Palatable Political Passion Projects?: Feminist Instatoons in South Korea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article builds on the work of existing English language-printed academic texts on webtoons and webcomics, and introduces instatoons (a portmanteau of Instagram and cartoon) as a medium used by creators to disseminate feminist ideas. Webcomics, as an instrument of feminist storytelling, are seen worldwide. Dubbati (2017) has examined Deena Mohamed’s webcomic Qahera, an Egyptian hijab-wearing superheroine; the French comic artist Emma (2017) published a series of comics in The Guardian, depicting issues such as ‘the mental load’ and maternity leave; Canadian artist Aminder Dhaliwal’s (2017) Instagram series Woman World tells a story of a post-apocalyptic future where men are extinct; and the Indian webcomic Priya Shakti (2014) follows a rape survivor ‘who, along with the Goddess Parvati, defends women against sexual predators’ (Aldama 2021: 5). Focusing on two South Korean (hereafter Korean) instatoons by the award-winning creator Soo Shin Ji (수신지), the notion of Korean feminist instatoons as palatable political passions projects will be explored. Myeoneuragi (며느라기, also known as SARIN) (2017-2018), and Gone (곤) (2019-2020), were both initially published on Instagram and Facebook. Myeoneuragi follows newlywed Min Sa-rin, tracking her experiences of day-to-day inequalities during her incorporation into her husband’s family, and Gone is set in a fictional world where all women who have had abortions face legal punishments. Myeoneuragi, begins with the wedding of the main character Min Sa-rin and her husband Mu Gu-young. The instatoon quickly shows the subtle inequalities that Sa-rin experiences on a daily basis, while she navigates her company job and her new role as a daughter-in-law (fig. 1).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".