Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide

Journalist Jung’s invigorating debut examines the “loud, raucous world” of contemporary feminism in South Korea, a country that has become a technological and cultural “juggernaut” while “hover[ing] at the bottom of many surveys on women’s status among advanced nations.” Covering the period between 2015 and 2021, Jung profiles feminists who were galvanized by such events as the 2016 murder of a woman in the bathroom of a bar in Seoul’s Gangnam district by a man she’d never met and prosecutor Seo Ji-Hyun’s 2018 TV appearance accusing a high-level Ministry of Justice official of sexual assault. Jung also discusses how voyeurs planted spy-cams in women’s homes, hotel rooms, and public bathrooms, and then posted the footage on nonconsensual porn websites; police only began to take the problem seriously after a series of massive protests in 2018. Elsewhere, Jung details how the Escape the Corset campaign goes beyond body positivity to reject the association between women and beauty altogether (“under the hashtag #EscapetheCorset, a growing number of people began sharing pictures and videos of crushed makeup; strands of long, chopped-off hair; or themselves with short hair or a shorn head”). Deeply reported and driven by the voices of the young activists Jung interviews, this is a full-throated rallying cry. Photos. Agent: Amy Bishop, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Mar.)