[KS] CFP: Feminist Korean Studies: Reimagining Futures (Due 1/31/26)

[Feminist Korean Studies]

*Feminist Korean Studies: Reimagining Futures*

This edited volume extends the project initiated by the Korean Studies 2025
special section “Feminist Korean Studies,”
<https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54881> which deployed feminist critique across
digital media, popular culture, legal discourse, public health,
neoliberalism, and postcoloniality. Building on that foundation, the volume
invites interdisciplinary, interregional, and bilingual feminist
scholarship to address pressing global and regional developments: the rise
of right-wing authoritarianism, intensified anti-feminist backlash in South
Korea, and the persistent marginalization of feminist discourse in
Anglophone Korean Studies.

We especially welcome contributions that critique disciplinary boundaries
and interrogate language-related exclusions within the field. The digital
entanglement of misogyny and violence against women and girls—visible in
phenomena such as the Nth Room, deepfake abuse, and the censorship of
women’s expression online—demands a dual focus on structural harm and
emergent forms of resistance. South Korea’s feminist movements of the past
decade have gained global visibility through hashtags, viral imagery, and
protest slogans. Yet Western interpretations often flatten the complexity
of movements like 4B (rejecting heterosexual dating, marriage, sex, and
reproduction). This volume seeks contextualized, nuanced interventions that
disrupt both Orientalist pathologization and celebratory exceptionalism.

We invite papers that intervene in two intersecting terrains:

Within Korean Studies: Submissions should push back against disciplinary
conservatism and the field’s preoccupation with Cold War legacies, which
often sidelines contemporary feminist activism. We encourage work that
crosses status, national, and language boundaries to foreground feminist
urgency.

Within Gender & Sexuality Studies: We welcome analyses of recent South
Korean feminist thought, culture, and activism in transnational
conversation. Areas of engagement might include sexual citizenship,
neoliberal feminism, transgender exclusions, and state-sanctioned gendered
violence—particularly works that integrate Korean feminist scholarship
(much of which remains untranslated and uncited) with broader decolonial
and transnational feminist frameworks.

   1.

   Emerging Voices

We seek contributions from early-career scholars, independent researchers,
translators, and graduate students whose work expands or redefines the
terrain of feminist Korean Studies. Submissions might engage new
methodologies, archives, or affective registers that unsettle disciplinary
hierarchies and linguistic boundaries.

   2.

   Activist Narratives

We invite essays, reflective pieces, and ethnographic accounts that center
the work of activists, organizers, and collectives shaping feminist
struggles in and beyond South Korea. Possible areas of focus include—but
are not limited to—the intersections of digital organizing, bodily
autonomy, labor, disability, regional disparity, and resistance to
gendered, racialized, and sexualized violence.

   3.

   Collaborative Voices as Co-Authoring

Recognizing that feminist knowledge is often co-produced, this section
welcomes co-authored or multivocal contributions that blur the boundaries
between researcher, activist, artist, and participant. We particularly
encourage hybrid and dialogic forms of writing that embody feminist
praxis—collaboration, care, and collective reflection.

   4.

   Feminist Reimaginings of Korean Studies

This final section invites critical essays and theoretical interventions
that reimagine the epistemic foundations of Korean Studies. How might
feminist, queer, indigenous, and decolonial frameworks transform the
field’s intellectual genealogies, methods, and institutions? We seek pieces
that propose new directions for feminist Korean Studies as a site of
knowledge production, solidarity, and global exchange.

We invite contributions that foreground these tensions, crossings, and
ruptures in order to reimagine what feminist Korean Studies can be. As an
interdisciplinary and mixed-method edited volume, this project seeks to
bring feminist scholarship in and of Korea into direct dialogue with
transnational feminist and decolonial theories and frameworks. By situating
Korean feminist thought within these broader intellectual and political
currents, the volume aims not only to unsettle disciplinary and linguistic
boundaries but also to chart new futures for feminist Korean Studies. In
that spirit, we welcome contributions from within and beyond Korean
Studies, including those that approach Korea as a site of feminist
solidarity, collaboration, and reimagining rather than disciplinary frames.

For questions and to submit an abstract (up to 500 words) and 2-page CV by
January 31, 2026, email Dr. Anat Schwartz (California State University,
Dominguez Hills) and Dr. Soyi Kim (Duke University) at
feministkoreanstudies at gmail.com.
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