Volume 122

Through the Escape the Corset Movement (ECM), the essay explores the impact of social media on feminist consciousness, discourse, and activism in South Korea. Founded in 2016 and prominent nationwide in 2018, ECM urged women to discard the patriarchal model of beauty and reassert bodily control by cutting their hair, not wearing makeup, and throwing away beauty products. Drawing on concepts from digital activism and feminist media studies, the paper maps the historical transition from conventional to digital media in Korean feminist movements and reveals how online platforms changed modes of participation and communication. With hashtags like #EscapeTheCorset, social media operated as a public sphere where stories, community, and the development of collective identity could take place. The text analyzes how digital narratives and graphical confrontations as forms of protest challenged Confucian gender norms and re-considered femininity in modern Korean culture. Finally, the paper demonstrates how ECM’s discourse played a role in economic and cultural resistance, with efforts to resist the pink tax as well as the #Women_ShortCut_Campaign, demonstrating social media’s potential to reproduce and sustain activism. However, the study does emphasize critical constraints: platform hierarchies, online harassment influenced by gender, and entrenched patriarchal structures that inhibit transformational initiatives. ECM embodies, in the end, the emancipatory and structural possibilities of digital feminism, exposing how social media can become a force behind social change, but also remain rooted in unequal power relations.

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This article examines the construction of gender identity among African American female bloggers in China, focusing on Rose, an African American blogger on the Xiaohongshu platform. Despite the growing relationship between China and Africa and the increasing number of African immigrants, African women in China still face marginalization on race and gender. The content of these bloggers aligns with China's mainstream policies, such as "Rural Revitalization" and "Belt and Road," but reinforces gender roles under patriarchy, binds women's value to domestic domains, and defaults them to unpaid labor and emotional service roles. In user comments, there are both affirmations of these bloggers' personal traits and attention to their skin color and racial identity. This phenomenon reflects the differences between relevant policy orientations and existing cognitive tendencies among some groups. Despite the formation of certain practical norms at the platform level and the bloggers' active efforts to secure development space, African female bloggers still face dual challenges related to gender and race in their actual development. The process of their identity construction is consistently influenced by multiple external factors such as observation, evaluation, and regulation, and they exist within this complex interactive structure.

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