The 4B movement: envisioning a feminist future with/in a non-reproductive future in Korea

ABSTRACT

Recently, in Korea, young feminists launched the 4B (4非) movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu, meaning the refusal of (heterosexual) marriage, childbirth, romance, and sexual relationships. The 4B movement encompasses not only criticisms of the pro-natalist turn in state policy and protests against it, but also various forms of self-help discussions and practices that are explicitly oriented towards women’s individual futures. In this article, we explore how the 4B movement has given young feminists the opportunity to envision the future that they had been discouraged from imagining. Presenting a lived critique of contemporary Korea, these feminists ask how young women are led to imagine their current, single life as a temporary state, as consumer capitalism and the patriarchal state together place these young non-married women in an economically vulnerable position. They see this as achieved by endorsing ‘feminine’ desires and a presentist lifestyle, as well as excluding non-married women from opportunities in the job market and state-sponsored benefits in welfare services. We argue that the 4B movement and its discourses on the future and self-help could offer these women one possible way to envision a feminist future as individuals without being part of the state’s reproductive future.

KEYWORDS:

• Future
• self-help
• digital feminism
• neoliberalism
• korea

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Corset’ is a term that digital feminists in Korea have appropriated to refer to the gendered constraints that are related to socially enforced performances of femininity. The Tal-Corset or ‘escape the corset’ movement urged women to free themselves from those constraints. As the digital feminist discourse developed, the strict beauty standard was identified as one of the major issues oppressing women in Korea.

2. When citing quotes from online communities, we follow each community’s rule on anonymity that sets its users’ expectations of privacy. We have chosen to provide the name of each online community in order to give a sense of where the discussion took place, while keeping the users unidentifiable.

3. As Korean digital feminists often identify themselves as ‘anonymous women’, and it is conventional not to disclose their personal details online, it is difficult to determine their demographic characteristics. From the digital texts written by the 4B feminists, we may infer that they vary greatly in their educational backgrounds, economic status, and current occupations. The only thing that brings them together is the very experiences of engagement in the digital feminist discussions in general, and the 4B movement in particular, and the ways they problematize the current status of women in Korea. However, it is generally accepted that this group of feminists comprises mainly women whose ages range from their mid-teens to their thirties, often referred to as the ‘3-po (given-up)’ generation.

4. Twitter has been an important site for Korean digital feminists particularly during the nation-wide #Metoo movement in the early 2018.

5. Indeed, bihon movement itself is not completely new. Since 2005, a feminist activist group, UnniNetwork, has promoted bihon as a political agenda to challenge the centrality of heteronormative family model in Korea. However, their feminist bihon discourse was rather on the fringe. In the popular discourse, non-married singlehood was still portrayed as a choice for successful, cosmopolitan, young women. What is new in the bihon discourse in the late-2010s, especially in the 4B movement, is that both its explicit political orientation as well as popularity.

6. We selected the book as it is one of the most frequently mentioned materials in the discussions among the 4B feminists on Twitter, as they try to substantiate their economic turn in envisioning the non-married future. The author, previously a successful professional woman, highlights the importance of financial independence to sustain a non-married life, reflecting on her frustration after her divorce.

7. The Korean feminist scholar and activist Young-Gyung Paik (2015) has argued that feminist organizations, in their attempt at the policy changes, have engaged with the ‘low fertility’ crisis discourse without problematizing it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jieun Lee

Jieun Lee is an Assistant Professor in  the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, Korea. She is interested in the politics of knowledge production and circulation in various fields (including medicine, technoscience, and women’s studies) in relation to the rise of digitally mediated communications and lay experts.

Euisol Jeong is a PhD research student in the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York. Her research focuses on the relation between digital feminist activism and changing dynamics of women’s movement in South Korea. In her dissertation research, she explores how the feminist discussions of digital users have reconfigured feminist practices in contemporary Korea.