Written by Harry Fry
‘We are oppressed by having to be women.’ By describing how women’s agency is subverted to biological capacities, Rubin posits the female gender lacks identity under South Korea’s domineering patriarchy. This cements the sentiment of the 4B Movement, where young women follow the ‘Four No’s’ which denounce romance with men, therefore rejecting heteronormativity. Similarly, Hell Joseon, meaning ‘Living Hell’, theorises the distress and hopelessness felt by young people towards prospering in South Korea. The youths who perform inside the 4B Movement and Hell Joseon remove themselves from society’s foundations, crafting a separatist, new vision for their future. Equally, these models are critiqued by young academics such as Johan Shoonhoven, arguing that they prioritise grievances and resultantly are imprecisely aimed. This investigation will largely be solidified with graduate thesis projects, as these scholarly bodies hold first-hand experience and outlooks with living in and looking in on South Korea as youths. It will explore the logic behind the 4B Movement and Hell Joseon respectively and conjunctively: how they uniquely perform and institutionalise discontent. To truly navigate around the conditions and dangers of South Korean society, female and youth experiences will be understood through recent sociological and anthropological research using interviews, alongside more traditionalist gender and queer frameworks to perceive the historical weight of these matters. South Korean society will be portrayed as confining and damaging the breadth of youth identities, but I will concurrently query the extent to which these two institutions have robustly self-empowered and aided youth performance.
The 4B Movement centralises the global but specifically South Korean issue of the patriarchy. To followers of this movement, the patriarchy has been developed and maintained too firmly, ensuring men are ruinous to women. Following ingrained societal titles on heterosexual marriages, men face no constraints – 장가가다 (getting married), whereas women 시집가다 (goes to her husband’s home). While older terminology, remain commonplace and depicts a sense of women being represented through their husbands upon marriage. This is significant given South Korea’s high rate of household abuse under fathers and husbands, as correspondingly 시집살이 (the experience or difficulty for a women living with in-laws) is contemporarily used to describe the abuse women face at the hands of their in-laws. Within the 4B Movement, there is an implicit sense of raising and maintaining these norms by having a child, who could potentially be a girl and repeatedly face these identical problems; and hence, the eternal subversion of women. In Ji Min Nam’s master thesis, he uses social anthropology theory on ‘male militarisation’ to assert it shapes gender roles in South Korea. This is where men are faultlessly constructed in South Korean homes as active, domineering icons, preventing any exceptions to the damage of women.
Ji finds that these heteronormative structures fuel South Korea’s patriarchy and the 4B movement reacts to how this reality is being empowered in each generation. The movement’s followers attempt to unlearn traditional norms of love and romance as well as its performative, explicit role within society. This follows Nancy Chodorow’s feminist anthropological perspective, seeing human development under a gender role creating intrinsic subversions of identity. Through restructuring how to live and grow in South Korea, they ideally gain an unprecedented sense of power as women, absent of male interference and damage. Ji’s later arguments note that having to perform the female gender is constraining and this can be supported by Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’ theory of gender being made in its engagement with society. The 4B Movement steps away from all gendered societal bubbles, as Butler insists that women’s bodies are not naturally constrained until placed in male-oriented, societal frameworks. To form a whole female identity and be successful in contemporary South Korea, the 4B Movement segregates from romance with men to derail the perception of heterosexual relationships as hallmarked by childbirth and male hegemony.
Yeong Ji, a feminist activist, reasserts the concept of women’s identity being fractured in a male world, particularly due to the binary terming of gender: conventional female identity is defined by the experience of marriage and motherhood. Therefore, as Ji proposes, the 4B Movement must avoid and tangibly step away from this societal, gendered delineation through their physical acts and choices from youthhood. Finding their authentic expression is impossible under men, the 4B Movement attempts to craft Marilyn Frye’s traditionalist theory on an intentional, feminist separatist utopia. Moving out of a reproductive prism, the 4B Movement embodies an unprecedently female-oriented life. Jieun Lee’s contextualisation of this movement within gender theory proposes this is not merely gender equality and female empowerment, but focuses on the capacity to remain overtly feminist and self-motivated without falling into the social system of reproduction. Ultimately, the 4B Movement was created out of the increasingly militant attitudes of online feminist debates, battling what Lee deems as masculine ‘insecurities’ within society. This is where males are nurtured under the patriarchy and conceive its structures as normal, consistently rewriting femininity as a secondary entity which accompanies and upholds masculinity. In contrast to Hell Joseon’s notions which largely confines itself to defeatist mentalities, the 4B Movement proclaims gender equality and female social emancipation through a method which activates such attitudes. Recreating their perception in society by preventing the female body’s label as a necessary agent of sexual reproduction, they simultaneously worked to remain outside of South Korea’s patriarchal makeup which confined and objectified women. Rather, it is forming a female separatist future.
The 4B Movement has similarly damaging but important parallels to the idea of China’s Leftover Ladies, where women remaining unmarried at 30 are considered ‘expired’. Hyeonseo Lee, in a 4B feminist zine, emphasised the notion of women running out of plans and journeys upon marriage. By avoiding the pathways of heteronormativity and men, women can prevent the subversion and confinement of their abilities, reinventing themselves. Renowned authors Cho Nam Joo and Jin Ah Kim, regularly inspiring the 4B Movement, find that when women are objectified as part of a household, it becomes their core identity. Therefore, by removing themselves from activities which simultaneously fuse damaging patriarchal norms, women can live a new full life; reshaping the identity of a South Korean woman. Kim also encourages readers to become the ‘sedeju’ (head of one’s household), opposing the legal household registrations in South Korea – ‘hoju’ – where only men can succeed in dominance in the household. This provides women with a long-term future under the 4B Movement’s philosophy, without reliance on society, the patriarchy, or even other people. As Lee narrates, their lives are scoped fully and in isolation, meaning their visions are extended to greater lengths and widths than ending at marriage and motherhood. Further, in opposition to heterosexuality, women possess more freedom to consider same-sex relationships. Todd Henry’s leading research on the queer experience in South Korea reports and sees lesbian couples as more empowered since they are not limited to being appreciated under patriarchal contexts. Female identity is pigeonholed under ingrained societal views of them through a male gaze, where their looks and values are predesigned and consequently, limited. 4B Women can be perceived independently, able to prioritise friendships and ignore how they appear to men and thus society.
Hell Joseon mirrors the 4B Movement in being rooted in youth experiences of overwhelming discontent. Contrastingly, Hell Joseon’s followers possess an anxiety towards the state of Korea, unparalleled in the more robust and progress-driven institution of the 4B Movement. Moreover, Hell Joseon is regularly viewed in recent scholarship such as Schoonhoven’s as a complex and convoluted theory (Schoonhoven 2). Admittedly, it exists as a historical comparison to the pre-modern Joseon dynasty to present the wide comparison between traditional and progressing South Korean society: between rich and poor as the middle class steadily declines under an elite-facing class structure. From crafting a metaphorical parallel to the Joseon dynasty, Hell Joseon depicts the tangible lack of progress in South Korea’s continually fracturing society, namely the continually worsening class-based wealth gap after waves of modernisation and the failure of the state to provide and ensure prosperity for most youths. Hell Joseon’s activism and protest lie in complaints from the majority towards wealth being narrowly centralised in a minority of elites; often male-dominated oligarchs. Schoonhoven notes how the older generation is seen as denying what has persistently existed and youths unprecedently perceive, admit and perform this struggle. This is partially connected to the 4B Movement, as young, admittedly ungendered, struggles for empowerment under South Korea’s unchanging fabric have instilled young complaints.
Schoonhoven defines Hell Joseon as resisting nationalism and a focus on monetary prosperity when representing one’s identity, role, and spirit. To young South Koreans, their faith in their country’s efforts to support them is futile and insufficient, as even a flawless CV and education will not ensure them a job. This facilitates Hell Joseon’s leading complaint over unendingly high employment, ensuring graduates begin with fear and lacking hope towards their future careers. Therefore, to followers, Schoonhoven’s resolution theory relating to self-prioritisation and self-realisation can only take place outside of the conventional approaches to progressing within South Korea. Within an established adult, workforce society, Hell Joseon sees limitations of adolescent’s development into adulthood; youths remaining within traditional approaches to societal progression are unable to support their mental health. Through being unconventionally non-work-oriented, future generations’ attitudes can be redrawn to prioritise mental health and realise one’s identity. This is an empowering perspective inconsistent with the typically limited reflections of Hell Joseon towards merely giving up and accepting Hell. This novel outlook towards self-prioritisation and perhaps empowerment, which Schoonhoven casts as a deeper meaning behind Hell Joseon, is a more productive outlook on casting out the unsupportive programmes of South Korean society.
Students and graduates consider Hell Joseon’s notion by reflecting on feeling lost within it, where you cannot be sure if you are in or out of South Korean society even after deeming it is hell. This similarly relates to how Hell Joseon regularly lacks clarity: presenting a stagnated mentality and existence between pre-modern and modern life, youths frequently cannot locate the actual meaning of this outlook for complaining. The true reasoning behind this institution is what Schoonhoven moves to in challenging it, querying ‘what is going within the conceptual walls of Hell Joseon’. He finds its notions misunderstood and impenetrable to many youths, particularly as its complaints originate from what he terms as a working-class belief. Resultantly, it struggles to be fully represented in middle-class youths who are also struggling under elite, financial domination. Young Mi Kin ties its lower-class scope with historical geneses and comparisons to the inequality of Chaebol hegemony over wealth. Consequently, utilised terminology such as 흙수저 (spoons born and subsequently living without any wealth) is solely related to distinctively working-class people. By lacking a bottom-up approach, Hell Joseon’s complaint on inequality perhaps withheld by more middle-class youths struggling on a lesser note. Kim posits a more extremist theory on Hell Joseon, finding it attempts to end societal fabrics and hence implicitly desires a shutting down of South Korea’s political identities – democratisation, neoliberalism, and repeated modernisation – which similarly lacks identification amongst much of its followers. Equally, Schoonhoven interviewed students who attended overseas universities and initially disregarded Hell Joseon until returning to South Korea and struggling. This emphasises more elite-facing youths, going jobless within South Korea, aligning with Hell Joseon. Opposingly, being shaped around critiques of how prosperity and national development are confined to upper-class lives, perhaps Hell Joseon ought to be limited to a more working-class experience.
Hell Joseon largely equates to doubt and fear towards South Korean youths’ futures, which can reflect a wider sense, outside of this institution, towards the uncertainty of one’s success upon newly entering the workplace. There exist new forms of mental health outlooks such as shamanism. Dirk Schlottmann investigates how this practice remains followed in contemporary South Korea, considering jaesugut (ritual of happiness) and uhwangut (ritual against misfortune) which have been adapted to the demands of a modern, urbanised society. Youths can locate their purpose and self-identity by altering one’s idea of happiness and success; making life explicable and liveable despite the backdrop of Hell Joseon’s contexts. Hell Joseon therefore exists as one of many therapy measures surrounding mental worrying and turmoil. Further, given queer institutions also step out of the traditional beliefs of South Korea, Hell Joseon cannot be viewed as unprecedented. This results in the 4B Movement lacking individuality, since both follow abnormal routes away from societal and cultural values of heteronormativity.
Henry’s Queer Korea theory shows locals challenging binary gendering, the expected couple form, and reproducing to maintain familial bloodlines, to some degree mirroring the 4B Movement. This may be, yet queer existence in Korea still ‘[upsets] the natural social order’, viewed as bringing in AIDS and foreign entities inhibiting South Korea’s consistent development through their seemingly independent values. Henry suggests anti-Westernisation as the cause, highlighting inward and unmovable mindsets, despite modernisation through outwardness and mobility. Nonetheless, the queer movement can only partially reject South Korea’s norms, as it faces attack, notably the military’s use of gay dating apps to hunt down queer soldiers and banish them. Hell Joseon, but more significantly the 4B Movement, has a pivotal impact in going outside desired societal activity and against one’s so-called loyalty to their family’s institution. This connected institution of queer culture, while portraying a recurrence of identical approaches towards rejecting South Korea’s traditions as well as its social and cultural infrastructure, is constrained in its movements.
By instigating the theme of refusing and removing society through preventative measures, the 4B Movement defies women’s established reproductive and maternal capacities as defining them; casting out male representations. While consequently living a fuller life, unthreatened by patriarchal-dominated societal structures, only 4,000 members are reported. The movement piercingly defies society yet is limited in its quantitative damage. Hell Joseon is greater in number and notoriety, as well as equally breaking society’s programming to rather form novel mindsets and versions for youths’ progress. However, it regularly lacks distinct visions and largely exists as a hybrid complaint institution which does not materialise tangible agents of change. Equally, despite their assumed polarised beliefs, both institutions are not incomparable: the queer community and mental health practices such as shamanism are aligned in moving out of South Korea’s societal cues. Nonetheless, Hell Joseon, and particularly the 4B Movement, strikingly resist how youths are expected to act, instead generating unique performances which break and rewrite society, perhaps from the future generation to the next.
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Featured image credit: Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty. Accessed via https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html
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