Affective Politics of Feminist Snap: Exploring Young People’s Voices in the SchoolMeToo Movement

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Peer Dynamics, Activism, and Resilience

Abstract

While the global #MeToo movement has been affecting various parts of society, one notable aspect in Korea has been that the youth-led online and offline SchoolMeToo movement has gone viral, becoming the most tweeted hashtag in Korea in 2018. This paper contributes to the discussion of contemporary youth feminist activism as SchoolMeToo was the first gender justice movement among school-aged students in South Korea. Through the lens of feminist affect, utilizing discourse analysis on five semi-structured, in-depth interviews with young feminist activists who have organized the SchoolMeToo movement, the following issues are addressed: First, I explore the motivations that led young feminist activists to engage in activism and what their call to action looked like. I attend to the ways in which feminism became a lens that equipped them to interpret, name, and explain their lives. Second, I document the challenges and critical moments these activists have faced during the movement. I focus on the struggles that emerge within the adultist world in which young people’s voices are unheard and marginalized for not fitting established grammars or norms. In addition, I attend to their frustration with the ways their activism was misread and misrepresented in the media. Third, I discuss their thoughts on the progression of the movement and the institutional approaches for which they argue. Last but not least, I attend to their long term aims, desires, and hopes. In particular, I discuss their hopes to bring youth feminism into every policy domain and social issue that demands radical imagination to fundamentally reconstruct society. SchoolMeToo was and is young people’s desperate call to embrace youth feminism as a lens that has transformative potential to reconstruct society. Attending to SchoolMeToo through the lens of feminist affect motivates us to imagine, and to have more courage to work toward gender justice.

Author

• Eunhye Grace Lee, Rutgers University