Pathways to Heterosexual Refusal: Collectively Producing New Orientations Toward Intimacy in South Korea

• In Event: Critical heterosexualities in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

This paper examines the rise of heterosexual refusal in South Korea—young women’s growing collective withdrawal from dating, sex, marriage, and childbearing—as a case for developing critical sociological approaches to heterosexuality. Drawing on 130 life-history interviews with South Korean women in their twenties and thirties, I argue that heterosexual refusal is not an aggregate of individual lifestyle choices nor a passive demographic drift, but a collectively produced political formation that remakes the terms of intimacy, desire, and kinship. I identify three interconnected process through which women participate in heterosexual refusal: (1) building feminist infrastructures that transform feminized digital spaces into sites of political recruitment and affective circulation; (2) remaking sexual subjectivity by experimenting with alternative desires and reinterpreting heterosexual histories through feminist framework; and (3) reconfigure kinship beyond heterosexual marriage through alternative networks of care and chosen community. These processes operate recursively as well where infrastructures transform subjectivities, and transformed subjectivities expand infrastructures, revealing heterosexual refusal as an ongoing collective practice. By centering women’s agentic participation in the undoing of heterosexual life, this paper contributes to the sociology of sexualities by treating heterosexuality as a politically contested institution subject to collective resistance, and by theorizing agency as distributed and relational, rather than individually autonomous.

Author

• Meera Choi, Harvard University