Tag: korea

So Korean terfs are going to protest alongside far right-wingers organizing a “General Women’s Rally” calling for the super-corrupt former President Park Geun-hye to be brought back and pro-reform President Moon Jae-in to be impeached

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Tell me, why do terfs get cozy with the far right everywhere? It’s almost like they’ve never been progressive but were always right-wingers co-opting feminist language to hate on trans people? Almost?

Look I am fully on board wih the aims of the Escape the Corset (탈코) movement in Korea. Women don’t need to cater to the male gaze and they shouldn’t be pressured to use all their time and energy to look pretty. It’s a very necessary movement and I hope it keeps up.

That said, there’s also a subset in the movement who are not just escaping the corset themselves but actively shaming women who do wear makeup and saying they’re not true feminists, their minds are enslaved and so on. Yes, anyone can be jerks about a movement and take it way too far, but there’s a clear trans-exclusionary undercurrent to this rhetoric against the reality where trans women are unable to be accepted as women at all unless they perform femininity to degrees far beyond cis women.

To be clear, trans women should not experience these pressures to be hyperfeminine, any more than cis women, and easing the ridiculous beauty pressure is good for all women. This isn’t about discrediting EtC or dismissing those who adhere to it as shrill bullies. It is not okay to invalidate the very real problems that prompted EtC by saying “I wear makeup because it makes me happy!” or such shit. Shut up. Not about you.

At the same time we can recognize that the trans-exclusionary part of the movement is using it to paint trans women as enemies of feminism and male oppressors, when makeup may be necessary for them in a way it is not for cis women.

The EtC movement is admirable and necessary. At the same time, please be on the lookout for ways activism can be co-opted to isolate and demonize some of our most vulnerable sisters. Please don’t forget trans women in your activism.

What are racial dynamics like in a non-white country like Korea?

It’s different from the U.S. or anywhere else for that matter, since every community is different, but racism, colorism, and antiblackness are still very much present. White foreigners are lionized while SE Asians and Black people are looked down on. There’s a large population of marriage immigrants from Vietnam and elsewhere who endure high rates of abuse and violence from their husbands and in-laws, often in isolated rural settings. Workers from SE Asia, Africa, and the Middle East often suffer from bad working conditions and have no bargaining power under an immigration law that gives all the power to employers. A few hundred Yemeni refugees arrived in Jeju Island back when it had a more liberal entry policy, and the widespread pushback against accepting them has been heartbreaking and infuriating.

There’s xenophobia that can’t be neatly fitted into racial categories, for example against Chinese citizens of Korean heritage who are technically the same race and ethnicity as Koreans. There’s a class element going on here, too, as Korean Chinese are treated very differently from Korean Americans who are assumed to be richer and better educated. There are cultural clashes with and prejudices against Korean Americans as well, of course.

We have serious prejudices against Koreans against mixed heritage. The nationalist myth (and it is a totally fabricated myth) of Korean “purity of blood” has a toxic effect on the lives of people with a non-Korean parent. Mixed Koreans with a white parent are treated the least worst, although they too are subject to unwanted attention and fetishization that I imagine is uncomfortable for them. Koreans with a Black or SE Asian parent are treated considerably worse, subject to the racism faced by their non-Korean parent and lack of acceptance as Koreans. North Korea has the same prejudices, only more violently expressed under an authoritarian regime. I have read reports of North Korean authorities committing infanticide against babies born to NK women returned from China, the reason being that the babies were “Chinese seed.”

A huge number of Korean children of mixed heritage, generally those born to SE Asian women, are subject to racist bullying in school. The first generation of these children since the start of marriage immigration policy are now grown and we should be seeing them in society, but we just… don’t. They don’t seem to be going on to higher education or being hired for jobs. This is really disturbing, that we now have an entire contingent of Koreans who have been pushed out from mainstream Korean society by racism. This is not to say that other factors like class and the marginalization of rural areas are not issues, but racism is a huge factor as well.

lj-writes:

lj-writes:

lj-writes:

SO EXCITED to read articles discussing the possibility that groups of Baiyue, the peoples who inhabited modern South China and North Vietnam, lived in ancient Southwest Korea.

We always knew a large group of South/Southeast Asians lived in Korea since ancient times. It’s an archeological and genetic fact, not to mention something you see in the faces of people you pass in the street. My husband has what is called the “Southern” facial structure. So does his mom, and so do about 20% of modern Koreans. But to be able to put a name to these groups and get hints of where they came from? Fucking amazing.

Grave styles. Tools. Agriculture. Even language? I covered my mouth to keep myself from screaming in the library when one of the articles speculated that 半乃 found on a tile fragment from the Korean Southwest might be BaanNaa, “village with rice field” in a major language of the Baiyue peoples.

It’s all rather speculative by necessity, but that’s why I’m writing a novel and not a thesis, right? I’m just trying to give a sound basis to my fictional vision of ancient Korea. And whatever Korea looked like 2,000 years ago, it was most certainly not pale and homogeneous the way some nationalists imagine it.

lj-writes:

SO EXCITED to read articles discussing the possibility that groups of Baiyue, the peoples who inhabited modern South China and North Vietnam, lived in ancient Southwest Korea.

We always knew a large group of South/Southeast Asians lived in Korea since ancient times. It’s an archeological and genetic fact, not to mention something you see in the faces of people you pass in the street. My husband has what is called the “Southern” facial structure. So does his mom, and so do about 20% of modern Koreans. But to be able to put a name to these groups and get hints of where they came from? Fucking amazing.