Joohyun park

Research

My research examines the dynamics of dominance and resistance by looking at the intersection of law and medicine, gendered subjectivity, and social movements.

My dissertation as a book project examines how political and technological shifts have affected the recognition of victims’ injuries in criminal proceedings from the 1960s through the 2010s. My dissertation, entitled “The making of agentic vulnerability: The legal and medical construction of rape victims’ injuries in South Korea,” analyzes three key issues: 1) the medicalization of legal practice, 2) the concepts of vulnerability and agency in victimhood, and 3) the interaction between the state and social movement. The following section describes each research area and relevant works in detail.

Medicalization of legal practice

I am interested in the competing and complementary roles of law and medicine in court. In determining legal truth, courts have increasingly relied on medical knowledge and institutions. However, courts not only accept medical practice and assessment to reinforce their authority but also reject them under their autonomous expertise. Exploring the implications of legal models in close relation to medicine is critical for understanding how advanced knowledge systems and institutions interact to define crime and produce offenders and victims.

Relevant works

  • Joohyun Park. 2025. “The cost of being a legal patient: Judicial use of rape defendants’ and victims’ psychiatric records in South Korea.” Social Science & Medicine 376. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118108)
  • Joohyun Park. “The double bind of agentic vulnerability: Legal assessments of victims’ medical evidence in South Korean rape trials.” Under review.

Sexual violence and victimhood

My research examines sexual violence as a consequence and cause of inequality. To investigate the additional violence and injustice that the criminal justice system imposes on victims, I investigate how victimhood is shaped in institutions.

Relevant works

This paper demonstrates that the coercion-based rape model reinforces gender hierarchy by depicting the victim as the one who is supposed to be severely injured and ashamed in order to be believed. This study contributes to a better understanding of what we lose when femininity is defined by vulnerability. Also, it engages the global debate over coercion-based versus consent-based legal models for rape adjudications.

Civil society and social movements

I am interested in the intertwined relationship between social movements and the state, with an emphasis on the issues of legal mobilization, the legal perception of social movement actors, and nonjudicial dispute resolution outside of state law.

Relevant works

  • Joohyun Park. 2023. “Peaceful or disciplined? Perceived efficiency and legitimacy of nonviolent protest by novices and repeaters in South Korean candlelight protests.” Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest 11(2). https://doi.org/10.3167/cont.2023.110202

This paper examines how prior state policing and legal restrictions shaped the protesters’ perceptions of nonviolence as a protest tactic, using the South Korean presidential impeachment protests in 2016-17.

  • Joohyun Park. 2015. “Cultural movement and locality in South Korea: Changing independent music scene after Duriban protest.” Industrial Change and Locality in East Asia. Korean Studies Information. pp.107-130. (in Korean)

This book chapter investigates how the Duriban protest became an iconic center for South Korean cultural movements in the 2010s, after a series of legal defeats in court to protest forced eviction and demolition.

  • Joohyun Park. 2017. “Aspiration for simplicity: A case study on magazine Kinfolk and Kinfolk culture.” Korean Journal of Cultural Sociology 24. pp.121-181. (in Korean)

This article focuses on how social actors integrate individual taste and cultural activities into social movements, focusing on the virtue of simplicity as a countercultural lifestyle, yet to be consumed for aesthetic appreciation.

Work in progress

  • “Vulnerable or agentic: For and against raising the legal age of consent”

In this paper, I analyze the process of legal mobilization, focusing on the division of feminist organizations to the statutory rape statute.