Everyone as Insider–Invader: Fluid Boundaries and Liminality in South Korean Lesbian Feminist Online Safe Spaces

This study examines how South Korean lesbian feminists negotiate safety and threat within Twitter (X)-based safe spaces, drawing on digital ethnography and in-depth interviews with eight participants. We develop the concept of insider-invaders to capture how individuals simultaneously constitute these spaces while also being perceived as potential or actual threats. Rather than fixed boundaries between insiders and outsiders, we show that belonging and safety are continuously reconfigured through participants' interpretations of misogyny, their situated understandings of feminism and lesbian identity, and their assessments of others' identities and practices. The insider-invader framework illuminates how suspicion, identification, and conditional acceptance emerge within a community often imagined as homogeneous, rendering safety an ongoing relational achievement rather than a stable condition. By moving beyond the binary between exclusionary and non-exclusionary feminisms, this study reconceptualizes safe spaces as fluid and contested formations, shaped by the shifting interplay of solidarity, difference, and vulnerability in digital queer feminist contexts.