“I Had My Hair Cut Today to Share #Women_Short Cut_Campaign”: Feminist Selfies Protesting Misogyny

Abstract

This study examines the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement, a feminist hashtag activism that began on Twitter (rebranded as X in 2023) in 2021. The movement was to defend a South Korean female archer and Olympic gold medalist, An San, from misogynistic attacks that accused her of being a man-hating feminist, given her short hairstyle. Informed by theories about social media’s affordances and affective politics, this article unpacks how women harness social media affordances to combat sexist oppression, particularly in the sociocultural context where women’s hair is fraught with gendered stereotypes and women’s bodies are historically deprived of agency under Neo-Confucian influence. The qualitative textual analysis of 1,849 tweets mostly written in Korean, with a focus on 811 selfies and images, suggests that #Women_Short Cut_Campaign functions as networked, affective counterpublics where oppressed women construct counter-narratives against the attempts to control women’s bodies. The hashtag also challenges the binary of online or offline and stretches the traditional notion of participation by urging digitally networked participants to take action offline. Participants practiced media solidarities by encouraging each other to protect themselves from potential sexual violence. In doing so, they realized affordances for practice through optimizing and contextualizing the original use of technologies. This research contributes to discussions on the sustainability of digital activism and the need for the pluralization and diversification of contemporary feminism. It also offers an opportunity to address the call for decolonial approaches in mobilizing Western-originated theories. Finally, it invites scholars to focus more on the visual in interrogating digital feminist activism.

In July 2020, at the Tokyo Olympic Games, South Korean archer An San won three gold medals—in the women’s team, the mixed team, and the women’s individual competitions. However, her achievement was overshadowed by her haircut. Members of male-dominated far-right populist online forums such as FM Korea, Ilbe, and MLB Park (에펨코리아, 일베, 엠엘비파크 in Korean, respectively) accused her of being a feminist, which has become a synonym for “man-hater” in South Korea (Korea hereafter; Yun, 2022). The claimed evidence of her being a feminist was short hair. Some detractors argued that she must be stripped of her medals. Although An had never been explicit about her political orientations, trolls alleged that she was an extreme leftist man-hater (Tan & Yip, 2021). Comments on those forums were widely circulated on other social media platforms, which triggered backlash. High-profile figures’ commentaries on the attack followed. For instance, the then President of Korea Moon Jae-in released a statement congratulating An on her win and acknowledging her struggle to overcome discrimination supposedly referring to the incident. An’s supporters inundated the Korea Archery Association’s website, demanding that the Association protect the gold medalist from defamation and potential threats. The organization released a statement asking the public to refrain from making comments on An’s hairstyle (Park, 2021).

In defense and support of An, Korean feminist Han Jiyoung, specializing in research on women’s bodies, initiated a hashtag movement on Twitter, where women share their images wearing short hairstyles with #Women_Short Cut_Campaign (#여성_숏컷_캠페인; Han, 2021). “Short cut” is a Korean-ized English word meaning short haircut. Although Twitter was rebranded as X in April 2023, this study uses the old name as perceived by the authors of the posts this study analyzes. Within the first 24 hr, the hashtag was shared over 6,000 times on Twitter by mostly users in Korea, but also by speakers of other languages including Arabic, English, Japanese, Russian, and Thai, to name a few. The movement captured the conventional media’s attention at home and abroad during the Olympics. News stories highlighted the quick spread of the hashtag accompanying images of women with short hair, pointing out the increasing anti-feminist sentiment within the country (J. Lee, 2021).

While hashtag feminism and selfie activism have occurred worldwide, this study focuses on #Women_Short Cut_Campaign within the Korean context, as it offers a distinctive case for two reasons. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign took place in a society (a) that historically has deprived the subjectivity and agency of women’s bodies under the profound Neo-Confucian influence (Elfving-Hwang, 2010; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang, 2012; T. Kim, 2003; H. Lee, 2013) and (b) where women’s short hair is fraught with gendered stereotypes (J. Kim et al., 2010; K. Lee, 2018; J. Lee & Kim, 2007; Ryu, 2013). As a native Korean researcher socialized as a woman, I was intrigued by not only the movement’s affective and discursive intensity. The movement also offers to shift our focus from verbal texts to visuals in analyzing hashtag activism without universalizing feminist activism in a sociocultural setting differentiated from Western contexts, where the core of feminist selfies is expressive bodily presence (O’Keefe, 2014).

Informed by theories about social media’s affordances and affective politics, this article unpacks how women harness social media affordances to combat sexist oppression. The qualitative textual analysis of 1,849 tweets written in Korean, with a focus on 811 selfies and images, suggests that the hashtag #Women_Short Cut_Campaign functions as networked, affective counterpublics where oppressed women constructed counter-narratives against the attempts to control women’s bodies; challenged the binary of online or offline by taking action offline too; and practiced media solidarities through optimized and contextualized use of technologies.

Korean Women: Subjectless Bodies and Gendered Hair

The Korean context necessitates understanding the philosophical influence of Neo-Confucianism, which was the official sociopolitical philosophy of the Joseon Dynasty for 500 years—from 1392 to 1910 (Elfving-Hwang, 2010). Neo-Confucianism in Joseon perceived women as inferior to men and, therefore, required women to conceal their desires and bodies; and obey and stay behind men (Deuchler, 1992). Women’s bodies were recognized only by reproduction to continue men-centered lineage. In reserving and maximizing reproductive function, society demanded sexual passivity and chastity from women (Holliday & Elfving-Hwang, 2012). The problem is that such outdated perceptions of women’s bodies have not reflected the rapid changes in women’s expectations in gender relations (H. Lee, 2013).

Furthermore, for Korean women, wearing short hairstyles is more than an aesthetic choice. Koreans kept their hair long until the so-called modernization era, with the introduction of Western ideas in the 1920s. Similar to Flappers in Western culture, Korean women with bobbed hair were considered members of the modernized new generation or promiscuous by conservative people (Ryu, 2013). It is probable that the homogeneity of hair color (black) and texture (straight to slightly wavy) of Korean ethnicity channels attention to its length (J. Kim, 2010). Although the literature on the sociology of Korean women’s hair is scarce, studies in cosmetology and literature show strong associations between long, silky hair and conventional feminine stereotypes shaped by Neo-Confucianism such as being gentle and amiable, as opposed to short hairstyles associated with professional and intellectual impressions (K. Lee, 2018; J. Lee & Kim, 2007; H. Lee & Park, 2007). It is in this context that An’s short hair triggered the misogynistic attack. As such, the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement, where Korean women share their bodily images, particularly short hair, is a remarkable case, given the sociocultural deprivation of women’s bodily agency under the potent Neo-Confucian influence and the unusualness of women’s short hair.

Popular Misogyny and Feminism Reboot in Korea

Although Twitter has had fewer users than other platforms like Facebook or Instagram in Korea (Jobst, 2024), it has served as a hashtag feminism hub in the country (J. Lee et al., 2019). Korean society has experienced the rise of popular misogyny as a “reactive response to popular feminism” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 37). While the gendered nature of the Web among Korean users goes back to the 1990s, online misogyny in the country has intensified since 2010 with far-right populist online forums becoming the nucleus of hate speech and trolling culture against women (J. Kim, 2021). In this context, Korean digital feminist activism resurged recently, with several critical moments including the #iamfeminist (#나는페미니스트입니다) movement in 2015, which was “the first public and collective cry of those who identify as feminists” in Korea (J. Kim, 2017, p. 805). In 2016, #sexual_violence_in_[ ] (#[ ]_내_성폭력)—the professional field where the harassment occurred comes into the brackets: for example, film industry—circulated widely, where countless victim-survivors broke the silence and shared their painful experiences. It led to public apologies, resignations, and discontinuation of public activities of offenders, many of whom were established figures in their field (H. Kim, 2017). The wave of #MeToo ¹ in 2017 ignited more revelations of sexual harassment (J. Lee et al., 2019), followed by the #Escape the Corset (#탈코르셋) movement, where women shared their stories and images of rejecting standardized beauty ideals (Kuhn, 2019; Yun, 2022). In 2021, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign continued this “feminism reboot,” as defined by J. Kim (2021), combatting misogyny and the attempt to police women’s bodies. As such, hashtag feminism in Korea has become a focal point of contentious politics where participants share their experiences of gender inequality and misogyny, making the personal political (Hanisch, 1970). Investigating the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement, this study builds on literature on social media’s affordances, shifts in social movements, and alternative discursive arenas, which I discuss in the following.

Social Media, Affordances, and Connective Action

The theory of affordances (Gibson, 1979/2015) lends itself to understanding social media’s roles in contemporary social movements, as it suggests how technologies demand, request, encourage, discourage, or allow users to act in a given environment (Davis, 2020). Scholars analyzing civic engagement through the lens of affordances suggest avoiding techno-deterministic approaches and characterizing affordances as relational and dynamic (boyd, 2011; Hutchby, 2001). For example, Fayard and Weeks (2014) theorize that “affordances for practice” require the interplay of technologies, human agents, and other social components, which results in the optimal realization of affordances. Focusing on affordance’s fluidity allows examining how technologies enable or facilitate social movements’ organization, mobilization, and participation. Studies show that outcomes of affordances for practice differ by context. The notion of “social affordances,” for example, highlights how digital spaces afford sociality for individuals’ collective action (Wellman et al., 2003). Social media also enable creating in digital space a “repertoire of contention” (Tilly, 1986, p. 2), allowing people to share and advocate for the cause they pursue and invent innovative activities, such as online petitions and boycotts, reducing the cost of offline activities (Earl & Kimport, 2011). A hashtag affords a site of collective identity construction through aggregating and amplifying personal stories (Barker-Plummer & Barker-Plummer, 2017). Similarly, Facebook groups allow oppressed women to realize affordances for practice by creating a safe space only trusted members can access (Khazraee & Novak, 2018).

Among various affordances, connectivity makes social media social (van Dijck, 2013). It has shifted social movements’ organizational structure from “collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities” to “connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 739). Under the logic of connective action, networks form through sharing personal stories, rather than organizational coordination and building collective identities. But because they still practice solidarity, action for social change here is connective, not necessarily collective. The shareability of personal stories is the mobilizer, and sharing becomes something more than merely exchanging information, as observed in feminist hashtag movements (Khalil & Storie, 2021; Suk et al., 2021). As such, the concepts of affordances and connective action are useful for analyzing #Women_Short Cut_Campaign, where participants leverage Twitter’s affordances to transform everyday social media uses into connective actions.

Selfie and Hashtag Feminism in Networked, Affective Counterpublics

Although hashtag feminism emerged on Twitter to challenge sexism, misogyny, and rape culture (Kermani & Hooman, 2024), it has become more than protesting on social media. It “demonstrates an ability to redefine social realities by combining new ways, and ideas, in forming communities for women who are seeking a place to express their beliefs, globally, with other women who share in their social identity” (Dixon, 2014, p. 39). Such characteristics manifested in movements such as #YesAllWomen ² in 2014 and #MeToo in 2017, gaining considerable attention from feminism and media scholars theorizing the potential and limitations of this digital activism (e.g., Baer, 2016; Clark-Parsons, 2021; Hansen, 2021; S. Jackson, 2018; Mendes et al., 2018; Mincheva, 2021). Studies highlight the outcomes of social media’s affordances: raising effectiveness in mobilizing (Rovira-Sancho & Morales-i-Gras, 2022); generating powerful counter discourses (Clark-Parsons, 2014); influencing conventional media agenda and public opinion (Barker-Plummer & Barker-Plummer, 2017); providing safe environments for anti-sexist activities with reduced potential harm (Rentschler, 2015); and enabling oppressed women to share subversive stories with trust (Novak & Khazraee, 2014). Such outcomes illustrate a feminist hashtag as simultaneously a practice and a site, which transforms digital space into what Fraser (1990) termed “counterpublics.”

Counterpublics are “where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990, p. 67). In doing so, those oppressed challenge hegemonic narratives, just as feminists upend dominant narratives around sexist issues through hashtagging (S. J. Jackson & Banaszczyk, 2016; Sills et al., 2016). With technological advances, counterpublics have evolved into “networked publics,” a space and also a collection of people created through digitally enabled connectivity (boyd, 2010). In such processes, affect, with its intensity, drives and bonds women. Although definitions of affect differ, Papacharissi (2014) defines it as “the sum of—often discordant—feelings about affairs, public and private” and “the energy that drives, neutralizes, or entraps networked publics” (p. 7). Dean (2010) sees affect as a “binding technique” produced and circulated by social media, which develops “the feelings of community” (p. 22). In hashtag feminism, for example, risk-taking in fighting against sexism reinforces affective connections among participants and increases the authenticity of their discourses (Hansen, 2021); gendered and racialized affective labor of minoritized groups results in authentic and powerful outcomes (S. J. Jackson et al., 2020); and rhetorical strategies can archive women’s affect in digital space (McDuffie & Ames, 2021). As such, affect is personal, conscious, and always linked to the social (Ahmed, 2014). Built on these notions of alternative publics is the concept of “affective publics,” or “networked public formations that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment” (Papacharissi, 2014, p. 125). The concept underscores affect’s power in forming counter discourses and mobilizing participants in digitally networked publics for social movements.

A selfie is a photographic object and also a practice “that can send (and is often intended to send) different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences” (Senft & Baym, 2015, p. 1589). Selfies have become ubiquitous as a way of mediated, everyday communication in digital spaces, especially among the younger population (Abidin, 2016; Albury, 2015). Although criticized as narcissistic, individualistic, and apolitical (Giroux, 2015), part of selfie culture forms potent activism. Selfies offer alternative ways of self-representation to historically marginalized groups, such as LGBTQIA2+ communities (Duguay, 2016), undocumented immigrants (Rodriguez Vega, 2017), or rape victim-survivors (Ferreday, 2017). They also challenge dominant discourses around gender and sexuality, making alternative images of selves visible (Tiidenberg & Gómez Cruz, 2015; Wargo, 2015).

In the Western context, selfie activism becomes highly visible and viral when accompanied by hashtags, and female bodies are central to the problem addressed (Boon & Pentney, 2015; Hardesty et al., 2019; Matich et al., 2019). However, across non-Western contexts, selfies suffice as a protest tool by evidencing presence at the protest site, not necessarily being expressive of individuals’ bodies (Aziz, 2017; Hartung, 2017; Nikunen, 2019b). Thus, a Korean feminist hashtag using selfies merits a close examination in pluralizing and diversifying contemporary feminist activism. Also, this research pays more attention to visual texts, namely images, aiming to expand the literature on hashtag movements focusing on discursive power based on analyzing verbal texts. The following questions guide the inquiry: How is Korean hashtag feminism represented through selfies on Twitter? How is women’s hair constructed in the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign tweets? What are the outcomes of affordances in the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement?

Data and Method

The data include tweets sharing #Women_Short Cut_Campaign from 25 July 2021, when the hashtag emerged, to 25 October 2021. The 3-month window was pertinent for two reasons. First, although the frequency of the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign tweets decreased noticeably as the controversy lost attention after the Olympics ended on 8 August 2021, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign kept appearing intermittently for months. Second, however, the portion of non-Korean #Women_Short Cut_Campaign tweets increased concurrently. Data were collected through Zeeschuimer and 4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit. Zeeschuimer is a browser extension that monitors and collects traffic data from social media that resist data collection based on conventional scraping or application programming interface (API). This method was beneficial because the once free-for-all API data became costly after Musk’s takeover of Twitter. 4CAT is an open-source Web-based tool that captures data from various online platforms. It allows researchers to create datasets from data collected via Zeeschuimer. I removed all identifiable items when storing the data on a local device in consultation with the Institutional Review Board (IRB). By doing so, this research complies with the Korean Personal Information Protection Act, which prohibits collecting identifiable data without consent. Consulting the IRB was beneficial to ensure this study’s ethicality, given the rising ethical concerns regarding social media research (boyd, 2010; Samuel & Buchanan, 2020) and that the study uses data of women vulnerable to misogynistic online harassment.

After computerized de-duplication of the initial 27,673 #Women_Short Cut_Campaign tweets, 1,849 remained. Regarding verbal texts, 89% (n = 1,642) were in Korean, and the remainder (11%, n = 207) displayed various languages, including Japanese, English, Thai, Chinese, Russian, and others. A total of 1,088 posts, in both Korean and non-Korean languages, had images, including 811 sets of selfies or photos showing women with short hairstyles. The remaining images included flyers, hairstyle guides, and visual arts. For verbal texts of tweets, the traffic data were imported into NVivo. For images, each screenshot of tweets was first collected. Informed by visual anthropology’s method of direct analysis, I then produced detailed descriptions of each photo for coding (Collier, 2004). The descriptions were written in English on an electronic spreadsheet, focusing on hair; body parts shown/unshown; and whether the user’s face is visible, to name a few. For example, I wrote,

A woman wearing a leaf cut ³ is standing by a rocky beach, showing the side of her body. Looking at the camera, but her face is blurred by a filter. Wearing a loose-fitted, short-sleeved t-shirt plus a shirt, which functions as a jacket. Body contour barely revealed. Legs cropped.

The spreadsheet was imported to NVivo. Initial coding, recoding, categorizing, and theming of the texts were conducted (Saldaña, 2021).

Producing and coding descriptions of images, instead of images themselves, enabled looking beyond what is optically visible within the image frame. Such practices of reading images allow researchers to incorporate contextual information into visual data, which is crucial for social research (Banks, 2012; Collier, 2004). As a native Korean woman socialized and culturalized for decades in Korean society, I am confident in interpreting the context in which the images were produced and circulated. In addition, although I am not a native English speaker, I am proficient in English and capable of articulating my observation and understanding of the images. The potential lack of nuances and subtlety shall be limited due to my focus on factuality.

Affective, Protesting Selfies as Counterpulbics

The analysis shows how #Women_Short Cut_Campaign functions as counterpublics where women together build counter-narratives against the misogyny around short hair and attempts to oppress women’s bodies. Photos had four types of images: (a) women with short hair; (b) women having their hair cut at a hair salon or at home—including cut hair on the floor; (c) artistic works in support of the movement or An; and (d) informative materials including short hairstyle tips and screenshots and thumbnails of news stories about the movement. Findings from the analysis of the tweets’ images and verbal texts are reported in the following. All identifiable data were omitted to ensure anonymity.

First, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign benefited from Twitter’s affordances such as connectivity, searchability, and visibility, in building an affective community. The counterpublics became networked and feelings of community grew as participants replied, retweeted, and liked posts; as Dean (2010) puts it, affect “accrues . . . from the endless circular movement of commenting, adding notes and links, [and] bringing in new friends and followers” (p. 21). The keyword search feature enabled aggregating and amplifying stories. The hashtag search yielded a list of the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign tweets so long that a user must refresh numerous times to see all. The stream of images showing women with short hair elicited intense feelings among participants, as it signaled the massive participation and showed that many Korean women shared the sentiment that short hair means more than a hairstyle. The images became affective statements longing to erase the stigma attached to short hair and reclaiming bodily agency. Examples were posted in Korean and translated into English for this article:

#Women_Short Cut_Campaign I am moved to see the wave of the hashtag and its constant appearance. Photo-sharing seems to work. I am getting so emotional as scrolling down to see all the tweets searched by the hashtag.

#I_support_An San #Women_Short Cut_Campaign #Women_Short Cut_Relay This short haircut is to celebrate An winning three gold medals; plus, here is my old photo with short hair. I hardly post my photos, but the movement touched me so deeply that I couldn’t help posting one.

Twitter’s affordance enabled mobilizing online without needing many resources. The timeline feature afforded #Women_Short Cut_Campaign greater visibility. Once gaining visibility by appearing on the timeline, the hashtag becomes even more visible through participants’ intentional frequent searching and sharing. Participants commented that they could find this movement thanks to the hashtag popping up on the timeline. Here, the affective counterpublics with short hair disrupted the dominant discourse around women’s bodies by harnessing technologies. The collage of images in the “Media” section of the hashtag search results visualizes the conceptual counterpublics opposing the stigmatization of short hair (see Figure 1). As previous research shows, the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement also illustrates how technological affordances enable marginalized people to create networked, affective counterpublics, which simultaneously function as protests.

Figure 1.

Collage of the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign photos.

Playbook for Action: A Catalog of Activisms

The tweets created a playbook of the movement through connecting online and offline, tweet to tweet, and movement to movement. First, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign not only built counterpublics but also expanded the movement by encouraging women to act offline, leading participants to share the photo of cutting hair or decisions, plans, and willingness to do so. The hashtag inspired them to head to a hair salon or try a self-haircut at home. Some said they did so solely because they wanted to use the hashtag:

I just had a two-block ⁴ haircut today because I wanted to post this hashtag so badly. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign

I am wearing a sort of bobbed hairstyle now but will try a two-block haircut tomorrow. I’ll refer An’s photo to the hair designer. I can’t even breathe now, feeling so dope by An’s remarkable performance. Always cheers for An, no matter what the results will be for the rest of the games. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign #I_Support_An San #Stop_Terror_Against_An San #Protectants San.

Displaying cut hair on the floor was also an effective way to accentuate the action of cutting long hair short (see Figure 2). Several participants said they self-cut their hair at home because of the pandemic and were sharing the pictures of cut hair as proof of action. Research shows offline components such as formal organizations and triggering offline events help social movements succeed, although online mobilization and participation are increasingly central (Chung et al., 2021; Earl, 2015). In that regard, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign motivated the practical bodily protest offline, making the movement more powerful. This practice challenges the traditional notion of digital and material considered oppositional, as affective counterpublics were materialized not only as verbal and visual texts online but also as short hair in the offline world.

Figure 2.

Cut hair on the floor.

Second, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign educated women about short hairdos. Tips for short hairstyles were shared verbally and visually. Not all short hairstyles were treated equal. The watchword was a “two-block haircut,” praised as liberating women from taxing grooming labor. It was so because other so-called feminine short haircuts, such as pixie cuts, still were considered high maintenance. Participants wearing a two-block posted their photos with specific instructions on how to describe the hairdo accurately to a hair designer when trying it. A participant created and posted a short hairstyle chart titled, “Let’s try a short haircut!” noting that anyone could share it (see Figure 3). Accompanied by professional illustrations, it presents 10 different hairstyles with varying shapes and lengths. It also provides the pros and cons of each style to consult for a hair makeover. For instance, the chart explains that “Buzz Cut” (버즈컷), a semi-bald cut shorter than 12 mm, is convenient as one can wash their hair and face all at once but needs to be cut frequently to maintain the short length. It describes a two-block cut as a hairstyle that keeps the top hair as if it is a cap of the head and the remaining part shorter than 12 mm, and one just needs to dry the top part after washing. Participants retweeted the chart more than 9,000 times and liked it more than 4,000 times as of November 2023. I argue that this practice is an extension of craftivism, or “a practice of using crafts for political activism” (Nikunen, 2019a, p. 129), where marginalized people build solidarity by making things together. Although the chart was created by one participant, it became collaborative work as other women shared, liked, and commented on it, producing sentiments accrued on the chart.

Figure 3.

Chart of short haircuts.

Third, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign connected other feminist movements. Several tweets added #Escape the Corset, which started gaining traction among young Korean women in 2018 (Jeong, 2020). Corset is a metaphor for all grooming labor and products marketed to women for managing their appearance, such as wearing makeup, maintaining long hair, going on a diet, cosmetic products, and shapewear, to name a few. Inspired by the Freedom Trash Can that appeared during the Miss America protest in the United States in 1968, the Escape the Corset movement aims to set women free from the control over their bodies. By displaying #Women_Short Cut_Campaign and #Escape the Corset together, the participants connected the movements to expand the battle against sexist oppression:

I neither go on a diet nor wear makeup, which has helped me remove much of my inner corset. The only un-corseting I had not tried was cutting my long hair. I could not help laughing when I finally did it. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign #Escape the Corset.

I’ve un-corseted myself for the past two years, and this attack against An San has assured me that I should keep un-corseting. The more Escape Corset and Short Cut women practice, the less devaluation and attack from misogynists we will face. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign #Escape the Corset.

#Women_Short Cut_Campaign also brought into the discourse another sexism issue, the so-called “pink tax,” which refers to a markup for commercial products and services marketed to women as opposed to men (Horwitz, 2015). Pinktax_hairshop_out (핑크택스지우개, meaning “a pink tax eraser”) is a movement on Instagram that encourages women to collect information about hair salons requiring or not requiring extra costs for women’s long hair. Some participants steered the conversation toward the pink tax issue and introduced the Instagram account:

#Women_Short Cut_Campaign I want to piggyback to introduce pinktax_hairshop_out movement since this is a great opportunity. An Instagram account pinktax_hairshop_out collects information about local hair salons regarding the pink tax, pricing, and helpful reviews. Your experiences become information when accumulated. Your participation helps a lot. My account is [Instagram URL].

As such, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign created a playbook of action, which women could pull up on their mobile devices easily. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign was connective action bridging online and offline, activism to activism, and woman to woman, expanding the counterpublics from platform to platform.

Stickers of Sisterhood: Solidarity and Protecting Selves

#Women_Short Cut_Campaign was a site for what Nikunen (2019a) calls “media solidarities” or “the ways in which media shapes, circulates and takes part in expressions and representations of solidarity” to “challenge injustice and social vulnerability” (p. 3). Here the solidarity was the shared commitment to protect each other from potential sexual harassment. Participants were extremely cautious about exposing identifiable bodily information. Ninety percent (n = 732) of 811 images containing face, body, or both covered or blurred the faces. The most common tool to cover their visual bodily information was digital stickers, PNG image files one can insert into another image file. By putting stickers on their faces, participants were able to prevent the leak of bodily data (see Figures 1, 2, and 5). Some urged to use separate applications to alter images stressing that built-in stickers are easy to remove. Tweets also shared detailed instructions to delete location data from photos taken with mobile devices:

Everyone, ensure to remove location data when posting photos. For example, Galaxy users want to go to the three dots in the lower right corner—More—Edit and delete the location information. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign.

Another strategy to counteract potential harassment was cutting out unnecessary body parts from photos and spotlighting short hair. Photos were also zoomed in to show hairlines around the ears, directing attention to the short hair length (see Figure 4). Excluding other body parts from the images allowed women not to expose their entire body shape, which shielded them from viewers’ judging appearance. Participants’ clothing styles were far from revealing. Loose-fitting clothes distracted attention away from participants’ bodies (see Figure 5). As such, the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign users understood the risks of participating in online feminist activism and meticulously practiced data protection measures. Removing “self” from selfies and sharing such “selfless selfies” is another outcome of affordances for practice, where vulnerable populations oppose injustice without exposing identities (Rodriguez Vega, 2017, p. 137). That is how they become what Novak and Khazraee (2014) call “stealthy protester[s],” who risk the perils of displaying bodies digitally in protest efforts (p. 1094). Participants also encouraged each other to follow the advice and tips to eliminate any possibilities of cyberbullying. The tweets urging women to protect themselves from online misogyny were largely retweeted with remarks on prioritizing women’s safety and solidarity. Solidarity here resonates with Nikunen’s (2019a) call for expanding its meaning for the increasingly complex and mediated world. Tweeters may have had varying identities—for example, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region—and shared photos for different interests. They may disagree with each other. Tweeting, retweeting, liking, and commenting may seem too ritual, habitual, and mundane to oppose injustice. However, they fought a joint fight against misogyny. The affective ties among digitally networked publics enabled mediated solidarity to emerge (Nikunen, 2019a).

Figure 4.

Cropped and close-up photos not to expose bodily information.

Figure 5.

Loose clothes not exposing bodily information.

Conclusion

On 5 November 2023, as I was preparing this article, a man in his 20s in Korea was arrested for attacking a convenience store worker late at night, accusing her of being a feminist based on her short hair (Mackenzie & Mao, 2023). As much as devastated, I became more convinced to document the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement to oppose anti-feminist, misogynistic violence.

This study illustrated how #Women_Short Cut_Campaign functioned as networked, affective counterpublics where oppressed women constructed counter-narratives against the misogyny around short hair and the attempts to control women’s bodies. Social media’s affordances allowed participants to create a playbook for the movement, challenging the binary of online or offline and stretching the traditional notion of participation. Participants also practiced media solidarities by protecting each other from potential sexual violence as they took risks to disrupt patriarchal hegemonic discourses. Finally, the study showed how, in the Korean sociocultural context, where women’s hair is burdened with gendered-ness, posting selfies with freshly cut hair became a political statement, which might be otherwise simply an individual aesthetic choice.

The contribution of this study to the scholarship is threefold. First, it expands the conversation around the sustainability of digital activism, including hashtag feminism. Immediately after the attack on the convenience store worker, #Women_Short Cut_Campaign started pouring again on newly branded X—but this time, accompanied by #MaleDominantCommunity_ViolenceAgainstWomen (#남초커뮤니티_여성폭행). This continuing hashtag echoes what J. Kim (2017) terms “mother tag” (p. 804), referring to feminist hashtags that expand and aggregate feminist discourses. #Women_Short Cut_Campaign became one as it resurged and created a topical relationship with other feminist activisms. Also, blurring boundaries between digital and material, the two hashtags were widely circulated via paper flyers at offline events to protest the misogynistic violence. The instant-ness of digitally mediated communications does not mean the affect they invoke fleets as well. The rapidity of tweeting does not mean less contemplation of and appreciation for tweets. It is rather a “nonetheless” relationship that exists between digital communications’ frivolity and affective sustainability. Given the increase in affective labor involved in social media content, hashtag feminism should not be seen as ephemeral or limited to online space, as “media serve as conduits for affective expression in historical moments that promise social change” (Papacharissi, 2014, p. 5).

Second, the findings reaffirm the need for pluralization and diversification of contemporary feminism (Caldeira, 2023). The selfless selfies with #Women_Short Cut_Campaign are no less powerful than highly expressive selfies in Western feminist activism. Rather, they effectively channeled attention to the movement’s cause. Whether the photographs show faces or not, what matters is that women reclaim bodily and narrative agency through such contextualized and optimized engagement. The rigorous data protection measures taken by participants in the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement highlight the dire situation facing Korean women. Despite recognizing the high risk involved, they bravely displayed their bodily images in digital spaces. This particular practice of Korean women invites further research on intersectional concerns regarding digital feminist activism. Similarly, the insight into counterpublics gained through this research both upholds and challenges existing research. While the Korean sociocultural background where women’s short hair is subject to heated political contention is distinct, how #Women_Short Cut_Campaign operates resembles how networked counterpublics oppose sexist oppression in the Western context due to similar affordances. This suggests interrogating the impact of communication technologies on the conventional demarcation between Western and non-Western contexts in inquiring about combat against sexism. Such interrogation offers a chance to respond to the call for a decolonial and postcolonial approach when mobilizing Western-originated theories toward non-Western contexts (Brouwer & Paulesc, 2017; Huang & Kang, 2022).

Finally, the study enriches the literature on feminist hashtags by centering on visual texts, as hashtag feminism studies have largely shed light on discursive power based on the analysis of verbal texts. As discussed above, visual and verbal texts together constitute richer data when mutually complementing. Moreover, a focus on women’s hair in the selfies can inspire scholars to highlight different cultural settings around women’s bodies in examining selfie activism.

There is room for improvement. The flip side of the deliberate contextualization is that the focus on Korean tweets might have limited the breadth of this research. Especially, non-Korean #Women_Short Cut_Campaign participants did not hide their faces, which leaves us with another intriguing question about the differing reactions of women toward online harassment. Also, the study could benefit from a longer data collection period. Literature shows that characteristics of narratives change as a hashtag movement lasts over time. For instance, personal stories decrease, and meta-discourses emerge as the movement matures (Mendes et al., 2023; Suk et al., 2021). Studying the discursive changes in the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign, especially after the Olympics’ end and around the attack on the convenience store worker, seems considerable. So is a closer examination of verbal texts of #Women_Short Cut_Campaign. As such, this study offers multiple possibilities for future research.