Since the brutal murder of a young woman near Gangnam Station in Seoul on May 17, 2016, misogyny and gender inequality have been hotly debated in Korea. The prevalence of violence and sex crimes against women show that our society is in crisis. However, feminism or feminist theology advocating gender equality has not been generally welcomed or discussed in our society. In this context, as a researcher, I have been interested in themes such as how women perceive feminism, how subjectively they are living and how feminism has influenced women’s understandings of themselves, gender, family and society as well.

Reading previous research papers and books on these themes, I find out that much of the research has focused on highly educated women in high-profile positions. I think that I need to overcome such limitations and try to concentrate on the grassroots women, centering on their subjectivity. Regarding these topics, I appropriate the famous philosopher Judith Butler as a theoretical framework.

Butler poses a question to the modernist view that the substance or nature of gender pre-exists and that woman as a subject represents this nature. She argues that establishing a consistent, stable subject of woman and the dichotomous gender system reifies and fixes this existing gender system. She accepts the assertion by Michel Foucault that the judicial system of power produces the subject. Thus, Butler argues that a subject is subject to, and regulated by, a power system. In other words, power constitutes subject and object as well as dichotomous relations between women and men. Butler argues from the postmodernist perspective that I, the woman subject, is made by performing the law.

In addition, she asserts that gender is not substance but performativity, that gender is a kind of law or violent regulations, and that people acquire and enact gender through this law. Gender is not something essential, inevitably given as in the modernist thought, but a cultural construct and a regulative performance made by modes of regulation and punishment. Furthermore, identity also is not a given or a fixed substance but a kind of illusion. There is no pre-existing substance that makes the I, but the subject of I is made by performing gender. Through Butler’s explanations, I also understand that a certain given, fixed nature of woman does not exist, that women’s subjectivity is formed through specific performances in various, dynamic discourses and power relations.

Women can be made subjects of diverse contents and meanings through ceaseless performances. Thus, women can be formed into new subjects, not by way of traditional obedience that patriarchal society orders and demands, but by performing in new, liberating manners. So, sublating the modernist view that women’s nature is fixed means that it may be possible to overcome opposition, conflict and hostility between women and men deriving from the existing dichotomous, gender-based power relations. Lastly, Butler’s conception of multiple identities of women allows for diversity and opens the door for gender identities to be formed in various, changeable and liberating manners.

Lee Nan-hee studied English in college and theology at Hanshin University.