Through the Escape the Corset Movement (ECM), the essay explores the impact of social media on feminist consciousness, discourse, and activism in South Korea. Founded in 2016 and prominent nationwide in 2018, ECM urged women to discard the patriarchal model of beauty and reassert bodily control by cutting their hair, not wearing makeup, and throwing away beauty products. Drawing on concepts from digital activism and feminist media studies, the paper maps the historical transition from conventional to digital media in Korean feminist movements and reveals how online platforms changed modes of participation and communication. With hashtags like #EscapeTheCorset, social media operated as a public sphere where stories, community, and the development of collective identity could take place. The text analyzes how digital narratives and graphical confrontations as forms of protest challenged Confucian gender norms and re-considered femininity in modern Korean culture. Finally, the paper demonstrates how ECM’s discourse played a role in economic and cultural resistance, with efforts to resist the pink tax as well as the #Women_ShortCut_Campaign, demonstrating social media’s potential to reproduce and sustain activism. However, the study does emphasize critical constraints: platform hierarchies, online harassment influenced by gender, and entrenched patriarchal structures that inhibit transformational initiatives. ECM embodies, in the end, the emancipatory and structural possibilities of digital feminism, exposing how social media can become a force behind social change, but also remain rooted in unequal power relations.
Research Article
Open Access