#MeToo movement in Korean arts & culture sector and gender mainstreaming strategies in cultural policy

This study examines how the #MeToo movement in the Korean arts and culture world has changed the Korean government’s cultural and gender equality policies. First, I discuss the gendered power structure of the Korean arts and culture sector, focusing on the issues raised by this movement in terms of the specificity of the sector, which is a dominant discourse of cultural policy. Second, by exploring that newly organized activist groups through the movement played a significant role as gender governance, I examined how this gender governance overcame the limitations of government gender mainstreaming strategies and reconciled the specificity of the arts and culture sector with gender mainstreaming strategies under the conflicted political circumstances and government policy-making process. It resulted in the ‘mainstreaming of gender equality as an inalienable right of artists’ in the new Artist’ Status and Rights Guarantee Act, beyond the mere reliance on the existing gender mainstreaming tools.