ABSTRACT
In the early hours of 17 May 2016, a twenty-three-year-old woman enters a public toilet in the Seocho Gangnam district of Seoul, South Korea. A man follows her in and stabs her to death. The attacker later testifies that he killed the woman because he was ignored by women. Referred to as ‘Gangnam Station Murder,’ the case sparks heated arguments about misogyny and mental illness in South Korea. A memorial of post-it notes appears at Exit 10 of Gangnam Station. The collection of notes grows daily—leading Seoul City Office to claim and protect them as a permanent memorial. These tiny memos commemorate the experiences of women in South Korea. They lament Korea’s culture of ‘female hate.’ However, other notes contest the claim that the murderer was driven by misogyny. Instead, they highlight the killer’s mental health and the burden of military service on men in South Korean society. Men and women, national service and mental health, are pitted against one another. This chapter asks why certain types of gender-based violence are easily commemorated and acknowledged on the peninsula, North and South—for instance, Korean women forced into Japanese sexual slavery—while other types of gender-based violence are, for example, contested as due to mental illness. There is no doubt that women on the Korean Peninsula have suffered gender-based violence at the hands of their fellow Koreans and by foreign powers. This chapter goes beyond this observation and instead asks in what instances the suffering of women is commemorated and contested.
