Crisis of whose making? Population panic and the politics of heterosexual refusal in South Korea

• In Event: Demographic Anxieties

Abstract

South Korea has recorded the world’s lowest fertility rate since 2013, reaching 0.72 in 2023 and prompting intensified pronatalist intervention, anti-feminist backlash, and what officials call a “national demographic emergency.” Drawing on Marxist feminist and social reproduction theory, analysis of pronatalist policy documents, and 130 life-history interviews with young women, this paper argues that the so-called “low fertility crisis” is not fundamentally demographic but a misrecognized crisis of patriarchal social reproduction. I distinguish between the state-narrated population crisis, centered on declining birthrates and national survival, and a deeper crisis of patriarchal social reproduction, marked by the destabilization of the heterosexual bargain that historically secured women’s disproportionate reproductive labor under capitalism. Historicizing South Korea’s fertility governance, I show how reproduction has long been subordinated to nationalist capitalist imperatives. Crisis discourse functions as an “ideological conductor” (Hall 1978), displacing structural contradictions onto women’s bodies by treating fertility decline as both disease and feminist fault. Anti-feminist backlash thus emerges not as reaction but as crisis management. Yet women’s refusal is also generative: while resisting demographic mobilization, many sustain a neoliberal sacralization of childhood that renders reproduction structurally untenable. Reproduction becomes a key political fault line through which struggles over gender, nationalism, and capitalist social reproduction are contested.

Author

• Meera Choi, Harvard University