Decentering the Body
Feminist Agency in Korea’s 4B Movement and African Philosophy
In South Korea, women’s reproductive bodies have been historically treated as objects to be managed by a patriarchal state. For instance, in 2016, the South Korean government published a “National Birth-Map,” which explicitly highlighted the number of women who are of reproductive age in each municipality. Also, the current government’s cash-centred incentives reveal a state-centric gaze that treats women not as autonomous citizens with professional aspirations but as demographic assets to be managed. By focusing almost exclusively on financial subsidies, these policies fail to address the structural anxieties women face, such as career interruptions and the unequal burden of domestic labor. In this framework, the female body is reduced to a mere tool for national survival, making me feel that having a child is synonymous with committing professional suicide.
In response to this systemic objectification, as well as the all-pervasive misogyny and widespread domestic and sexual violence in their everyday lives, many young Korean women have mobilized the 4B movement. This radical refusal of heterosexual marriage, childbirth, romance, and sex is not only from professional exclusion and digital sex crimes but also from a fierce protest against a society that constantly threatens women’s safety while demanding their reproductive labor. Ultimately, it is a collective struggle to reclaim women’s autonomy over their own bodies.
Under these societal-political contexts that I have been living in, when I first encountered the notion of motherhood in an African context — which links to power rather than weakness and fragility — it instantly reminded me of the 4B movement. While these two contexts might seem completely unrelated, they both offer profound challenges to the idea that female biology is a destiny of subordination. Unlike the Korean experience where biology feels like a trap, Yoruba philosophy presents a radically different paradigm where biology does not equate to social destiny, and “mother” is a dynamic, powerful role independent of gender constraints. This encounter allowed me to see that the problem is not motherhood itself but the patriarchal lens that weaponizes it.
To unpack this lens, we must look through the Western “bio-logic”, which roots social hierarchies in the physical body, leading mainstream feminism to mistakenly assume women are universally oppressed by biology. Yet, projecting this onto non-Western societies distorts local realities, ignoring cultures where social roles are not primarily rooted in physical bodies but in relationships. In South Korea, the oppression of women operates in two ways: the state’s biological weaponization of women’s reproductive bodies and the deep-rooted Confucian tradition of hierarchical relationships. Unlike Western bio-logic, Confucianism is highly relational; however, its concept of harmony is inherently hierarchical, functioning through strictly ordered roles between superiors and inferiors, such as men and women. The 4B movement is a direct resistance against this Confucian hierarchical harmony. Rather than accepting the subordinate role within the heteronormative family to save the nation’s demographic security, young feminists completely detach from the expected life course.
In stark contrast, African philosophy promotes an egalitarian harmony based on mutual sharing and caring. Especially in the Yoruba “world-sense”, social organizaton is based on chronological age and seniority rather than biological gender. In this paradigm one can be simultaneously a ruler, a child and a mother, regardless of gender constraints. Since human identity is fundamentally achieved through others — as the African maxim states, “a person is a person through other persons” — motherhood and family care are not biological traps. Instead, they are profound expressions of a relational agency.
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Ultimately, these two distinct frameworks reveal that feminist agency cannot be monolithic. For South Korea’s participants, agency requires a radical severance from the oppressive hierarchical harmony of Confucianism and the state. On the other hand, African philosophy shows us that agency can also be deeply inclusive, rooted in egalitarian community roles where motherhood transcends biology. For a truly transnational feminism to thrive, we must recognize that liberation can be found both in rejecting domestic futures and in embracing egalitarian, relational ones.
Bibliography
- Corxet Solé, L. (2023, May 30). South Korea’s 4B movement: How patriarchy undermines demographic security.
- Lee, J., & Jeong, E. (2021). The 4B movement: envisioning a feminist future with/in a non-reproductive future in Korea. Journal of Gender Studies, 30(5), 633–644. https://yonsei.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/the-4b-movement-envisioning-a-feminist-future-within-a-non-reprod/
- Metz, T. (2017). Confucianism and African Philosophy. In A. Afolayan & T. Falola (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy (pp. 207–221). Palgrave Macmillan.https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.soas.idm.oclc.org/lib/soas-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5150915
- The Guardian. (2016, December 29). South Korea pulls website mapping women of prime age to have children. The Guardian. South Korea pulls website mapping women of prime age to have children | South Korea | The Guardian
- Yeung, J., & Seo, Y. (2026, February 7). South Korea is finally having more babies. But can it last? CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/06/asia/south-korea-population-fertility-rate-intl-hnk-dst
- Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects. In The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (pp. 1–30). University of Minnesota Press.
