Voluntary Outsiders in Their Anthropocentric Nation:Korean Vegan Youth Navigating between National Ruins and Transnational Mobilities
This study asks why and how a segment of young people have led the emergence of veganism in contemporary South Korea since the mid-2010s, and what this appearance means—especially against the backdrop of the wide interpretation of Korean youth as disillusioned and depoliticized individuals who distrust the possibility of any positive social change. The article argues that the youth-driven Korean veganism has played a role in filling the void of the postdevelopmental, postindustrial, and postliberation era of climate crisis and planetary challenges by working as a broad vision for a good life and meaningful social change. Based on qualitative interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation, the article shows why veganism has worked as a way of alternative survival for vegan youth, how veganism as the source of voice and personal growth has been validated and cultivated by the transnational youth culture, and what has enabled veganism's solidarity from and coalition with other social movements. The article contributes to diversifying the representation of Korean youth and their agencies beyond the ruins and pessimism of the neoliberalized Korean society.
veganism, youth, lifestyle movement, social movement, transnational mobility
This is the video of my first disruptive protest. I wanted to disrupt the grand scale of violence against animals and the social custom that naturalizes and normalizes it. I hope this action is spread at the very sites [e.g., restaurants] where such violence happens to expose the reality of animals.
—@dxeseoul [End Page 139]
On June 18, 2019, Korean Twitter exploded over the above tweet from a young female animal rights activist.1 The thirty-eight-second video attached to the tweet showed that she had broken into a buffet-style pork restaurant in Seoul, shouted, "What you're eating is not food. It's violence," and had been dragged off by the alarmed employees of the restaurant. Creating more than 5,000 clashing reactions to the video through retweets, quote tweets, and likes, her tweet went viral along with other activists' similar videos uploaded to Twitter and Facebook. "#Veganism" and "#Disruptive protest" became trending topics on Korean Twitter over the next few days and generated a follow-up discourse on veganism and animal rights.2 In response, numerous news media outlets, from progressive to conservative, covered this unprecedented form of activism whereby a mundane place of eating in the lifeworld turned into a stage charged with contesting the anthropocentric relations of power. This publicity, however, was not a singular and isolated incident. It was connected to prior protests against a chicken-related event held by Baedal Minjok, a food delivery app company, on July 22, 2018, as well as later protests that involved blocking a chicken-carrying truck on October 4, 2019, as part of World Animal Day, and interfering with diners in the restaurant of a big shopping mall in Seoul on December 25, 2019. Protestors in both of these events were convicted of obstruction of business by the Korean court in 2020 and 2021. More generally, it was rooted in an increasing participation in and awareness of vegan practices and ideologies in contemporary South Korea to the extent that the ruling Democratic Party of Korea's presidential election committee created an animal rights subcommittee and held a public meeting to listen to vegans on December 9, 2021.3
Seeing veganism located at the intersection of lifestyle movement and social movement, this study takes notice of the phenomenon that young Koreans have led the rise of veganism in South Korea since the mid-2010s. In other words, increasing numbers of Korean youth have joined the vegan movement that problematizes the systemized violence and exploitation of nonhuman animals. However, this phenomenon has rarely received proper scholarly attention. Moreover, a considerable body of Korean studies scholarship has focused on diagnosing Korean youth as the survivalist or pathological generation. This generation is assumed to exhaust themselves as they struggle with the harsh economic conditions of the neoliberalized society, without much interest or resources to engage themselves with moves for social change beyond their own individual issues and concerns.4 To address this gap and contribute to the emerging literature on examining the agency and voices of Korean youth beyond the above homogeneous, victimized, or helpless identification, I ask two questions: (1) How and why did veganism start to materialize in contemporary South Korea through a segment of young people at a specific time? and (2) What does this appearance mean against the backdrop of the wide interpretation of Korean youth as disillusioned and depoliticized individuals who distrust the possibility of any positive social change? [End Page 140]
I argue that youth-driven Korean veganism has played a role in filling the void of the postdevelopmental, postindustrial, and postliberation era of climate crisis and planetary challenges by working as a broad vision for a good life and meaningful social change. I do not mean that veganism is the only or primary answer that Korean youth find when economic growth, industrialization, or democratization have lost their appeals as collective visions that many individuals used to align their life trajectories in the past. Instead, I highlight that the emerging voices of vegan youth indicate a rising public demand for new values, discourses, and ways of living in contemporary Korea. Responding to this demand, their voices show us a vision of radical connection to others that includes nonhuman species as well as a principle of horizontal expansion of relationships as a basis for a fulfilling life. The sensibility inherent in such a vision and principle is different from the prior orientation of hierarchical mobility or of the desire for endless economic growth at both the individual and collective levels. It is significant for us to understand such a sensibility within youth-driven Korean veganism and the processes and conditions (e.g., the widespread use of global social media platforms that accommodate a set of these young individuals' needs, such as social recognition, meaning-making, and community-building) through which vegan youth manifest themselves. Understanding this sensibility can help us grasp the newly unfolding national and transnational contexts that mediate new voices, agendas, or groups appearing in Korean society.
To support the argument, the remaining article is constructed as follows. First, I conceptualize veganism both as a lifestyle movement and a social movement and apply this conceptualization to describe the contour of Korean veganism. Exploring the context that situates young Korean females as the main participants of the Korean vegan movement, I then review the literature on contemporary Korean youth based on their diverging responses to the failure of the neoliberal regime especially in the 2010s. After explaining methods and materials, I show my analysis about what enabled the youth-driven Korean veganism to work as a broad vision for a good life and meaningful social change in addressing the void of the precarious and disintegrated Korean society. The analysis consists of (1) veganism as a way of alternative survival and a source of voice and personal growth for young vegans; (2) transnational Korean youth culture that has validated and cultivated veganism; and (3) veganism's solidarity from and coalition with other social movements. In conclusion, I discuss the contribution of this article to the Korean studies scholarship on the representation of Korean youth and their agencies.
VEGANISM AS A LIFESTYLE MOVEMENT AND A SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Veganism has dual faces that can be conceptualized as a lifestyle movement and a social movement, respectively. Lifestyle movements are movements that promote [End Page 141] a way of life as a primary means to foster social change. Distinguished from social movements, lifestyle movements concentrate on lifestyle choices as tactics of social change, centralize individuals' personal identity work, and rely on structurally diffuse and informal networks.5 Therefore, actions in lifestyle movements are expressed by scattered actors individually, privately, and culturally, whereas actions in social movements are manifested by organized actors collectively, publicly, and politically.6 A social change in lifestyle movements is ultimately imagined as a desirable cultural change based on accumulated transitions in individuals' lifestyle practices and consumptions. In comparison, a social change in social movements is often perceived as improvement in tackling the problem of inequality and injustice in the structural, institutional, legal, or political contexts.7 Leadership style is also different. "Cultural entrepreneurs" who produce and circulate popular content like books, magazines, or documentaries can emerge as movement "authorities" or "representatives," whereas leadership in social movements is often tied to the position of activists who have roles in and vibrant interactions with particular social movement organizations.8
Rejecting or reducing the purchase and consumption of all animal products, from food to goods like clothing, is a key practice advocated in veganism as a lifestyle movement. To stick to this abstention, the participants of veganism aim to change their everyday practices and consumption choices. This process also leads them to get involved with personal identity work about the construction and presentation of their vegan identity, which can create conflicts or needs for negotiation with nonvegans in their social relationships.9 As a result, vegan practitioners often seek out relevant knowledge about alternative products, aspirational role models to emulate, and informal and supportive vegan networks to maintain and expand their practices.10 Ideologically speaking, veganism as a lifestyle movement is porous, multifaceted, and market-friendly While its moral and ethical commitment is based on animal ethics and environmentalism (e.g., critique of mass-scale pollution caused by animal agriculture), it also embraces healthism and anthropocentric desires (e.g., regarding veganism as a "feel-good" way of losing weight or living healthy for humans) to popularize participation. Especially, the vegan lifestyle movement is driven by the belief that the consumer-capitalist market can be a channel for the pursuit of ethical principles without assuming contradictions between them.11
In comparison, veganism as a social movement highlights the need for direct and explicit intervention in the larger social context of institutionalized exploitation and violence against animals beyond removing animal products from an individual's everyday life.12 Connected to the histories and practices of animal rights activism, vegan social movement participants organize themselves to act collectively, publicly, and politically. To push for a structural change in the system where animals' suffering and oppression are hidden, naturalized, and commodified, organized vegans engage in contentious politics on the streets (e.g., marching or protesting for the enactment of related laws and policies), public spaces (e.g., [End Page 142] picketing or speaking up in grocery stores and restaurants), industrial sites (e.g., rescuing pigs and chickens from factory farms) and formal politics (e.g., pressuring politicians or founding a political party).13 Their vision of anti-speciesism is to create a world in which animals have "moral rights" to live as "sentient beings," not as properties or instruments to be exploited or mistreated by humans.14 Ideologically, the vegan social movement is critical about considering the market as a neutral and amoral means of distributing social goods. Thus, the movement is wary of the logic of consumer activism—viewing the individualized acts of buying and consuming the right things as the solution to a collective problem—embedded in the vegan lifestyle movement. This is because a depoliticized focus on the "ethical" consumption of individuals can derail necessary public attention from forming the force of legal, political, and governmental initiatives to harness the structural transformation of industrialized production (e.g., the regulation, reform, or abolition of violent and environmentally destructive, mass-scale animal agriculture).15 Last, veganism as a social movement often aspires to be social justice-oriented, intersectional, and inclusionary without overlooking vulnerable human populations associated with the anthropocentric system of violence against animals (e.g., precarious, often immigrant workers in slaughterhouses).16
The Korean vegan movement has developed since the mid-2010s beyond the previous social and organizational presence of vegetarianism since the late 1990s.17 According to the Korea Vegan Union, the former Korea Vegetarian Union founded in 2005 as a nonprofit NGO, vegetarians in South Korea are estimated as 1.5 million people including 0.5 million vegans as of 2018, which is a tenfold increase in comparison to 150,000 vegetarians in 2008.18 The growing participation of Koreans in veganism as a lifestyle movement has been demonstrated in the expanded public discourse about veganism as new culture mediated by news coverage, social media, books, podcasts, webtoons, crowdsourced magazines (e.g., Visdeum, founded in early 2020, and Moolgyul, in late 2020), and events (e.g., the Vegan Festival Korea since 2016, or the Vege Film Festival in 2018). The visibility of vegans as a new group of consumers has corresponded to the heightened production and circulation of vegan products by established food industries (e.g., CJ CheilJedang, Nongshim, Market Kurly), emerging vegan restaurants and start-ups (e.g., Devotion Foods, a start-up company focusing on plant-based meat substitutes since 2018), and various vegan platforms (e.g., Ch'aesik han kki, a vegan smartphone application offering information about vegan restaurants since 2017, and Veganfesta, a vegan exhibition sponsored by the Seoul Business Agency and held annually since 2019).
At the same time, Korean veganism as a social movement beyond the individual consumption of vegan products has also radiated its collective expressions into public realms. This has included the consecutive foundation of animal rights organizations since 2017 that concentrate on the "rights" and "liberation" of animals rather than their "protection" and "welfare" controlled by human beings (e.g., Move, Animal Liberation Wave, DXE Korea, Seoul Animal Live); protests on [End Page 143] the street and in restaurants (e.g., the annual Animal Rights March since 2018); gatherings to hold slaughterhouse vigils to bear witness for farm animals; the foundation of an animal sanctuary as a facility where animals are brought to live and to be protected for the rest of their lives, as well as a public space to spread the message of animal rights (e.g., the Dawn Sanctuary founded in 2020); and filing petitions on the lack of vegetarian or vegan canteens at public bodies like schools, hospitals, and armies (e.g., the petition with the Constitutional Court on April 6, 2020, and the one with the National Human Rights Commission on June 4, 2021).19
Interestingly, the majority of Korean vegan movement participants are young girls and women from their teens to their thirties (e.g., 85.2 percent of Animal Liberation Wave's Instagram followers are women, and 71.4 percent of them are under the age of thirty-four).20 They are the leaders and followers of the movement as much as the producers and consumers of vegan products and cultural discourses. To explore what national contexts have mediated some young Koreans, especially women, to become active leaders of and participants in veganism, I review the Korean studies literature about the responses of Korean youth to the ruins and pessimism of the neoliberal regime, especially in the 2010s, in the next section.
DIVERGING YOUTH IN THE PRECARIOUS AND DISINTEGRATED SOCIETY: SURVIVALISM, TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY, AND RESISTANCE
Survivalism is one of the major orientations observed in the literature in terms of how Korean youth respond to the deepened inequality and disintegration of neoliberalized Korea. More specifically, it refers to the mindset, value, or attitude that prioritizes optimizing one's life against all odds for the goal of winning competitions and not being excluded from the cutthroat society that does not allow second chances or consolation matches in being employed, building a career, and managing risks in life.21 The absolutized goal of survival locks up the outlook of the youth within the endless cycle of victory and defeat. Such imprisoned psyches constantly refuel self-exploitative behaviors by encouraging youth to spend an extraordinary amount of effort on increasing their own marketability. This process of internalizing ruthless competition often forces the youth to pay mental costs (e.g., chronic depression or burnout due to frustration, obsession, and anxiety associated with competition outcomes that will save only a few people in the first place), social costs (e.g., social withdrawal from or deficiency of reliable social connections that need time and trust to be made), and political costs (e.g., abandonment of repairing inequalities and injustices through sociopolitical solutions and acceptance of disenfranchisement for people lost in competitions).22 Anthropologist Cho illustrates that the state and the family joined forces to let young people accept the deregulation of the labor market in the abrupt and violent [End Page 144] process of neoliberal transformation, which facilitated the formation of a disconnected society that is now led by competitive and restless youth entrapped in a crisis of biosocial reproduction.23 Survivalism has aggravated already precarious sociality and facilitated the financialization of everyday lives (e.g., investing in stocks and real estate) despite its accompanied risk of increased individual or household debt.24 And many young people excluded from the neoliberal regime socioeconomically (e.g., the rush to the gamble for wealth) and culturally (e.g., showing off luxury goods on social media) feel like they are "refugees" in their own country.25
Another response is to leave the country temporarily or permanently. Lack of hope, vision, or desire to continue a life in South Korea, fraught with survivalism and gender discrimination, has led some youth to choose this path.26 Routes vary from working holidays, training overseas, internships, long-term travels, and volunteering to more traditional ways like studying abroad and immigration. In comparison to the condition of the past, when only a few elites had transnational mobility, the world has become much more accessible to the general youth because (1) they are exposed to the ideas of going overseas for travel, study, and work from an early age via the internet, which they find normal and mundane rather than special and privileged; (2) governments and corporations actively provide young people with diverse volunteering and internship opportunities while they are passive in creating full-time jobs; (3) youth have become more bilingual and more proficient in English due to frantic English education; and (4) they are variously stimulated by their peer groups' acts and discourses about going overseas.27 The "escape" can be seen as a will or resistance to free oneself from the oppressive environment. Still, scholars of transnational mobility explain that there are more complex dimensions in global migration.28 That is, there is the context of neoliberal globalization in which short-term and semistructured migration has already been widespread among students, company employees, public servants, and professionals (e.g., lawyers and journalists) since the 1990s. Having "international experiences" has been framed and valued by institutions (e.g., universities, corporations, and the government) as acquiring a "global perspective."29 Accordingly, job seekers and employees have looked at the act of "going abroad" for study, work, or training as a necessary investment or important perk to improve their marketability and self-worth for competitive job markets or career prospects.
At the same time, the literature concurrently found that living overseas can provide Korean youth with a "critical evaluative terrain" beyond the neoliberal project of perpetual self-improvement.30 Especially, being exposed to a different sociocultural context offers them an opportunity to reevaluate their priorities, attitudes, and life trajectories as well as their own prejudices and privileges, particularly through navigating everyday experiences and interactions with locals. Under the lessening grip of assumptions and customs from their home country, some youths absorb new ideas, values, or meanings in life that they could not identify in postdevelopmental, postindustrial, and postliberal Korea. The [End Page 145] transformative aspect of finding a new vision or purpose in life overseas also enables them to have the communicative position of cultural translator about what they found abroad and the reason why they want to come back "home" with their reconstituted self and their new perspective.31
The last response of youth is to resist and seek an alternative way of life. They aspire to create new communities for coexistence or build activisms beyond the given position of oppressed victims trapped in the life of relentless self-development, isolation, or desperation from the absurdities of injustices and inequalities. The Korean studies literature has documented a variety of such attempts and achievements in the areas of labor (e.g., the foundation and advancement of the Youth Community Union and Arbeit Workers' Union, led by young precarious workers); gender (e.g., "feminism reboot," the resurgence of feminist activism against misogyny and digital sexual violence like spy cam filming); sexuality (e.g., the rising public presence of pride parades organized by LGBTQ Koreans to question heteronormativity and protest discrimination against sexual minorities); alternative housing, family, and intimacy (e.g., the experiments of cohousing, community, and mutual care among the unmarried); spirituality (e.g., budding participation in "engaged Buddhism" emphasizing the combination of individual practice and social action); and the environment (e.g., the appearance of the youth climate movement tackling the environmental politics of air pollution).32
Particularly, the surge of feminist activism since the mid-2010s has had a prominent impact on the sociopolitical experience of female youth. Confronted with the rise of popular misogyny and femicide, they have participated in the formation of feminist counterpublics that allow them to collectively resist, articulate, and intervene in the gendered relations of power.33 The heightened consciousness and solidarity against sexual violence and gender discrimination has resulted in some institutional and social changes (e.g., the shutdown of the nation's largest porn website, Soranet, the decriminalization of abortion, the resignation of politicians and celebrities related to their sexual crimes revealed by the #MeToo movement).34 Such an experience of dissention and accomplishments reiterated by a myriad of online spaces, offline grassroots meetings, cultural events, and public protests have also broadened the scope of their political views and practices. In particular, "feminism reboot" has opened a door for the idea of intersectional politics among some Korean youth, confronting the interlocking axes of social division and the mutual construction of different power relations in aiming to spread social justice and equality.35 The idea has risen as a specifically valuable principle to perceive women's internal diversity as a strength, not a weakness to be suppressed or removed in the debates over the exclusive tendencies of Korean popular feminism (e.g., excluding transgender women from the category of women and from feminist activism).36
The youth-driven Korean veganism has drawn on and intertwined with the above three responses (survivalism, transnational mobility, and resistance) of youth to neoliberal Korea. Young people's own experiences of survivalism and [End Page 146] transnational mobility have been transformed into the backgrounds of and resources for growing veganism. Also, their experiences of resistance, especially the experiences of young feminists, have fueled veganism to work as an expanded political vision tackling the speciesism of the patriarchal society (e.g., the foundation of the Vegan Feminist Network in 2017). In the next sections, after presenting research methods and materials, I analyze what enabled the youth-driven Korean veganism to work as a broad vision for a good life, and meaningful social change, more specifically.
METHODS AND MATERIALS
Employing the qualitative methods of semistructured interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation, my analysis relies on in-depth interviews, media texts, and field notes.37 I interviewed twenty-two participants who can be called either the "cultural entrepreneurs" of the vegan lifestyle movement or the "activists" of the vegan social movement. Six of them were activists who belonged to the various animal rights- or veganism-related organizations such as Direct Action Everywhere Korea, Seoul Animal Save, Care, the Vegan Feminist Network, and the Adolescent Vegan Network. My participants are mostly in their twenties or thirties (68 percent), females (73 percent), and cultural entrepreneurs (73 percent). There are three archetypes of vegan cultural entrepreneurs: icons (image entrepreneurs embodying veganism as an aspirational and desirable way of life), informers (knowledge entrepreneurs disseminating the information used to adopt veganism), and innovators (market entrepreneurs creating consumer products to assist with a vegan lifestyle).38 I interviewed four "icons" who portray veganism in an aesthetic or artistic manner through the language of poetry, webtoons, photography, fashion, or design, and twelve "informers" who produce and circulate knowledge related to veganism through the medium of books, magazines, blogs, lectures, cooking classes, podcasts, or social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. My interviewees vary in terms of their profession, from high school and college students to participants in working holidays, employees of a company or restaurant, or business owners.
Using snowball sampling, I recruited the participants by directly contacting them via email or direct message on social media. The interviews were conducted between June and July 2019, mostly at cafés or vegan restaurants in Seoul. I also met some interviewees virtually by using the video conferencing function of Skype or KakaoTalk, a mobile messaging app for smartphones, when participants were abroad or when we had difficulty arranging a physical meeting. Each interview took about one and a half or two hours, on average, and I conducted two group interviews with the participants who run the same social media account or podcast together. On top of analyzing the interview transcripts, I also collected and analyzed some of the media texts (e.g., books, magazine issues, podcast [End Page 147] episodes, photos, and writings on blogs or social media posts) that my interviewees had produced or that they mentioned as the source of influence during the interviews. My field notes were taken after I visited and participated in various arenas, such as the 2019 Veganfesta, a specialized vegan exhibition; Marche, a farmers' market; a documentary screening about animal rights; a meeting to discuss filing a petition with the Constitutional Court on the lack of vegan canteens in public institutions at the Korean Green Party; a reading group about the climate crisis at the Haja (Youth) Center; a gathering organized by the online-based vegan community, Ch'aesik Konggam; and public lectures about vegan cooking with themes of environmental protection or female health, organized respectively by the Organic Culture Center or the magazine Monthly Vegan. Additionally, online participant observation has been conducted in a vegan "room" located on Kakao-Talk since I joined the room in June 2019. To the participants, whose number fluctuates between eighty and one hundred (the group has eighty-five members as of January 2022), the room has worked as a place for them to share veganism-related news, ask for participation in petitions about animal abuse incidents, and introduce new vegan products or content to one another.
ALTERNATIVE SURVIVAL: VEGANISM AS THE SOURCE OF VOICE AND GROWTH
Being a vegan does not cost that much in reality unless you eat every meal at a vegan restaurant. It is prejudiced to think that only the affluent can be vegans. But you should be quite diligent for sure. There are so many things you need to newly learn, search for, and think about in avoiding animal products and finding alternatives. They take time and effort. This is why I started posting about vegan information like recipes and goods on Instagram. I feel really encouraged whenever I hear that my posts were helpful to people.
Kaŭl is a female interviewee in her twenties who identifies herself as a vegan microinfluencer and has more than five thousand followers on her Instagram account.39 As glimpsed in the above comment from her interview, veganism as a lifestyle movement offers a whole package of tasks to unpack immediately and constantly for young individuals who seek an alternative way of life and a different relation to the world filled with the increasing signs of climate crisis. This is because the goal of removing the purchase and consumption of all animal products from their daily and social life is not easy to achieve. They quickly realize that it is actually a daunting mission once they are seriously committed to it as individuals who inevitably depend on countless industrial goods in modern society. The package of tasks contains practical and social problems to solve (e.g., where to find or how to make alternative everyday meals, and how to negotiate with family members and friends, especially if they are not supportive of a vegan lifestyle); needs to research and justify or promote about veganism (e.g., [End Page 148] frequently being asked to explain the perceived concerns of nutrition deficits in vegan meals, or to offer reasons why or how to practice veganism); moments to decide and act (e.g., how to respond to a conflict in the workplace due to being a vegan usually as a minority member); and new issues to think about and pay attention to (e.g., expanded awareness of where and how goods beyond animal products like palm oil or avocados are produced and their environmental costs).
Accomplishing these tasks often requires a significant change in one's identity, relationships, or even career moves. As it can be overwhelming, would-be vegans often give up on their attempts to become vegan or must adjust themselves to a compromised version (e.g., being a vegan once a week, or only when they are alone). However, at the same time, these challenges can also encourage the participants to look for relevant knowledge out there, reach out to other vegans for their advice and experiences, or join a vegan community to support each other and address the tasks together. Moreover, this process of pursuing intellectual exploration, social interactions, and new learnings provides the participants with a chance to reflect about themselves and the society they live in as well as to reclaim themselves as a person of voice.40 This voice is basically about acting against the speciesism and anthropocentrism deeply embedded in modern civilization through their personal practices, along with a potential to expand their practices to social and public levels, either by inspiring others to become vegans or demanding related public policies.
Articulating such a voice of veganism, Korean vegan youth often frame it as a way to overcome the mental or political helplessness widely felt and shared among the youth living in neoliberal Korea. Such a viewpoint is shown in the book My Veganism Cartoon, written and drawn by Posŏn, a young female illustrator and author. Using a confessional tone, she describes how practicing veganism rewarded her with a sense of accomplishment and added valuable meaning to her mundane meals, by which she could slowly defeat her depression, as seen in the following statement.41
I've had depression in the last five years. After becoming a vegan, my life has not changed dramatically. Still, I felt a vague sense of accomplishment whenever I ate my meals. I would say my value gave my mundane meals the certain meaning that my vegan practice is connected to reducing the pain of animals. I accrued such tiny meanings day by day. And I could finally get myself up from my bed, which used to be very difficult before.42
A Vegan in Haebangch'on, written by Chŏn Pŏmsŏn, a young male author and the editor of a veganism magazine, is another book that associates veganism with having the political agency to beat a sense of floating in vain in the "hopeless" society more directly and explicitly. He particularly highlights anti-speciesism as a gateway to understanding the intersectionality of contemporary capitalist society. The related quote goes as follows. [End Page 149]
When I align my perspective with the goal of anti-speciesism, the intersectionality of multiple oppressions in contemporary capitalist society became crystal clear to me. I acquired a valuable goal in life after reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, which was almost like feeling religious stability. The goal gave me courage to live a meaningful life in this meaningless society. I got the most fundamental and political driving force in me.43
In other words, young vegans often regard becoming a voice for animals and practicing veganism as acquiring a language to build their new positive identity and communicate about the purpose and value of their life, distancing themselves from prior states of feeling like "refugees" in the regime of anxiety and despair without any vision.
Social media is often considered by young vegans as an essential space to stage their newly found voice and identity. This stage also allows them to have an individual narrative of personal growth or an internal sense of improvement through the inspiration provided by a sense of new connection or community they are able to form or join. These roles are not trivial when the normative life cycle of modern society—based on assuming the linear progress from going to school and/or college, finding a full-time job, and getting married to raising children and retiring—has become less available or wanted among Korean youth. The following comment from Chŏngŭn, a vegan female in her twenties who runs a Twitter account providing vegan information, shows how vegan youth can feel motivated to refine their knowledge, grow their agency, and promote veganism as a political action by new encounters and interactions they have on social media.
Social media, especially Twitter, is a very intensive learning site for me. Unlike a school, it is like standing on an open field full of argumentative people who think and talk differently, which makes me wonder what "I" think about an issue at stake. Organizing my thoughts is important because everyone on Twitter is the subject of creating knowledge, not a passive receiver. I remember the moment when one vegan "master" appeared into a fierce debate between a few vegans and many aggressive anti-vegans. This person "saved" us by effectively "fighting" against all the logics and cases anti-vegans brought up. I got inspired a lot. I also wanted to be more knowledgeable and persuasive so that I can convince more non-vegans to participate in veganism and contribute to making a considerable social change.
To young vegans, the sense of growing on social media comes both quantitatively and qualitatively. For instance, when they become acknowledged as trustworthy producers of vegan information, knowledge, discussion, or sensibilities, such recognition is instantly and repeatedly visualized by their number of followers, likes, replies, shares, and personal messages. The materialization of symbolic appreciation enables them to feel the value of their work and imagine their expanded social connection through interactions with people beyond their immediate locality. The advancement in numbers is frequently correlated with having [End Page 150] other opportunities (e.g., getting an offer to publish a book, being invited as a speaker to an offline gathering, getting an interview request from a journalist, etc.) to stage their voice to different audiences in different contexts.
Even without being active content producers on social media, vegans also find moments of feeling growth in their experiencing of new social connections and interactions placed across the online-offline nexus. Such experiences range from engaging a vegan community to participating in a collective action; meeting with a like-minded peer community through the form of book or film club or cooking class; having intensive debates with skeptics or critics of veganism on Twitter; introducing veganism to nonvegans, along with accompanied feelings like the joy of accomplishment or frustration from disappointment; and organizing or participating in a new vegan subcommunity (e.g., Adolescent Vegan Network, Veggie Teachers), vegan events (e.g., Vegan Camp, filled with discussions, socializing, and lectures to inspire and train participants to become animal rights activists), or vegan action (e.g., witnessing the last moments of farm animals before they enter a slaughterhouse).44
Not all Korean youth find veganism a way for their "alternative" survival. Yet, to some youth who do find such a meaning by highlighting its vision as the coexistence with nonhuman animals and the environment, participating in veganism serves their internal need to recognize their own existence and actions as worthwhile contributions to the world. The participation allows them to become a person with a voice against violence and inequality and to feel their personal growth by expanding the scope of their awareness and engaging with a bigger goal—not in the sense of national development, industrialization, or democratization, but that of saving the planet and the lives on it. This advantage is crucial and can be appealing, especially against the backdrop of neoliberal Korea that rarely offers youth such a position of producing values and meanings except for the position of having relentless competition and swallowing the absurdities of injustice and inequality to maintain a marketable self.
TRANSNATIONAL VALIDATION AND CULTIVATION OF VEGANISM BY MOBILE YOUTH ON THE ROAD
The perspective of regarding veganism as a broad vision for a good life and meaningful social change has also been validated and nurtured by transnational Korean youth culture, a mutative cluster of associations filled with discourses, meanings, practices, connections, and experiences that Korean youth get involved in before, during, and after their transnational moves.45 In particular, Korean youth during their transnational moves have had an intermediary role of channeling the global—more specifically the Western—contexts of veganism either as a mainstream lifestyle or a part of animal rights activism to their peers in Korea. Transnationally connected to their peer groups via social media, blogs, and messaging [End Page 151] apps beyond locality and nationality, they often produce vegan discourse by translating vegan information in English to Korean or readjusting it to the Korean context (e.g., the twenty-two-day vegan challenge in Korean cuisine). In doing so, they intended to inspire fellow Koreans to become vegans or support their vegan peers in Korea, who, as a minority group, often handle the difficulty of not being understood by the majority of nonvegans in their social and institutional life.
For instance, Eunmi, a female vegan in her twenties, began creating vegan content on Instagram by translating funny vegan memes to comfort her vegan peers in Korea. She then expanded her creation to include writing lengthy blog posts to validate vegan practices more explicitly—her blog readership grew among Koreans to the extent that she also published her book about guiding readers to vegan lifestyle in February 2021. As a person who lives in Germany and worked and traveled in multiple Western countries (e.g., Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and England) through working holiday visas, Eunmi actively incorporated her transnational experiences and observations into her discourse. Such an approach is shown well in the below comment from her interview.
I became a vegan when I was in England in 2018. I might not have been able to be a vegan if I had not lived and worked overseas. I'm saying it because veganism has been really rising in Western countries. I recently visited Berlin and was impressed by the degree that vegan-specialized places are everywhere, from restaurants to grocery stores. Korea used to be a tough place to be a vegan. However, I believe Korea will change as well, especially from young people. Young Koreans these days travel a lot, are often good at English, share information with non-Koreans all the time on social media. I think it is impossible to block this flow of veganism.
Even when young people live in Korea, they can also mobilize the Western contexts of veganism and become intermediaries to promote the Korean vegan movement. They do so by finding vegan content in English directly through global media platforms such as YouTube and carrying them into a Korean context. Ŭnji, another influential vegan blogger and a female in her twenties, found the translation of Western veganism to be an important part of her blogging. In her interview, she told me about the reasons as follows. She also entered a university in the United States in the next year after she had this interview.
To write my blog posts, I usually watch overseas vegan YouTubers a lot. This is to know global trends on veganism and let my readers know that veganism is considered hip and enjoyed by young people in other countries. Also, there is not much vegan information in Korean. While there are some related Korean books and websites, I found them [so] old and limited that I could not trust them as trustworthy sources.
Korean youth on their transnational flows have also contributed to cultivating veganism as a social movement through founding animal rights movement [End Page 152] organizations connected to Western animal rights organizations that pursue a global network of animal rights activists.46 The newly founded organizations include Animal Liberation Wave, founded in 2017 (as a sister organization of Last Chance for Animals, founded in 1984 in the United States); Move, founded in 2018 (following the street activism of Anonymous for the Voiceless, founded in 2016 in Australia); Seoul Animal Save, founded in 2018 (as a Korean chapter of the Animal Save Movement, founded in 2010 in Canada); and Direct Action Everywhere Korea, founded in 2019 (as a Korean chapter of Direct Action Everywhere, founded in 2013 in the United States).
These organizations founded by twentysomething vegans set a new milestone for the Korean history of animal-related organizations. First, they pushed the cause of animal rights to the frontline (e.g., the straightforward goal of putting an end to the commodity status of animals). This means that the activists of these organizations explicitly articulate oppression, violence, and exploitation against animals on a societal or civilizational level rather than criticizing particular "bad" people or companies as exceptions. It also means that they aim to liberate animals from human-caused pain and deaths by changing the anthropocentric society through laws and customs. Accordingly, they try to challenge the status quo through their interventionist actions and confrontational tactics (e.g., rescuing animals from factory farms, or disrupting public spaces like restaurants and grocery stores). In this regard, they strive to alter the focus of veganism from individual consumption (e.g., celebrating vegan lifestyles and products) to action-oriented, political commitment to changing social and political institutions (e.g., the abolition of the animal agriculture industry and the creation of a political party for animals). This attempt is based on the assumption that just having vegan or vegetarian options for humans does not effectively intervene in the problem of animal exploitation on the structural and industrial levels.47 The uncompromising, social change-oriented, and global features of these organizations are a radical departure from the mild, paternalistic, and human-centric approach—focusing on the welfare and protection of companion animals like dogs and cats and acting like charity organizations—of previous animal advocacy organizations founded in the early 2000s.48
The case of Chayŏng, a leading animal rights activist of Direct Action Everywhere Korea, shows how transnational flows of people crossing borders and transnational conversations shared through social media have assisted a few Korean animal rights activists in holding themselves as voluntary outsiders in the national context. In the interview, Chayŏng recalled that listening to an encore talk about the need for fearless animal rights activism of vegans by Haru in April 2019 was a turning point for her becoming a devoted activist; the talk was originally presented at the 2019 Vegan Camp organized by Move and Vegan Feminist Network in February 2019.49 Haru is a young Korean woman who identifies herself as a "nomad" activist, filmmaker, and hitchhiker who has traveled sixty countries since 2015 and shares her global activist experiences and observations through media like [End Page 153] documentaries.50 After doing disruptive protests in restaurants like those described at the beginning of this article, she and her fellow activists had to digest and decide how to understand the backlash, including criticisms like "Such a confrontational tactic does not work in Korea." They reached out to the global community of animal rights activists formed and developed on Facebook, consulted with them, and became relaxed due to the support and confirmation of their fellow activists from all over the world, seen below. Inspired by transnational interactions she had during her activism, Chayŏng also participated in the Animal Liberation Conference held in Oakland, California, in October 2021.
We pulled ourselves together after hearing from veteran activists in other countries that we should not be discouraged and they also get responses like "Your actions are inappropriate" from the public including the government and businesses. Overseas activists support us a lot, cheering for our activism. I feel a special attachment to them as we share a common goal. So, I also try to help them by responding positively whenever I get a request to translate Korean photos and videos to English.
The Korean vegan social movement has been led and enriched by the emergence of youth who want to be agents of change and resistance in returning to South Korea temporarily, permanently, or regularly from their travel, study, or living abroad, based on their experiences, networks, and sense of belonging crossing national and anthropocentric boundaries.
SOLIDARITY FROM AND COALITION WITH OTHER SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
The youth-driven Korean veganism has grown along with solidarity from and coalition with existing or emerging social movement organizations in South Korea. They have recognized the rising voice of vegan youth about correcting the anthropocentric relations between human society and the natural world as an agreeable response, especially given ecological emergencies on the planetary level.51 Previous vegetarian communities, animal protection organizations, feminists, and human rights activists are the primary groups who have embraced vegan youth and their vocabulary. For example, the Korea Vegetarian Union, a nonprofit NGO founded in 2005, updated its title to the Korea Vegan Union and directly promoted young vegan bloggers on the front page of its website. Korea Animal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit, animal-welfare-focused organization founded in 2002, has shifted the focus of its public education program by following the language of animal "rights" since 2019. Korean Women's Environmental Network, founded in 1999, organized vegan promotion campaigns (e.g., Veginner: 100-Day Vegan Challenge) and invited young vegan authors, who had published books based on their webtoons or YouTube videos, as speakers in talks for the public. [End Page 154]
The above solidarity was precious, especially when the animal rights activists had to confront controversies related to their disruptive protests along with newly focused attention from the mainstream media and the public. For instance, the aforementioned Chayŏng was able to ignore hateful replies and felt touched and hopeful when she received countless positive messages from other activists in the areas of human rights, disability rights, labor, and LGBTQ rights after she posted the video of her first disruptive protest on Facebook. Hyangjae, the editor of the monthly life magazine Vegan and a female in her fifties, also mentioned her support for the idea of disruptive protest in her interview as follows:
I wholeheartedly support such actions of young vegan activists. Society can change only when such bold acts are put forward. The title of my magazine used to be Begun since I founded it in 2011. Only recently, from May 2019, was I able to change it to Vegan, because "vegan" used to sound too strong to be received in the conservative Korean society. I get consoled and feel rewarded about my effort and struggles in the last ten years whenever I meet young vegans who try to practice what they can do with their keen awareness of environmental issues.
Concurrently, the new generation of young feminists that formed and have evolved explosively since the mid-2010s have continuously supported or joined the Korean vegan movement. The foundation of Vegan Feminist Network in 2017 and its active actions, like holding the Vegan Camp training for animal rights activists, clearly show the critical role of feminists in the development of Korean veganism. Sangmi, who is a host of a vegan podcast and a college student in her twenties, explained why she became a vegan as a feminist in her interview: "I think I was able to become a vegan because I had become a feminist first. Feminism had helped me to see and confront with the oppression women experience, which again opened my eyes to violence and pain that humans put on nonhuman species on the earth. For me, both veganism and feminism are political choices and commitments to confront injustices and oppression."
Coalitions between vegan youth and other social movement organizations were germinated whenever young vegans expanded the scope of their attention and engagement. They did so by accepting invitations from existing movement organizations (e.g., Korean Women's Environmental Network, Nodŭl Disability Night School, Korean Contingent Workers' Center, World Without War, and Kabaeul, the association of female farmers to preserve local seeds) or joining newly emerging climate activism (e.g., Emergency Action for Climate Crisis, the association of various movement organizations for joint climate actions). They also participated in a collective action to enact antidiscrimination laws (e.g., a tent protest in front of the National Assembly). Chŏnghwa, a founding member of the Vegan Feminist Network, a long-term traveler, and a female in her twenties, showed this development in her interview as follows. [End Page 155]
We receive many suggestions from other organizations, like holding a conference, writing a book, or creating a campaign. We have evolved with these experiences. While we started our vegan activism with the issue of animals, now we are also exploring how to live beyond consumerism and overcome the grasp of the consumer-capitalist market on us. This is why some vegans recently participated in rice-planting activity. Actually, some of us are considering leaving Seoul together and becoming farmers.
Veganism has settled down as a social movement based on the productive solidarities from and coalitions with numerous existing organizations or emerging groups. At the same time, as seen in the motto of "No one can be liberated unless all become liberated," stated by the Nodŭl Disability Night School that hosted the talk about the book Only Stolen Pig Survived (this book was written by the activists of Direct Action Everywhere Korea, and the book talk was held on December 19, 2021), Korean vegan activists have contributed to the advancement of inclusionary and intersectional social justice movements in South Korea.
CONCLUSION
This study qualitatively explores individual meanings, transnational processes, and national contexts through which the youth-led Korean veganism has emerged as a lifestyle and a social movement since the mid-2010s. In doing so, it argues that the youth-driven Korean veganism has played a role in filling the void of the postdevelopmental, postindustrial, and postliberation era of climate crisis and planetary challenges by working as a broad vision for a good life and meaningful social change. Veganism might not be "the only" way to fix the ruins of neoliberal Korea fraught with widening inequalities, the crisis of biosocial reproduction, and helpless responses to ecological challenges. It also might not be "the primary" answer to fill the emptiness of the era left with the residual legacy of developmentalism, industrialization, and democratization that Koreans had as collective visions in the past. Still, some Korean youth have identified veganism as a method for coexistence with nonhuman beings and alternative survival on the planet, with which they have found their voice, felt their personal growth, and staged their public action. Such newly found voices, feelings, and actions have been validated and resonated among peers who are transnationally mobile, interconnected, and conversational across borders and nationalities. The acceptance of and encouragement to veganism as a valuable vision and practice has also come from some of the existing or emerging Korean social movement organizations that have environmental agendas or fight for minority rights. Based on these elements, Korean vegan youth have been able to lead the agenda of veganism as a relevant idea of this era that requires environmental actions and considerations.
With the above findings and argument, this study contributes to the emerging Korean studies scholarship that aims to diversify the representation of Korean [End Page 156] youth and their agencies as the producers of a new social agenda, political discourse, and cultural practice.52 This representation intends to overcome the homogeneous interpretation of Korean youth as the survivalist or pathological generation, captured as the victims or prisoners of their neoliberalized society. In this regard, this article pays specific attention to dynamics in which the various responses of Korean youth to neoliberal Korea—survivalism, transnational mobility, and resistance—have been transformed into the backgrounds and resources in their pursuing an alternative vision and designing their lives accordingly. These experiences of vegan youth also can be useful in understanding the scales and conditions of creating a movement in contemporary South Korea. Simultaneously, this study is limited in illuminating the in-depth mechanisms and meanings of the obviously gendered participation of veganism in Korea despite its potential to be applied to explain other phenomena, like the gendered attention of Korean youth to climate crisis.53 In other words, this article is located as a contribution to an ongoing conversation in which the future Korean studies scholarship is invited to explore how we understand that young females are leading discursive and political actions to confront the existential and fundamental crises of this era. [End Page 157]
Su Young Choi is assistant professor of communication and media studies at Stetson University. She examines media and communication practices related to environmental activism in the context of contemporary South Korea. She is currently engaging a research project about the transnational dynamics of Korean climate activism. Her work has appeared in such journals as Media, Culture & Society, Environmental Politics, Korean Studies, and Javnost—the Public.
NOTES
. I thank my research participants for sharing their experiences with me. Also, special thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. Support from the Academy of Korean Studies is gratefully acknowledged (AKS-2019-R-44).
1. The original tweet is no longer available because the Twitter account no longer exists. Still, the related video is available at the YouTube account of Direct Action Everywhere Korea (https://youtube.com/shorts/GnaZ37SES_c?feature=share).
2. Some vegan users tweeted relevant books and videos to help their surprised followers better understand the backgrounds of and reasons for such protests, as shown in a tweet that says, "If you're curious about what we vegans are doing, read Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows written by Melanie Joy or watch a YouTube lecture video by Gary Yourofsky, an animal rights activist" (@breakspeciesism).
3. Kim Chisuk, "Yojŭm pigŏn ŭn irŏk'e sanda."
4. Academic and public discussions on the precarious life conditions of Korean youth and their impact on youth mentalities were vigorous throughout the 2010s. See Kim Hongjung, "Sŏbaibŏl, saengjonjuŭi, kŭrigo ch'ongnyŏn sedae"; Baik, "Atopic Moments in the Square."
5. Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones, "Lifestyle Movements," 1.
8. Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones, "Lifestyle Movements," 11; Morris and Staggenborg, "Leadership in Social Movements."
9. Greenebaum, "Veganism, Identity, and the Quest for Authenticity."
12. Castricano and Simonsen, Critical Perspectives on Veganism; Nocella et al., Defining Critical Animal Studies.
13. As of 2022, animal advocacy political parties have developed mainly in European countries. See Wikipedia, s.v. "List of Animal Advocacy Parties," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listofanimaladvocacyparties (accessed October 22, 2022).
14. The vision often draws on the initial discussions of animal rights led by philosophers like Peter Singer in Animal Liberation and Tom Regan in Animal Rights, Human Wrongs.
15. Consumer activism has been widely criticized across humanities and social sciences. For instance, see Taylor, Ecopiety.
16. Jenkins and Stănescu, "One Struggle"; Jones, "Veganisms"; Muller, Impersonating Animals.
17. The Korean vegan movement under discussion can be distinguished from its predecessors by its explicit emphasis on animal rights rather than, for example, on "health" or "well-being." See Yu T., Han'guk esŏ ch'aesikchuŭija toegi, 26–34.
20. Ch'oe, "Tongmul ŭl sarang hanŭn maŭm, i undong ŭl chal hago sip'ŭn maum, kŭraesŏ naon mal t'aryuksik," 53.
21. Kim Hongjung, "Sŏbaibŏl, saengjonjuŭi, kŭrigo ch'ŏngnyŏn sedae," 181.
22. Chŏng C., Insŭt'agŭraem enŭn chŏlmang i ŏpta; Kim Chuhwan, "Sugmyŏngjŏk pigŭk ŭi sidae, ch'ongnyŏndŭl ŭi chŏltaejŏk kot'ong kamjŏng kwa hŭisaengja sin toegi ŭi t'alchŏngch'i."
27. Cho M. et al., Heljosŏn in aen aut, 9–10; Yoon, Digital Mediascapes of Transnational Korean Youth Culture.
29. Stephanie K. Kim, "Illegitimate Elites and the Politics of Belonging at a Korean University," 175–77.
30. Chun and Han, "Language Travels and Global Aspirations of Korean Youth," 570.
32. Yu H., "Ch'ongnyŏn pulanchŏng notongja ihae taebyŏn undong ŭi ch'urhyŏn kwa sŏngjang"; Son, "P'eminijŭm ribut'ŭ"; Han, "Proud of myself as LGBTQ"; Kim Hyegyŏng, "Kajok ihu ŭi taeanjŏk ch'inmilsŏng"; Hyun Mee Kim, "Becoming a City Buddhist"; An and Yun, "Han'guk ŭi taegi kihu undong ŭro pon taegi k'omŏnjŭ chŏngch'i yudong hago poiji annŭn konggan e taehae marhagi."
35. Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality.
36. Choi, "'Veganism Will Rise like Feminism'"; Kim P., "P'eminijŭm ŭi chaebusang, kŭ kyŏngno wa t'ukchingdŭl."
39. All the names appearing in the article are pseudonyms except the ones presented as the author of a particular book or the editor of a specific magazine.
41. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.
45. Yoon, Digital Mediascapes, 1–20; Abu-Lughod, "Writing against Culture."
46. The Save Movement and Direct Action Everywhere highlight the worldwide presence of their organizations on their websites. See the list of their chapters on their websites: Animal Save Movement, "List of Animal Save Groups," https://thesavemovement.org/list-of-save-groups/; Direct Action Everywhere, "Chapters," https://www.directactioneverywhere.com/chapters (accessed October 22, 2022).
47. The organization Direct Action Everywhere is explicit about this point on their website. See Hsiung, "Why Activism, Not Veganism, Is the Moral Baseline."
48. A representative example is Kara, a Korean grassroots animal rights organization founded in 2002. See Kara (website), https://www.ekara.org/ (accessed October 22, 2022).
49. The encore talk at the organic center on April 2, 2019, was uploaded by Haru at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj8dXmI8aSQ.
50. She shows a set of her works on her own website. See Haru Lev's website, https://harulev.home.blog/ (accessed October 22, 2022).
