The Rise of Heterosexual Refusal: Gender Politics and Family Change in South Korea

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Kao, Grace

Abstract

South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate of 0.75 births per woman as of 2024 alongside precipitous decline in marriage rate. Demographers attribute these trends to delayed family formation, conceptualizing fertility and marriage as “foregone” or “postponed” due to unwanted external constraints. Yet these frameworks cannot explain why growing number of young women are opting out of heterosexual participation altogether. In Korean context, some join movements like 4B, explicitly rejecting dating, sex, marriage, and childbirth. Others engage in quieter forms of withdrawal. This research asks: how do women come to participate in the growing practice of heterosexual refusal in South Korea? What does their participation reveal about refusal as a collectively produced political formation rather than an individual choice? Drawing on 130 in-depth life history interviews with South Korean women and gender-diverse individuals in their 20s and 30s, I conceptualize heterosexual refusal as a collective reconfiguration of intimacy, care, and reproduction that transforms private non-participation into collective response to the contradictions of heteropatriarchy, a system that demands their intimate and reproductive labor while failing to guarantee their safety. Rather than a sexual identity, refusal is a relational practice through which women re-narrate desire, unmake attachments to heterosexuality, and reorient their intimate futures. My analysis reveals how South Korea’s gender order produces the conditions for its own destabilization, and the rise of heterosexual refusal through four cumulative mechanisms. Chapter Two traces how the popularization of “gaslighting” discourse provides epistemic infrastructure for naming heterosexuality itself as a site of structural violence. Chapter Three examines how growing gender ideological divide and perceived ideological misalignment renders heterosexual intimacy as increasingly untenable for many women. Chapter Four situates anti-marriage sentiment within intergenerational relations, showing how affective inheritances within families further develops feminist refusal across generations. Chapter Five analyzes South Korea’s fertility crisis, arguing that coercive pronatalism paradoxically politicizes the stigmatization of non-reproductive women and exposes reproduction as labor that can be refused. This dissertation makes three key interventions by foregrounding heterosexual refusal as a significant political formation. First, I theorize intimacy through agentic practices of withdrawal and detachment. Challenging demographic frameworks that treat non-participation as delayed or foregone opportunities constrained by external barriers, I demonstrate that women exercise agency across a spectrum of refusal practices. This study provides frameworks for understanding varying intensities and temporalities of refusal as agentic practice. Second, I challenge assumptions that heterosexual desire is constant and apolitical. Moving beyond the dominant postfeminist framing that centers on individualized negotiations of gender, I demonstrate how broader structural and cultural changes, particularly rising gender polarization enable radical reconfiguration of desire. As heteropatriarchal domination produces unsafe material conditions, feminist consciousness provides interpretive tools that fundamentally reshape women’s orientation toward heterosexual intimacy. Third, I reveal how heteropatriarchy under neoliberal precarity and crisis generates its own crisis. The same forces that demand and normalize women’s intimate and reproductive labor under heteropatriarchal institution simultaneously expose heterosexuality as dangerous and exploitable. This framework has global resonance for understanding contexts where contestations over gender and reproduction unfold through anti-feminist politics. In societies where states respond to fertility decline with pronatalist pressure while anti-feminist movements intensify, similar dynamics of refusal may emerge, revealing how heterosexual refusal operates transnationally under similar crises.

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