Gender Performance among the Elderly at Taegeukgi Rallies: Masculinity Restoration and the Politicization of Femininity

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 3: Gender and the Body

Abstract

Existing scholarship on elderly South Koreans' participation in the Taegeukgi rallies — conservative protest movements in Gwanghwamun Square — has interpreted this phenomenon either as an expression of active citizenship or as emotionally-driven social protest. Both perspectives, however, share a critical blind spot: they treat the elderly as a gender-neutral category, overlooking how gendered experiences shape political behavior within this cohort.
This study argues that Korean society produces a structural process of "desexualization" among the elderly, whereby the label noIn functions as a de-gendering stigma that strips individuals of their gendered identities. This desexualization is experienced differently across gender lines. For elderly men, retirement precipitates an acute masculinity crisis, as their identity had been anchored in occupational achievement and institutional recognition. For elderly women, desexualization takes the form not of role loss but of role non-recognition: care labor continues into old age yet remains socially invisible.
Drawing on ten sessions of participant observation at Gwanghwamun Square (April–May 2025) and field interviews, and theoretically informed by Butler's gender performativity, Connell's hegemonic masculinity, and West and Zimmerman's "doing gender," this study identifies distinct gendered performances among rally participants. Elderly men mobilize military symbols — uniforms, oversized flags, collective salutes — to invoke a past self in which their masculinity was socially validated, enacting compensatory masculinity. Elderly women, by contrast, extend domestic care labor into the public sphere through food-sharing and relationship-building, while simultaneously engaging in active political recruitment and messaging — a pattern interpreted as political motherhood.
These findings contribute to the aging sociology and political participation by introducing a gender-differentiated analysis of elderly conservatism in South Korea, and by demonstrating that the same social stigma of desexualization triggers distinct crises and distinct strategies of resistance for men and women respectively. In-depth interviews with 10 male and 10 female participants are planned to systematically extend findings.

Author

• JiEun Jung, Yonsei University