The Annual Trena Gillette Memorial Lecture
Presents
“Swiping” in South Korea: Tinder and Generation MZ’s Attitudes and Strategies about Dating and Sex.
Abstract
With just a few swipes left or right on Tinder, one can find a “match” with a stranger who is outside one’s real-life social circle. Since its launch in 2012, Tinder has gone on to achieve global success. Dating apps have also come to be widely used by South Korean young adults, who are transitioning into adulthood in one of the world’s most digitally connected countries. Based on a survey of 101 South Korean Generation MZ Tinder users and in-depth interviews with twelve of them, this study investigates how members of this generation, who are often characterized as giving up on traditional markers of adulthood, such as marriage, home ownership, and starting a family, use Tinder, and how/why they make the dating, sex, and relationship decisions they do.
Seung-kyung Kim is Korea Foundation Chair in the Department of East Asian Languages and
Cultures and Founding Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at Indiana University. Kim is
a cultural anthropologist by training, and her scholarship addresses the participation of women in social movements as workers and in relation to the state; the processes of transnational migration in the context of globalization and the experiences of families in that process; and feminist theories of social change. Kim is the author of Class Struggle or Family Struggle?: Lives of
Women Factory Workers in South Korea (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Korean
Women's Movement and the State: Bargaining for Change (Routledge, 2013). She is co-editor of Peace Corps Volunteers and the Making of Korean Studies in the U.S. (University of
Washington, 2020); and Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (Routledge, 6th edition). She also co-edited Productive Encounters: Kinship, Gender, and Family Laws in East Asia, for the interdisciplinary journal, positions: Asia critique (2021) and Time Divide, Gender Divide: Gender, Work, and Family in South Korea, for the Journal of Korean Studies (2023). She is currently working on a book project, entitled “Millennial Women’s Predicaments:
Marriage, Family, and Career in Twenty-First Century Korea.”
This event is organized by Institute for Asian Studies and co-sponsored by Department of Sociology and Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.