Women’s Position in Transition: South Korean Women’s Perspectives on the 4B Movement and on Their Position in Korean Society

Abstract

This master’s thesis explores how South Korean women understand the feminist 4B movement which rejects heterosexual birth, marriage, romance, and sex and, more broadly, the societal position of women. The movement, having been born as a counterreaction to the Korean state’s measures to address the country’s extremely low birthrate as well as the society’s misogynistic culture, has generally been primarily understood as a political movement aiming to weaken the patriarchal state through women withdrawing from the state’s reproductive economy.

While previous studies have emphasized the movement’s political aspect, this thesis deeper explores how women, both within and outside the movement interpret the phenomenon, and further how they understand the position of women within the existing societal structures and expectations. The theoretical framework of this thesis consists of Michel Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics and Judith Butler’s understanding of gender and its performativity, which together provide tools to analyze the topic through feminist and post-structuralist lenses. The data consists of a qualitative, descriptive online survey, 17 Korean women as participants, and it is analyzed by using theory guided analysis.

The study reveals how 4B represents a larger shift in women’s attitudes and how women experience conflict in between the existing structures and women’s personal aspirations. Furthermore, it highlights how women are subjected to multiple, sometimes even contradicting gendered expectations, and how women also question this current state of matters and wish for it to change. In this context of change and conflicting stuctures and expectations, women make different choices in their personal lives, varying from conformity to resistance and to alternative solutions. Together, these results demonstrate how the position of women in Korean society is undergoing a phase of transition, and how the 4B movement is only one manifestation of this shift.