Style, History, and Form: Viewing South Korean Feminism Through a Humanist Lens

Abstract

This study examines the South Korean cyberfeminist community Womad, a community currently under fire in South Korea due to its exclusionary politics, i.e. its antagonism towards anyone (biologically) male and (ethnically) Korean. In this project, The study reveals how Womad’s “medium specificity” (i.e. its platform) interacts with South Korea’s “national specificity” in specific ways that results in the “technological assemblage” that is Womad. By amassing individual postings through data crawling, the project uses computerized text analysis to (1) reveal the technical difficulties underlying textual analysis of Korean online communities in general (2) examine the kinds of topics that this specific community engages with (3) investigate which topics are most popular/unpopular within the community (thus accruing more upvotes/downvotes).