This study examines the construction of women who refuse normative ideals in South Korean society as internal enemies.It develops the concept of gendered securitization as an analytical framework that integrates Sara Ahmed's affective politics with feminist security studies, and applies this framework to Han Kang's The Vegetarian (2015).It argues that The Vegetarian functions as a literary allegory for how affective politics can be converted into a security logic that legitimizes exclusion.By tracing the pathologization of the protagonist's resistance, the study extends beyond narratives that reduce antifeminism to misogyny.Instead, it reinterprets this political shift as part of a deeper security grammar through which an unstable society restores collective identity by constructing threats and expelling people deemed deviant.Finally, the study suggests that this framework can be extended to other cultural contexts in which gender performance and community boundaries become sites of conflict.
Bona Kim (Thu,) studied this question.