The Paradox of Anger, Affective Governance and Movement Burnout in South Korean Digital Feminism

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: The Role of Digital Platforms in the Practice and Study of Movements: Global Cases

Abstract

Digital feminist counter-publics have become central sites of contemporary political mobilization. Yet what kinds of emotional regimes sustain participation within these spaces, and under what conditions do they undermine it? This paper examines South Korean digital feminist discourse on Twitter/X between 2018 and 2023 and identifies an affective asymmetry. Other-condemning anger constitutes over 85 percent of emotional expression across 382,824 tweets and remains structurally dominant throughout the study period.
Anger functions simultaneously as the primarily mobilizing resource and as a regulatory mechanism of community membership. Users who most intensely perform other-condemning anger are significantly more active but exit the discursive space in roughly half the time of low-intensity users. A burst-and-exit patter which is consistent with affective burnout is shown in the analysis. Through qualitative analysis of high-intensity debate threads, I show how emotional norms produce a hierarchy of grievability that expels intersecting identities, such as transgender women, married feminists, intersectional feminists) through affective policing rather than doctrinal disagreement. The regulation of belonging and legitimacy through emotional performance, affective governance, can be found.

Author

• Dahyun Ryu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign