"Controversy over Male-Only Conscription in South Korea: Democratization, Gender Equality, & Hierarchy Among Men"

By approaching conscription as a key mechanism to establish and maintain a relationship between the state and its citizens, who are differentiated by various social structures of inequalities, this article focuses on recurring controversies over male-only conscription in South Korea since the 1990s. Specifically, it investigates why and how the issue was framed in the language of gender inequality against men and women's conscription offered presumably as a remedy. Is the system of male-only conscription solely or primarily a matter of gender equality/inequality? What does the recurring agitation over women's conscription reveal about other forms of inequalities, such as social class, disability, ethnicity/race, and sexuality? Why and how did conscription become so controversial once it became accepted as men's duty to the divided nation and a rite of passage into adulthood? The paper examines these questions against the back drop of Korean's democratization.