'Authentic form of freedom': Professor Jinhee Choi explores girlhood, trauma and idleness in Korean cinema

01 July 2025

'Authentic form of freedom': Professor Jinhee Choi explores girlhood, trauma and idleness in Korean cinema

'Forever Girls: Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood' by Professor Jinhee Choi is out now.

A few printed copies of Forever Girls by Professor Jinhee Choi on a desk

Image credit: Professor Jinhee Choi / @jinheechoi_kcl on X

Professor Jinhee Choi’s new book Forever Girls: Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first English-language monograph to focus on girlhood and South Korean cinema.

Forever Girls is a deep dive into how the concept of girlhood manifests itself in contemporary South Korean cinema against the background of colonialism, post-colonial and post-war traumas, to modern democracy.

Professor Jinhee Choi traces the evolving portrayal of girls in South Korean cinema, highlighting a significant shift from passive figures to complex characters with agency – those who ‘remember the past, experience the present, and envision the future, and whose interiority lies beyond their status as victims of sexual violence and national trauma’.

Spanning from the teen films and male-directed works of the 1970s to the feminist-driven independent cinema of the 2010s, the author examines how themes of sexuality, labour and leisure have been reimagined through the lens of girlhood.

‘I was surprised to see that there is a continuity from the 1970s to contemporary Korean cinema – that the girl figure is still associated with unproductivity, despite the long history of South Korean young women’s cheap labour, which has been so instrumental to the economic development,’ Professor Choi says. ‘I also saw similar cinematic devices, such as the empty gaze, that foreground such an association – their gazes are returned by an empty shot or eclipsed into a void.’

Similarly, girls’ desire for leisure, if not for freedom, constantly resurfaces in their idle walk or play; their ways to cope with extreme conditions that they have to endure, be it sexual labour, domestic abuse, and exploitation at work, are manifested through doing little things – writing, making doll houses, or even cooking simple dishes like egg omelettes. I was hoping to grant some idleness to these figures in my book, and that’s the reason that I ended the book with the chapter titled ‘Idle Girls’.
Professor Jinhee Choi, Professor of Film Studies

Shelter writing and idleness guide the last two chapters of Professor Jinhee Choi’s book. The trajectory of the book reflects her wish to grant idleness and freedom to South Korean girls and dissociate them from the frequent deaths both on and off screen.

‘Shelter writing is a process of securing a sense of security by creating a personal space or domestic routines – cleaning, ordering, cooking,’ Professor Choi explains. ‘It’s a concept advanced by Suan Fraiman – I love her book, Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins (2017). I focus on girl characters making doll houses or cooking simple dishes in a Korean indie film, The House of Us (2019), directed by a woman director, Yoon Ga-eun, for instance.’

‘Idleness – punctuation to the endless expectations on productivity and industry from both family and work – could be seen as a positive form of moral freedom. In his book, Idleness: A Philosophical Essay (2018), Brian O’Connor defines the concept as “a knowing indifference to specific recommendations about how one ought to live”. It helps me to challenge the criticism of unproductivity associated with girlhood and how it could be seen as an authentic form of freedom,’ says Professor Choi.

Forever Girls: Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood was launched on 12 June at the Garden Cinema, where Professor Jinhee Choi introduced a special screening of Lee Hae-young's queer horror film The Silenced. This event was organised in partnership with the Korean Cultural Centre UK.

Forever Girls: Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood is available here.