Emory College media theorist Jinsook Kim has won two prestigious awards totaling $135,000 to support a book examining how women in South Korea have fought back against online misogyny and real-world harassment.
Being selected as one of only 60 exceptional early-career scholars for the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship will allow Kim to take leave and focus on writing the manuscript this coming year.
An assistant professor in film and media studies, Kim plans to use the second award — a $75,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant — for editing and revisions of the book, “Sticky Activism: Online Misogyny and Feminist Activism in South Korea.”
“I argue that the creative media tactics from feminist activists, designed to capture digital engagement, have created connections that can have long-lasting impact and drive societal change,” Kim says. “Online spaces are not very separate from reality.”
That evolution was not so clear when Kim first began to examine online media in her native South Korea, where concerns about the proliferation of online misogyny have surfaced as a serious social issue in the past decade.
While the country is often praised as a leader in terms of digital infrastructure, connectivity and innovation, Kim’s book challenges the prevailing technological utopian image and calls for a reconsideration of a digitally saturated life from the perspective of marginalized groups.
Kim pinpoints a shift in 2015, when online spaces brought about a resurgence of newly identified feminists, organizing initially around issues such as gender violence. Some began openly challenging misogynistic culture through a practice called “mirroring,” mocking the style and content of the misogynists.
The 2016 Gangnam Station murder of a 23-year-old woman moved that activism into the public eye when protestors of the attack pasted hand-written notes in public spaces and shared the images through social media.
Kim’s book title refers literally to that “sticky note activism.” It also develops the idea of stickiness as a media concept, building on the interdisciplinary discussions referring to messages so compelling or memorable that they stick in the audience’s mind long after initial viewing.
The analysis is an expansion of Kim’s doctoral dissertation and covers a topic that the film and media department emphasizes. She has been teaching courses on social media and culture and digital activism since arriving at Emory in fall 2022.
“We know that social media is of interest to all students since it occupies a great deal of their time,” says film and media department chair and associate professor Michele Schreiber.
“Jinsook’s work allows us to incorporate the study of digital and social media into the curriculum, so students can critically engage with these issues and how they interact with political activism,” Schreiber adds. “It would be fantastic to build on her scholarship, through academic presentations and engaging undergraduates in her research.”
Kim has shared some of the case studies in the book, including the non-consensual filming of women in public and private spaces, with her classes on global digital activism.
South Koreans had long viewed the act — often referred to as “molka,” or hidden cam in Korean — as harmless entertainment, until activists problematized the term and forced discussion about the crimes connected to non-consensual filming and the networks sharing the images online.
Even though Kim’s work discusses such technology-facilitated gender-based violence in the context of South Korea, students in her classes quickly share that these issues can and do happen in the U.S. and elsewhere, though not always with focused activism against it.
“My book presents the specific case of South Korea as part of the transnational production and circulation of online misogyny and feminist activism,” Kim says. “I am very grateful to have won both awards for my book project. I hope it contributes to the public conversations about how digital platforms can exacerbate gender inequality or make a better society for all of us.”