Feminist Futures and Ecological Sense in South Korea

Kimberly Chung, McGill University Kimberly Chung, McGill University

Faculty host: Ivanna Yi, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies

Professor Chung writes: This paper examines the interrelationship of feminism, ecological sense and art practice in the context of contemporary South Korea. Since 2018, the Me Too movement brought systemic gendered discrimination in all areas of South Korean political, cultural, and social life into focus, with books, like Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982,  becoming a cultural touchstone for a generation of women who came into adulthood at the turn of the 21^st century. While most discussions about South Korean feminism have had an anthropocentric focus, this paper focuses on the productive and often fraught relationship between feminism and ecological movements in South Korea, best exemplified by writers, artists, and art collectives who interrogate capitalist patriarchalism and patriarchal urban planning through an employment of ecological sense. Ecological sense frameworks like microbes, symbiosis and the “women’s work” of knitting and DIY are ways in which artists/art collectives like Rice Brewing Sister’s Club, Listen to the City,  and Soyo Lee have exemplified an emerging feminist ecology that situates the exploitation of women within a wider web of human/nonhuman interrelations. This paper will utilize cultural works by South Korean artists, writers, and activists as important analytical tools for making sense of the consumption of nature, urban redevelopment, globalization, and dislocation of life. A particular line of questioning will focus on framings of landscape without nature, an aesthetics of dislocation, post pastoral perspectives, and science fiction futurist orientations.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature