Radical Contours: Exclusion, Precarity, and Radical Geography in South Korean Feminist Activist Spaces

Abstract: This article explores issues of exclusion and precarity in contemporary (2015–2024) South Korean feminist activist spaces. I argue that the growth of biological essentialism and trans-exclusion within the feminist movement is exacerbated by digital technologies of surveillance—both within activist communities and from outside. This article uses data collected over fifteen months of consecutive fieldwork (2018–2019) with radical feminist activists and three radical feminist spaces as case studies: the Uncomfortable Courage (2018–2019) protests, a mass protest series against hidden digital sexual violence and biased prosecution, and the Bwave Black Protests (2016–2019), a series of monthly protests to repeal the criminalization of abortion. In both protest spaces, activists hailed primarily from online-based, anonymous, radical organizing spaces, and, in a departure from previous centralized feminist movements, these spaces banned photography by participants and outsiders, banned participants from group attendance, and restricted access to "biological females." By examining these radical movements central to the contemporary South Korean feminist movement, using radical feminist geography as a framework, this article departs from previous scholarship to illustrate the ways in which the exclusion of gender nonconforming people in feminist spaces is tied to digital media culture, anti-feminist backlash, social precarity, gender-based violence, and surveillance technologies.