Feminism reboot: Korean cinema under neoliberalism in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT This paper examines recent feminist movements, which I am grouping together under the term ‘feminism reboot’, in the context of South Korea’s neoliberalization, with a focus on misogyny levelled against women. It first traces the emergence of social media-based feminism in Korea, following the democratization and market liberalization since the late 1980s and subsequent Korean films that used to showcase more diverse types of female characters up until the mid-1990s. But as misogyny intensified after the 1997 economic crisis, film narrative increasingly revolves around male characters, while female characters often disappear. This trope could be seen to register the gendered nature of Korean society that resulted from the rapid acceptance of neoliberal values in the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. This paper compares and contrasts the romantic comedies of the 1990s, such as Marriage Story (Gyeolhon yiyagi, Kim Eui-seok, 1992), Mister Mama (Misteo mamma, Kang Woo-suk, 1992) and the comedy of the 2010s, including Sunny (Sseoni, Kang Hyeog-cheol, 2011) in order to demonstrate how the economic crisis not only re- legitimized the gender hierarchy and has further affected the cinematic representation of gender, taking away female agency in the latter period.