by Jane Nam, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy

South Korea is often deemed the beauty capital of the world, as the cosmetic surgery hub and home to one of the largest beauty industries in the world. Beginning in early 2018, however, thousands of young South Korean women began to cut off their hair, smash their beauty products, and opt for androgynous wear. They are partaking in what they call the Escape-the-Corset Movement, or Tal-Corset, a radical feminist movement calling for all women to take off their figurative corsets. This project is an effort to describe the philosophical meanings behind the experiences of these women, using feminist phenomenology. With the CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant, I traveled to Seoul and became acquainted with nearly fifty of the women participating in the movement. The interviews I was able to conduct both in-person and online serve as the base of this project.  

The movement is motivated by a combination of recent events that have been brought to attention in the past four years: the Korean #metoo movement, the Gangnam murder, the bar incident near Isu Station, the Burning Sun Scandal, the case of Jang Ja-yeon, and most recently, the Nth Room Case. The Gangnam Station murder of 2016, however, is considered to be the most significant. The murder took place in a unisex public restroom, where a man deliberately waited for a woman to walk in so he could stab her (six men had walked in and out of that same restroom before her). The murder was not deemed a hate crime against women, but rather a mental illness issue, despite the fact that the killer himself confessed that he had done it because women had “ignored” him his whole life. This caused public outrage, but more significantly, a kind of existential panic among women. It forced many to take seriously for the first time the question of gender. If being a “woman” meant being subject to gendered forms of violence and discrimination, then how does one remove herself from this position? This led to a movement that began with the stripping away of femininity: the hair, clothes, makeup, etc.  

Learning about which events made the most impact and how these women got into feminism was important to understanding the women by their own logic. I was able to first connect with the women by following the hashtag they were posting under: #escapethecorset. Social media has been an important tool for the movement, in forming communities, posting ideas, and sharing experiences. Since 2018, when the movement first gained momentum, women have been posting their transformation photos on Instagram, under the hashtag. In the first few photos, you will see a woman you would typically see on the streets of Seoul: long hair, powdered face, bright lips, and wearing a dress or form-fitting blouse. In the following photos, the transformation is drastic: shaved hair, bare face, and wearing an oversized tee.  

Initially, the women appear simply to be motivated by a desire to protest against societal standards of beauty. Why should women have to spend an extra two hours on their appearances every morning, even when working the same jobs as their male colleagues? One woman wrote an article about how women in their twenties, in the Escape-the-Corset Movement, were buying cars with the money they would otherwise have spent on makeup and plastic surgery. Even while the movement’s message is about getting rid of the metaphorical “corset” society puts on its women, such as teaching us to prioritize beauty even at the expense of our health (very much like a real corset), it is first and foremost a freedom project. As I have found from my interviews, the changes in physical appearance are very much the first half of the transformation. What has been most transformative, according to the women I have interviewed, is the remaining parts. Many talked about being unafraid now to enter certain spaces, such as the weightlifting section of a gym. Many picked up new hobbies or took on more ambitious career goals. Partaking in the movement altered almost all facets of the women’s lives: It altered her spatial relations, temporal relations (allocating time in different areas of her life), bodily relations, etc. Many women also adopted a “4B” lifestyle, which is a commitment to four principles: no dating men, no marrying men, no having sexual relations with men, and never becoming mothers. At its worst, the movement is a divisive approach, fueling an extremely explosive gender war. At its best, however, it is a powerful response to a violent system (of patriarchy) that has consistently failed them.    

Why interviews? Why first-person experience? Alia Al-Saji describes “bodily experience” as “the ground of our awareness of social structure.” The body is not merely an object in space, but a site laden with social, historical, material, and subjective meaning. In other words, it is not the anatomical female body that makes one a woman, but the ways in which she experiences her body that simultaneously shape the structures of her consciousness. It is this privileging of first-person experience, and taking the time to slowly un-mystify which forces lie beneath each lived phenomenon, that makes feminist phenomenology the appropriate tool and academic space for this project.    

My main motivation with this project was to bring to light the strength, intelligence, and courage of Korean women, who have demonstrated not just their potential, but also a capacity for activism through concrete acts of feminism. I hope this project can bring new perspectives of Asian women, and Asian peoples more broadly, to Western scholarship.

—Jane Nam is a doctoral candidate in philosophy.