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Feminist Korean Studies: Reimagining Futures

This edited volume extends the project initiated by the Korean Studies 2025 special section “Feminist Korean Studies,” which deployed feminist critique across digital media, popular culture, legal discourse, public health, neoliberalism, and postcoloniality. Building on that foundation, the volume invites interdisciplinary, interregional, and bilingual feminist scholarship to address pressing global and regional developments: the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, intensified anti-feminist backlash in South Korea, and the persistent marginalization of feminist discourse in Anglophone Korean Studies.

We especially welcome contributions that critique disciplinary boundaries and interrogate language-related exclusions within the field. The digital entanglement of misogyny and violence against women and girls—visible in phenomena such as the Nth Room, deepfake abuse, and the censorship of women’s expression online—demands a dual focus on structural harm and emergent forms of resistance. South Korea’s feminist movements of the past decade have gained global visibility through hashtags, viral imagery, and protest slogans. Yet Western interpretations often flatten the complexity of movements like 4B (rejecting heterosexual dating, marriage, sex, and reproduction). This volume seeks contextualized, nuanced interventions that disrupt both Orientalist pathologization and celebratory exceptionalism.

We invite papers that intervene in two intersecting terrains:

Within Korean Studies: Submissions should push back against disciplinary conservatism and the field’s preoccupation with Cold War legacies, which often sidelines contemporary feminist activism. We encourage work that crosses status, national, and language boundaries to foreground feminist urgency.

Within Gender & Sexuality Studies: We welcome analyses of recent South Korean feminist thought, culture, and activism in transnational conversation. Areas of engagement might include sexual citizenship, neoliberal feminism, transgender exclusions, and state-sanctioned gendered violence—particularly works that integrate Korean feminist scholarship (much of which remains untranslated and uncited) with broader decolonial and transnational feminist frameworks.

1. Emerging Voices

We seek contributions from early-career scholars, independent researchers, translators, and graduate students whose work expands or redefines the terrain of feminist Korean Studies. Submissions might engage new methodologies, archives, or affective registers that unsettle disciplinary hierarchies and linguistic boundaries.

2. Activist Narratives

We invite essays, reflective pieces, and ethnographic accounts that center the work of activists, organizers, and collectives shaping feminist struggles in and beyond South Korea. Possible areas of focus include—but are not limited to—the intersections of digital organizing, bodily autonomy, labor, disability, regional disparity, and resistance to gendered, racialized, and sexualized violence.

3. Collaborative Voices as Co-Authoring

Recognizing that feminist knowledge is often co-produced, this section welcomes co-authored or multivocal contributions that blur the boundaries between researcher, activist, artist, and participant. We particularly encourage hybrid and dialogic forms of writing that embody feminist praxis—collaboration, care, and collective reflection. 

4. Feminist Reimaginings of Korean Studies

This final section invites critical essays and theoretical interventions that reimagine the epistemic foundations of Korean Studies. How might feminist, queer, indigenous, and decolonial frameworks transform the field’s intellectual genealogies, methods, and institutions? We seek pieces that propose new directions for feminist Korean Studies as a site of knowledge production, solidarity, and global exchange.

We invite contributions that foreground these tensions, crossings, and ruptures in order to reimagine what feminist Korean Studies can be. As an interdisciplinary and mixed-method edited volume, this project seeks to bring feminist scholarship in and of Korea into direct dialogue with transnational feminist and decolonial theories and frameworks. By situating Korean feminist thought within these broader intellectual and political currents, the volume aims not only to unsettle disciplinary and linguistic boundaries but also to chart new futures for feminist Korean Studies. In that spirit, we welcome contributions from within and beyond Korean Studies, including those that approach Korea as a site of feminist solidarity, collaboration, and reimagining rather than disciplinary frames.

For questions and to submit an abstract (up to 500 words) and 2-page CV by January 31, 2026, email Dr. Anat Schwartz (California State University, Dominguez Hills) and Dr. Soyi Kim (Duke University) at feministkoreanstudies@gmail.com.