Korea's #MeToo Movement and the New Feminist Generation

Korea's #MeToo Movement and the New Feminist Generation Haeseong Park (bio) Hawon Jung's Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide, Dallas: BenBella Books, 2023 Although there are some scholarly works in English on Korean women and feminism, little has been published about the extraordinary developments of recent years. Journalist Hawon Jung has written in a clear and compassionate tone about what she has personally witnessed on the ground. Jung has done this not only to introduce Korean feminist movements to English audiences but also to advocate for Korean women in the hope that the Korean feminist movement will continue to move forward in the face of the current backlash. The book starts with the Korean #MeToo movement in 2018, followed by a very brief historiography of Korean women's movements and a new wave of Korean feminist movements. Jung posits that misogynistic online culture in Korea sparked fourth-wave feminism in 2015. This grassroots movement utilized the internet and social media and then took to the streets in 2016. The book discusses major gender issues and women's movements in Korea in roughly chronological order. This approach effectively explains how Korean millennial feminists paved the way for the Korean #MeToo movement to explode, in contrast to nearby countries such as China and Japan, and for Korean feminists to have the momentum to push their work forward. Moreover, the chapter structure provides a clear roadmap of what this new generation of Korean feminists has achieved: from bringing men's sexual misconduct to justice, through fighting against digital sex crimes and defying sexist beauty standards, to winning abortion rights in 2019. Beyond the recent successes of Korean feminists, Jung acknowledges their "divisions and missteps" (7) and the backlash of widespread anti-feminism, especially among young men and in an increasingly conservative political atmosphere. Nonetheless, Jung concludes the book by assuring readers End Page 301 that Korean women, armed with their newfound language and experience of solidarity, will persist in making progress. An important strength of this book is the use of in-depth interviews that convey the reality of everyday life in Korea and that support the author's arguments. Jung often concludes her chapters, and in fact the book itself, with the words of interviewees to substantiate her own opinions. Furthermore, the personal stories told by the interviewees, sometimes feminist activists and sometimes victims of sexual violence, help readers to establish empathy with the interviewees' journeys to find their voice and solidarity out of pain and shame. The wealth of interviews and Jung's firsthand experience and interaction with feminist activists and victims give this book an almost primary-source quality. The personal accounts are given a broader significance through the use of statistics and public reports. The author is effective in showing how Korean women have broken their silence, but the book lacks the voice of men, particularly anti-feminist men. These counter-voices could provide the readers with a more holistic yet deeper understanding of Korean women's circumstances. In addition, Jung, who is critical of the essentialism of Korean radical feminists, does not question how other Korean feminists define the category of women. Jung also fails to pay attention to class and diversity issues among women in Korea, such as migrant women workers and foreign wives, even though some of her interviews raise these issues. For instance, Jung introduces a working-class woman who educated herself in feminism, which she described as "an unaffordable luxury … a posh, abstract, and meaningless concept that belonged to a different world—the world of well-educated, middle-class people" (142–43). This may be because Jung, coming from a journalism background, intends to present contemporary Korean feminism as it is: second-wave content that overlooks differences between women and women in the fourth-wave medium of digital communication. In this book, Hawon Jung stands with women activists and victims of sexual violence to present their wounds, anger, courage, and resistance. She allows the subjects of her research to speak in their own words, from their own perspectives. She makes no attempt to impose any theoretical discourse...