Mocking the “Military Parrot”: Digital Feminist Practices, Militarized Masculinity, and Feminist Knowledge Production in South Korean Cyberspace

ABSTRACT In South Korean digital spaces, antifeminist discourse frequently weaponises compulsory military service to assert male victimhood and exclude feminist perspectives from public debate, particularly when military‐related issues trigger misogynistic backlash. This paper examines how post‐2015 digital feminists have engaged with these debates through “trollish” digital practices, unexpectedly revealing the underlying structures of militarism and militarized masculinity. Drawing on digital ethnography and a keywords‐as‐method approach, the paper shows how digital feminists deploy satirical expressions, such as gunmusae (military parrot) and gunkangseu (military vacation), to ridicule the rhetoric of male sacrifice and expose its internal contradictions: grievances over the losses incurred through conscription displace the language of patriotic duty, thereby weakening the very masculinity it is intended to sustain. The paper argues that these everyday practices of digital feminist internet trolling operate as a mode of “theorizing in practice”, through which feminists repeatedly challenge the argumentative foundations of concepts such as militarized masculinity, which have remained largely unquestioned. I propose understanding these practices as a form of vernacular feminist knowledge production because they enable questions of gendered power relations to be articulated from their situated positions through everyday contestation under specific platform conditions.