SlutWalk Korea, its Cultural Production, and the Politics of Possibility

• In Event: The Politics of Women's Campaigns and Spaces

Abstract

In this paper, I conceive SlutWalk Korea as the site of cultural production and SlutWalk Korea organizers as cultural producers. I seek to understand SlutWalk not as a one-day event, but as a verb constituting and (re)constituted by different social and power relations and through organizers’ everyday life practices. Examining organizers’ cultural production practices/tactics and the cultural forms they produce, I interrogate why and how the movement has been transformed and translated in relation to other fields, including the global SlutWalk movement, Korean progressive leftist, feminist movements, and mass media. I argue that SlutWalk Korea, or Jabnyon hangjin can be understood as a borderland placed between public and private, between public appeals, political adequacy, and artistic expressions, between global and local, and between sexual and class politics. Discussing these issues, I finally consider the political possibilities and limits of SlutWalk Korea.

Author

• Woori Han, University of Massachusetts Amherst