South Korea

Practicing Self-Care Beyond Self

December 28, 2024 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Jung Eun Kwon
December 27, 2024

It was a beautiful day in October 2022, and the leaves were turning vibrant shades of red and yellow. I was interviewing Yuna (all names in this article are pseudonyms), one of my interlocutors for my research on suicidality—including suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts—among young South Korean women in their twenties and thirties. Yuna, a 34-year-old woman, had been experiencing suicidal thoughts since she was around 13 and had attempted suicide multiple times since the age of 21. Throughout our conversation, I noticed that she kept glancing around the coffee shop and asked to use the restroom several times within the hour and a half we were talking. I felt a sense of concern for her, and my initial instinct was to think that I could or should help her in some way. However, what Yuna said next completely shifted my perspective.

“Usually [for me], an intense suicidal thought lasts about 15 minutes or so, no more than an hour, or it ends within 3 hours at the longest. But in the meantime, with the right intervention, you can get through it. So, I have an automatically-run protocol [created and implemented by myself]—for example, I call a suicide prevention center, and after receiving the consultation, I wait a few minutes. If the suicidal thought is still severe, I just call an ambulance [to stop myself from attempting suicide].”

An SOS suicide prevention hotline phone on a bridge in South Korea, providing help for those in crisis. This phone was not used by Yuna during her experience of crisis. Credit: Jung Eun Kwon

Her self-analysis and the creation of her own “protocol” by strategically using institutional care services left me in awe. It led me to reflect on my own assumption that I needed to help her, an assumption partly influenced by South Korea’s broader social discourse on mental illness and suicide. In South Korea (hereafter Korea), mental illness has increasingly been viewed as a psychiatric disorder that requires medical treatment, and suicidality is largely seen as an unusual condition caused primarily by depression. This framework, which stems from disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology, positions people experiencing suicidality as patients or objects of intervention, reducing them to passive recipients of care.

Since the late 1990s, Korea’s suicide rate has risen significantly, ranking among the highest globally since the early 2000s. Although young women do not have the highest suicide rate, their suicidality has sharply increased since the 2010s, in contrast to other demographic trends. In response, the Korean government launched a national suicide prevention project to expand access to psychological and psychiatric support, framing suicide, particularly for women, as a result of ‘mental difficulty” (jeongsinjeok eoryeoum). This view individualizes the issue, also overlooking the creative and diverse care practices these individuals use to manage their suicidality.

The Infographic of 2022 Suicide Motives by Gender and Age Group in South Korea. Data Source: 2024 White Paper on Suicide Prevention (Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2024). Credit: South Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare

However, Yuna’s skillful management of her own mental health made me wonder: Is Yuna uniquely skilled at taking care of herself? Or might others who experience suicidality also be this adept at self-care? If so, what do their care practices look like? As I tried to answer these questions, my interlocutors’ various care practices came to my mind.Although most of my interlocutors had received institutional care, such as medication and psychotherapy, they were dissatisfied with these disciplines’ focus on individualizing their experiences. Thus, my interlocutors’ self-care practices tended to stretch toward communal practices, extending attention to society and their roles within it.

Creative Care Practices

I regularly asked the question, “How do you take care of yourself in your everyday life?” during the interviews to explore my young women interlocutors’ care practices, and I was often met with creative and unexpected responses. What impressed me was how these women expanded the boundaries of (self-)care, diverging from institutional care, which emphasizes paying attention to one’s inner self and emotions, as seen in psychology, or to biological factors, as seen in psychiatry. Institutional care often guides individuals to immerse their attention inward, rather than allowing them to explore sociocultural factors beyond their family. Rather, their practices pushed these narrow boundaries, allowing them to reflect on themselves concerning broader social issues prevalent in Korea, such as socioeconomic inequality, discrimination, and marginalized others.

Da-In, a 28-year-old woman working at a small company and living with her mother, offered one such example.She had been writing fantasy novels since high school, a practice she began after experiencing her first suicidal thoughts at 11 and attempting suicide at 14. Initially, she started with short stories, but over time, her narratives expanded into longer works. By the time of our interview, she had completed multi-book-length fantasy novels. She hinted at the pride she felt in her lengthy writing and spoke of her love for writing novels. When I asked her what aspects of writing fantasy novels drew her in, she said it was the ability to create a better world that she hopes to see.

“First of all, [in the fictional world,] the gap between rich and poor is extremely small, there is no discrimination at all, no unreasonable things happen. [People from] this world goes around to civilize other worlds [where the gap is wider, and discrimination and unreasonable things pervade].”

I realized that the setting of her novel both reflected and subverted the difficulties she faced as a teenager. Earlier in the interview, she had spoken at length about her family’s lower economic status, which caused her significant distress during her adolescence. She also mentioned that her classmates disliked her because she was considered “weird or peculiar” for enjoying philosophical books and showing herself off with those books, leaving her isolated most of the time. My interlocutors were deemed unusual in that they desired different paths from what is considered “normal” tracks of life in Korean society. As students, for example, the focus should be on getting into an elite college, then securing a high-paying job with tenure. As daughters, they are expected to obey their patriarchal parents and aim for heteronormative relationships and families to reproduce middle- or upper-class status. The continuous norms and roles imposed throughout their lives contributed to many of my interlocutors’ suicidality, as did the exclusion they experienced when veering from these prescribed paths.

Graffiti reading “Talchul (escape, in Korean)” and “Suicide” on a construction wall in front of high-rise apartments. Credit: Jung Eun Kwon

Against this backdrop, Da-In was flipping the script through her novel on the circumstances that had caused her pain and the prevailing norms, aiming for a society characterized by equality and the absence of discrimination.Imagining and bringing to life a society she hoped to inhabit within the pages of her story brought her a sense of joy and healing. This creative self-care practice reminded me of what Da-In and my other interlocutors commonly shared with me regarding institutional care: they believed it disregarded social issues and did not question social norms, which, in fact, caused their suicidality. Although institutional care was partially helpful to continue their everyday lives through medication and temporary emotional uplift, it could not address their fundamental factors of suffering. In this vein, Da-In was turning toward seeking alternatives that gave her hope, and she was trying to raise her voice through her novel.

Yoobin and Misun, whom I met through a support group meeting, had also been practicing an unexpected kind of self-care. Yoobin, a 32-year-old woman, was a freelancer relying on unemployment benefits at the time, having previously worked as a designer for a startup NGO. Misun, a 36-year-old woman, worked full-time as a support worker for the visually disabled. At the beginning of the group interview with both Yoobin and Misun, they commonly talked about how broader social issues—specifically mentioning the Russia-Ukraine War and climate crisis—were vividly embodied in their suffering, making them feel powerless and their lives useless. They expressed having developed a “deeply rooted distrust against this world” by observing a series of disasters, both far and near.

When I asked them what they do for self-care, their answer first took me by surprise: volunteering. Their response sounded paradoxical to me because I had specifically asked about self-care, not care for others. However, I came to understand their motivations for volunteering as driven by both their own well-being and care for others, especially in light of their discussions about social issues and feelings of powerlessness. Against these feelings, Misun wanted to “feel a sense of accomplishment in this really harsh and unfortunate world,” to feel that she was at least helping others. Yoobin also stated that she is “quite selfish about” volunteering in a similar vein. Rather than being self-absorbed in their emotions and situations, as institutional care often recommends, they directed their attention outward, searching for their space to connect with others, thereby expanding self-care to include care for others and society. In doing so, they situated themselves within a broader world, seeking to contribute to a more livable society.Shedding light on these creative care practices from “suicidal” women shifts our focus from viewing these individuals purely through the lens of their suffering towards recognizing their unique capabilities and resourcefulness. In other words, we realize their active roles in shaping their own well-being rather than viewing them as passive recipients of institutional treatment. This recognition also challenges the narrow boundaries of institutional care, which urges attention inward. In contrast, my interlocutors’ practices of care are oriented not only inward but outward, expanding the meaning of self-care by situating themselves within broader worlds and seeking their roles within it. Similar to Black feminists’ radical perspectives on self-care as a tool for social justice, their care practices encourage us to rethink both self-care and institutional care, emphasizing the need to go beyond self-absorption and foster social connections and collective efforts.

Aaron Su and Jieun Cho are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology.

Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea

December 13, 2023 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Shinjung Nam
October 12, 2023

Following the 2022 Halloween crush disaster in Seoul, South Koreans gather to remember the young victims and the nation’s history of human-made disasters and formations of publics in furious mourning.

On the eve of December 16, 2022, thousands of people filled the main street of Itaewon, a former US camp town in Seoul, South Korea. My husband and I were standing among the assembled, feeling the temperature drop far below the freezing point as gusts of wind rushed through town. The town has a long history of foreign military occupation, transnational exchange of goods and fashion, and festivities that, like Halloween, inspire creative self-expression in public and a sense of belonging among young people. We were gathered in memory of those who were crushed to death on the night of October 29, 2022, in a narrow alley that shoots off of the one on which we were standing; 152 were injured, 159 died, including a teenage survivor who committed suicide. Most of the crowd crush victims were in their teens and 20s, out with friends on Halloween weekend. December 16 marked the 49th day of mourning for the lives lost—a day believed to be the last day spent by the spirits of the dead among the living before their final departure to the yonder. Throughout the history of contemporary South Korea, collective mourning in the streets for the wrongful deaths of youths has been central to the social and spatial materialization of publics, that is, assemblies of stranger-others woken to the reality of their common fate as citizens subject to state violence. Earlier on the morning of December 16, select family members of the crush victims had held a memorial service at a Buddhist temple, just north of Itaewon. The ritual had come to an end by burning the name tags of the lost in a metal pit amid the sounds of cries, bells, and monks chanting. About 300 of the family members then relocated to Itaewon, wrapped in red scarves to symbolize the blood of their kin to continue the memorial service among thousands of other citizens in the main street of the town. When the clock hit 6:34 p.m.—the officially recorded time of the first emergency call made to the local police on the eve of the disaster warning of possible crush deaths—the crowd closed their eyes, lowering their heads in silence. On the screen set up at the head of the assembly appeared the words of the caller, her urgent voice ringing through town, followed by the victims’ names, their portraits, and messages of longing from their families and friends.

Up until the 49th day of mourning, people had to gather for weeks before a faceless and nameless altar set up by the South Korean government in front of the city hall in Seoul. The current administration, under Yoon Suk-Yeol, withheld the backgrounds of the victims from being publicized in the news media, making it difficult for the bereaved families to contact one another. The initial footage of the victims—lying side by side on the streets of Itaewon covered in white sheets—had evoked in me much older photos from the 1980s of youths murdered by the state under military dictatorship. While interrogation, torture, and murder of youth protesters by police had become a thing of the past in South Korea, the mass loss of young people continues as they fall victim to human-made disasters in the most ordinary spaces in their everyday lives.

But the Itaewon crush also brought back memories of another recent disaster that took hundreds of lives of young people. In mid-April 2014, a ferry capsized near the southwest coast of South Korea, drowning 304 people, including 250 high school students on a field trip. As the search and rescue was prolonged amid a lack of government response, the entire country watched innocent youths disappear into the abyss, broadcast real-time on television and on YouTube. Realizing how easily the lives of youths could be forsaken in a neoliberal democracy, without guns or tear gas, people gathered across the country to mourn for the victims who had been left to die at sea. In the aftermath of the 2022 crush disaster, publics formed again to collectively remember the victims’ names, faces, and histories.

A large crowd of citizens and the family members of young crush disaster victims gather in front of the Seoul City Hall building to set up an altar for the dead on the 100th day of mourning.

The family members and their supporters stand on guard as the police readies to remove the altar from the site any moment. (CREDIT: SHINJUNG NAM)

South Koreans’ collective mourning for the young victims of state violence and human-made disasters has been long shaped by their experience of becoming witnesses. Mourners would stand in the streets, hear the names of the victims called out loud, one after the other, see their faces enlarged on screens, and shout, “The state was absent!” The assembled would bear witness to not only the fact that the lives taken away had once fully existed but also the very experience of collective mourning. Such an experience of becoming witnesses is crucial to revitalizing a public that embraces the pain of others and its roots in their shared fate of being citizens responsible for the democratically elected government and its actions.

The South Korean public’s rage has only intensified since their recognition of the government’s undeniable role in the unfolding of the crush disaster. The Yoon administration had set the large gathering of the youths at Itaewon on the weekend of Halloween celebration as a stage for what. Yoon had called “a war on drugs,” replacing the crowd control police, once regularly dispatched to the town on such festive occasions, with police officers dressed in plainclothes for their undercover operation against drug trafficking and drug use. This “war on drugs” was engineered as a key strategy for empowering the authority of the former prosecutor-turned-politicians now heading the government and for legitimating their monopoly on executive powers. And the strategy has pivoted around the criminalization of innocent youths and their occupation of the street space.

Mourning to Remember

Now occupying the main street of Itaewon that had once invited young visitors was a public in furious mourning. “Memory has such strength,” said Ms. Choi Sun-Hwa, mother of one of the high school students lost at sea in 2014, as she stood on stage on December 16, 2022, wearing a yellow scarf around her neck, facing the family members of the crush victims who sat in the audience wrapped in red scarves. For months, makeshift spaces for commemorating the ferry disaster victims had filled public spaces across South Korean cities with yellow memorabilia symbolizing the youths left to drown just when their lives were about to bloom like the forsythia of spring (Kim 2018). The main street of Itaewon now cried red and yellow.

Joined by the choir group formed in memory of the ferry disaster victims, Ms. Choi began to sing “We Won’t Forget,” promising so to the victims of the crush disaster.

We will remember, surely and everything, so not one of you feels alone.

Such were the words of promise that had brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets, awakening a public powerful enough to charge the country’s legislative bodies with an exigent sense of duty to push through the country’s first ever impeachment process in 2017. The successful impeachment of President Park Kun-Hae (2013–2017) did not stop people from remembering the loss and their duty to remember. I still regularly spot yellow stickers on the backs of people’s cellphones or yellow ribbons hanging on people’s backpacks when traveling on public transportation. Ms. Kim Sunny, whom I have known for years, is no exception.

An assortment of yellow memorabilia is laid out on a white desktop—from simple ribbon-shaped pendants to round badges of varying sizes, on all of which are written, “We are sorry, We won’t forget you.”

These memorabilia belong to Ms. Sunny Kim, a long-time interviewee of the author, who has matched each of them with one of her daily objects, including her handbags and her cellphone case. (CREDIT: MS. SUNNY KIM)

“The song was specifically written for the ferry disaster victims in 2014 by Yoon Min-Suk,” my husband whispered into my ear. He remembered Yoon Min-Suk from his college days in the mid-1980s, when the artist first started writing songs for an underground cultural movement organized as part of the student activism against the military dictatorship. The song’s promise to remember has now been stretched to address the victims of the crush disaster. Those who were young adults in the tumultuous years of the 1980s, including Ms. Kim and my husband, came of age by bearing witness to the murders of youths under the military dictatorship (Lee 2009). Adopted new roles as parents, this generation now sees their children living in an era of the state’s dereliction and abuse of power. Publics in South Korea are constituted through this chain of collective mourning, where memories of the wrongfully dead youths get interwoven across generations through colorful mantras, objects, shapes, and lyrics. This mode of coexistence has persisted against and through times of collective upheavals. Their memories of the victims and of mourning together while embodying a public resistant to forgetting and forsaking the country’s youth dwell in the most ordinary spaces, shapes, and sounds—from all things yellow and red, to the very word “memory”—beyond the spectacular moments of such a public’s materialization in space.

Bouquets of fading white and yellow chrysanthemums and a poster biding its readers to remember the young victims line up the wall along one side of the alley.

In the photograph taken on the 49th day of mourning, the poster reads, “Please, remember us.” (CREDIT: SHINJUNG NAM)

Shinjung Nam is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for Liberal Arts & Basic Education at Sungkyunkwan University. She received her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University.

Nam, Shinjung. 2023. “Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea.” Anthropology News website, December 12, 2023.

We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here

October 27, 2023 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Alex Wolff
October 24, 2023

Queer activism often includes public visibility. But everyday surveillance and economic risk complicate LGBTQ+ politics in South Korea.

Author’s note: All the names in this piece are pseudonyms and locations have been withheld.

In 2021, I attended a protest held in a bustling shopping district near a local university in South Korea. It was organized by LGBTQ+ student groups and a regional LGBTQ+ advocacy group supported by Korea’s progressive party, Jeong-uidang, to raise public consciousness of LGBTQ+ Koreans’ presence in everyday life and the need for an anti-discrimination law. Some organizers held placards bearing phrases like “The youth want a comprehensive anti-discrimination law!” Others marched the streets, wrapping LGBTQ+ flags around their bodies like capes. We took photos and videos and later uploaded them on social media with #WeAreHere and #StopDiscrimination. The protesters, largely in their twenties, chanted, “We are here!” (우리는 여기 있다!), a phrase often repeated in queer activism in South Korea. To me, it sounded like saying, “We exist!”

But beyond the celebratory colors and phrases, this event was carefully planned and executed to manage the risks activism posed for each protester. The organizers made sure that we recorded ourselves during the protest in case we were refused entry into stores or harassed because of our outfits. Protesters also hid their faces with rainbow-patterned surgical masks during the march. When uploading the recorded footage and photos later online, they censored participants’ faces and altered their voices for anonymity. These measures were taken in response to a well-founded fear of being “outed,” both online and off, which could ultimately cost their social connections and chances for employment.

LGBTQ+ Koreans build politics between a desire for collective visibility and individual invisibility even as the possibility of being “outed” haunts their public and private lives. By selectively concealing and revealing their identities and intentions to others, queer and trans young adults manage to be with and keep a distance from the largely heteronormative public.

Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Undisclosed city, South Korea. Protest for a national anti-discrimination law and awareness of LGBTQ+ Koreans in 2021.
Image Description: A group of 14 people standing in a public park on a rainy day, waving “hello” at the camera. They are wearing rainbow flags like capes, rainbow surgical masks, and holding umbrellas. Their faces are censored with a digital mosaic pattern.

Queer life under a heteronormative gaze

Following student activism that helped bring about Korea’s shift from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy in 1987, LGBTQ+ student groups flourished at top universities. Yet compared to the youths who risked their lives to participate in democratization, contemporary Korean young adults are often portrayed as risk-averse, self-interested, and generally indifferent to politics because of economic pressures.

Since economic liberalization following the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), irregular employment with lower job security, benefits, and income became normalized in South Korea. The brunt of these transformations has disproportionately affected those in their twenties and thirties. A recent report suggests that nearly 40 percent of those in their twenties depend on parents for primary financial support, and over half of unmarried people in their thirties live with their parents.

Yet this narrative of depoliticization is contradicted by young adults’ key role in activism related to the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster and mass uprisings against government corruption in 2016–2017. Though often unrecognized in public discourse, LGBTQ+ student groups have also been instrumental in the recent groundswell of youth activism in Korea. Over the past decades, queer and trans students have worked to promote anti-discrimination, legislative reform, and destigmatization. Their activities significantly expanded in the mid-2000s, creating groups at more than seventy universities and even cross-university organizations.

Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Flier for the 2021 anti-discrimination protest. The translated text reads, “Gender and Sexual Minorities are nowhere to be found. But we’re everywhere without a doubt. So now we’re going to show you. We are here now.”
Image Description: Protest poster for a LGBTQ+ activism event. Depicts a stylized street with rainbow flags and the message is depicted in a handwritten font in Korean.

Still, as was evident in the protest I attended, students participating in LGBTQ+ activism frequently expressed anxiety over potential harassment and the long-term effects of discrimination. The ubiquity of surveillance in both public spaces and interpersonal relationships have largely contributed to this concern. Like many other countries, in Korea surveillance infrastructure is pervasive and social practices of self-and-other monitoring are a part of daily life. With almost a million security cameras installed by public institutions alone, being recorded in everyday settings is nearly inevitable. People’s daily routes are also logged by banking institutions whenever they use bank cards to pay public transportation fares. The ubiquity of smartphones and social media such as Twitter are also creating a condition for what Brooke Erin Duffy and Ngai Keung Chan call “imagined surveillance”: users’ conscious control over what information they publicize online based on the anticipated scrutiny of peers and employers.

Combined with public homophobia and transphobia, surveillance culture enacts an imagined heteronormative gaze for LGBTQ+ folk—something underscored by regular anti-LGBTQ+ organizing at pride events. At a queer festival hosted in Incheonin 2018, for example, anti-LGBTQ+ protestors from conservative civic groups harassed and physically injured festivalgoers.

They also stoked LGBTQ+ attendee’s fears of being outed by recording them without consent. According to a festival organizer, they taunted, “If you’re proud, then don’t cover your face!” Fears of being surveilled while participating in facets of queer life were further emphasized by the pandemic, as individual privacy was often curtailed to create public safety. In May 2020, state-led contact tracing methods even led to the outing of a twenty-nine-year-old man to his family and employer after his visiting businesses in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s few explicitly queer-friendly neighborhoods.

Although many LGBTQ+ Koreans I met were already out to certain friends, family members, and peers, they frequently worried that mismanaged publicity could jeopardize their employability. Young adults are broadly impacted by economic insecurity, but the situation is more fraught for LGBTQ+ Koreans because there are no enforceable anti-discrimination laws for protection in the workplace—or anywhere else—in society. A 2015 report by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea detailed that 44 percent of LGBTQ+ workers who came out or were outed in the workplace faced discrimination, including pay reductions, exclusion from promotions, or even forced resignations. One college group leader, Yeoungho, clearly summarized this situation when he told me, “Doing activism is burdensome, especially because many of us aren’t economically stable yet. I feel like I won’t be hired if they find out I’ve been doing queer activism. There are so few queer-friendly careers that I can count them on one hand.” For these reasons, many LGBTQ+ interlocutors in their twenties and thirties were particularly concerned that being associated with queer politics could cost their social connections and professional careers.

Between risk and possibility

Under these circumstances of pervasive heteronormative surveillance and a volatile labor market, interlocutors practiced what I conceptualize as a queer politics of “discretion,” in reference to Lilith Mahmud’s definition of the term as “a contextualized set of revealing and concealing practices, of knowing how much to say, to whom, and when.”

For many LGBTQ+ young adults, discretion is a way to stay engaged in collective politics while preserving themselves. One college group leader, Sungwoo, explained various strategies taken to mitigate the risks of being outed in activist and more mundane situations. Group members often don masks and costumes during protestsand commonly use pseudonyms (hwaldong-myeong) when referring to one another. When organizing LGBTQ+ students’ events on campus, the members of Sungwoo’s group would describe their events as “human rights festivals for minorities” to stave off harassment. When confronted by other students, they often claim to be allies—because being a queer ally is more socially acceptable than actually being queer. They also removed the label from their official meeting room door to prevent defacement, rumors, and bullying, making it a kind of open secret. As another group leader, Narei, explained in an interview, “We take a lot of care to secure participants’ anonymity. The primary goal is that everyone ends up safe and that no one is outed. If we let one person get outed, it becomes pointless and contradicts the existence of our group and the purpose of our activism.”

But the outcomes of queer discretion are not always liberatory. Sungwoo confessed, “Finding the balance between activism and the rest of my life is becoming harder as I get closer to graduation, because I actually have to think about my future now.” To practice queer discretion entails the constant anticipation of discrimination, which creates a heavy affective burden of self-regulation—in line with the neoliberal demands of the market and discourses of hetero- and cisnormativity.

When we discussed the future of queer politics in Korea, Yeongho said he was more worried about the people doing activism than the activism itself. He likened this tension to activists “passing a bomb around” (pogtan dolligi) among themselves, not knowing when it would explode. As Sungwoo described, it invites both risk and possibility: “Finding people to do activism is so hard because there’s always a possibility of being outed and experiencing even more economic instability. It’s exhausting. All my friends worry about this. But we have to do it to make ourselves real to the rest of the world.”

Many interlocutors, including Sungwoo, emphasized the significance of cultivating discretionary politics that entailed not just visibility but also invisibility as a means toward both everyday survival and activism. As Naisargi Dave and Cymene Howe have observed, the dominant logic of visibility politics—a belief that more visibility leads to increased tolerance—does not always define queer activism transnationally. On the one hand, queer Koreans’ careful work to ensure each other’s mutual invisibility emphasizes the vulnerability of their subject positions. On the other, it highlights the importance of ethical discretion within queer politics and the very practice of ethnographic research. As my larger work explores, queer discretion exists alongside other semi-public forms of politics, allowing queer and trans interlocutors different political and social possibilities, even as it complicates their existing vulnerabilities. More than just being “out” or “passing” as heterosexual or cisgender, their politics attempt self-preservation while aspiring to build a future of collective recognition and rights for queer and trans Koreans.

Alex Wolff (they/she) received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Their piece draws on field research conducted between 2018 and 2022 with LGBTQ+ folk in South Korea. Their research examines intersections among economics, temporality, and politics, through a focus on issues of gender and sexuality in Korea.

Wolff, Alex. 2023. “We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here.” Anthropology News website, October 24, 2023.

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

July 10, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of hu m an rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.