Feminism reboot: Korean cinema under neoliberalism in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

This paper examines recent feminist movements, which I am grouping together under the term ‘feminism reboot’, in the context of South Korea’s neoliberalization, with a focus on misogyny levelled against women. It first traces the emergence of social media-based feminism in Korea, following the democratization and market liberalization since the late 1980s and subsequent Korean films that used to showcase more diverse types of female characters up until the mid-1990s. But as misogyny intensified after the 1997 economic crisis, film narrative increasingly revolves around male characters, while female characters often disappear. This trope could be seen to register the gendered nature of Korean society that resulted from the rapid acceptance of neoliberal values in the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. This paper compares and contrasts the romantic comedies of the 1990s, such as Marriage Story (Gyeolhon yiyagi, Kim Eui-seok, 1992), Mister Mama (Misteo mamma, Kang Woo-suk, 1992) and the comedy of the 2010s, including Sunny (Sseoni, Kang Hyeog-cheol, 2011) in order to demonstrate how the economic crisis not only re- legitimized the gender hierarchy and has further affected the cinematic representation of gender, taking away female agency in the latter period.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber feminism
• feminism reboot
• neoliberal feminism
• Korean cinema
• romantic comedy
• Marriage Story
• Sunny

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It is not clear when the computer science term ‘reboot’ was borrowed into the entertainment and film industry. In Korea, it was first appeared in 2010 to describe a new trend in Hollywood of remaking franchise such as the Spiderman series. The first article referring to ‘reboot’ is in an article in the film magazine Cine 21. Lee 2010. ‘[Wald aeksyeon] summeoneun yiteora, seupayideomaenyida!’ [[World Action] Forget Summer, Spiderman is coming!] Cine21 (February, 2). Accessed 14, October, 2020. http://www.cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=59596

2 #IAmAFeminist in Korea many be compared to #YesAllWomen in the States. MERS Gallery refers to a website created by online community users in response to the outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) within South Korea in 2015. As misogynistic allegations emerged on this online forum, accusing women of being the origin of the MERS outbreak, female users migrated to this website to ‘take over’ the community, later developing the discourse of satirizing misogynistic expressions.

3 The term ‘feminism reboot’ describes the moment of uprising of the Fourth Wave Feminism in Korea. Regarding the Fourth Wave worldwide, see Munro, E. (2013) and Chamberlain, Prudence (2017).

4 Statistics shows an interesting number. Right after the economic crisis, wives with unemployed husbands performed more housework than wives with employed husbands. Wives with unemployed husbands take charge of 69 percent of domestic labour, while wives with continuous working husbands take charge of about 60 percent and those with re-employed husbands about 64 percent. (Ahn et al. 2001, 119)

5 KOBIS is a system (service platform) that aggregates ticketing information for movie theaters nationwide in real time run by KOFIC. (http://www.kobis.or.kr)

6 Three largest female-dominant online communities in Korea focus on frugal consumption and beauty.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hee Jeong Sohn

Sohn Hee-jeong is a Korean film critic and currently Research Professor of Center for Cross-Culture Studies in Kyunghee University. She completed her Ph.D in film studies at Chung-ang University, Art & Technology with the thesis entitled, 21segi Hangukyounghwawa neyisyeon [The twenty-first Century Korean Cinema and the Nation], after which she has been teaching at Chung-ang University. She is the author of Peminijeum ributeu [Feminism Reboot](2017), Seongpyeongdeung [Gender Equality](2018), Dasi, sseuneun, segye [Re-Writing the World](2020), and translated The Monstrous-Feminine (Barbara Creed 1993, trans. 2008) and In the Darkroom (Susan Faludi 2016, trans. 2020) into Korean.