ABSTRACT
While the notion of “candlelight citizens” was deemed to embody transformative and diverse social desires on the street of the 2016–2017 impeachment protest, the politicization of the category has entailed blatant exclusionary practices in the following process of the regime change. Why and how did the revolutionary moment so quickly diffuse with little undoing or challenging of exclusionary and violent social norms? This chapter examines the ways laboring, feminine, and queer subjects contest the consolidation of a homogeneous citizen subject during and after the impeachment protest. By articulating their sites of struggles as visual inversion, radical commoning, and solidarity right now, I argue that the intersecting dissident subjects continue to reveal, contest, and undo the violent neoliberal social relations in South Korea.
