faced a crisis.
The first issue was titled The Republic of Korea Reserve Forces on the Chopping Block, and the article that set off the ensuing controversy was titled “Some Reasons Why I Hate the Reserve Forces.” The article discussed how compulsory military conscription in Korea resulted in male reservists introducing the military culture to university environments. The article invited swift backlash immediately following publication. The Woljang message board experienced a flood of violent comments, and the official homepage of Busan University was subjected to a wave of vicious postings not unlike a cyber terror attack. In various online male communities, anger, personal attacks, and sexually violent language targeted toward the editors of Woljang were rampant. Moreover, as a harbinger of the cyber sexual violence that would subsequently occur in South Korea, the personal information of members of the Woljang community was deliberately leaked and publicized on adult phone sex message boards.
An online forum was established with the stated goal of facilitating a “rational discussion on the Woljang issue.” However, forum participants were uniformly concerned with seeking “punishment” for the female students and administered a questionnaire regarding their potential expulsion. This “anti-Woljang” camp even went so far as to prepare a lawsuit to sue the members of Woljang for defamation. That is, the online forum was simply another violent and misogynic corner of the manosphere. As this incident demonstrates, the violence of online macho culture, including the cyberbullying that targeted Korean cyber feminists throughout 2024, had already infiltrated Korean internet culture in the early 21st century. Recently in Korean society, and particularly among commentators in progressive spaces, there has been considerable finger-pointing at young Korean men who have become increasingly conservative and are often referred to as idaenam, a neologism used to describe Korean men in their 20s who vote against women’s rights. However, it is abundantly clear what is at the root of the idaenam phenomenon. That is, the men in their 40s and 50s who are pointing the fingers now would themselves have been considered idaenam if the term had existed in 2001.
Despite this backlash, Woljang continued until August 2003, publishing a total of eight issues. Moreover, with the rise of Fourth Wave feminism in Korea in 2015—which is often described as the “Feminist Reboot”—this momentarily forgotten history has been revived and shared with a new generation of young women.
When considered from a limited perspective, the 1990s may well appear as a nostalgic era analogous to the “Belle Époque.” However, the various difficulties that Korean society is currently experiencing have their roots in the 1990s. Therefore, we must examine the 1990s from a detached and objective perspective. Korean Feminism, which began to engage with identity politics in the 1990s, is also not free from the lasting influences of this decade. However, it is difficult to ignore the reality from which the feminism of the 1990s was born. That is, this “Belle Époque” witnessed male students deliberately causing chaos at a campus festival for female students, posting the personal information of female students who said things they didn’t like on phone sex websites, and spewing sexually violent rhetoric in cyberspace behind the veil of anonymity. In this context, what should be reflected on first? Due to society’s failure to reckon with this culture, Korean society is now coming face to face with the crime of deep-fake pornography in the 2020s, and we continue to have to fight against these kinds of digital sex crimes within the history of Korean feminism.
AUTHOR
Jay Hee-jeong Sohn (PhD) (_/her/_) is a Research Professor in South Korea at Kyung Hee University. Her major is Cine-feminism and the doctoral thesis is The 21st Century Korean Cinema and Nation. She is an actively engaged film critic and feminist based in South Korea and the author of Feminism Reboot (2017), I Saw the Universe You Created (2021), Gender Equality (2018), and If Only We Could Envision a Better Ends on This Damaged Planet (2024), among others. She also translated influential feminist works like Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed and Stiffed and In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi into Korean. She is affiliated with the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies in Kyung Hee University and also a member of the cine-feminist group Project38.
NOTES
[1] The acronym SKY refers to Seoul University (S), Korea University (K), and Yonsei University (Y). As of 2024, these three universities still occupy the top three spots in rankings of Korean universities.
REFERENCES
Jeon Hui-gyeong. Oppa neun piryo eopda. Imaejin (2008).
Kim Sin Hyeong-gyeong. “Jigeum/yeogi peminijeum eseo ‘munhwa’ e gwanhan munje seoljeong eul wihan myeot gaji jilmun deul.” In Yeoseong gwa sahoe (2005).
Kwon Kim Hyun-Young, Son Hee-jung, et al. Daehan Minguk net pemisa. Namu Yeonpil (2017).
“‘Dal nara ttal sepo,’ ‘Du ipsul’.” Yeoseong Sinmun, May 12, 2005. https://www.womennews.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=6970.