Hyun Jae Lee (female philosopher and professor at Urban Humanities Research Institute, University of Seoul) was invited to lead the third seminar of DOOSAN Curator Workshop, conducted under the subject of Gender Trouble in the Digital Age: The Recognition Struggle on Subject, Object, and Abject. The discussion explored issues of masculinity which newly emerged since feminism reboot, and what constitutes misogyny. Professor Lee pointed out that ‘the gender trouble today is focused on fairness and equity, and both genders feel discriminated against each other.’ She stressed that such state is not a physiological emotion but of moral emotion, and that the anger felt by each side corresponds to this moral emotion. 

However, Lee explained that in order for it to be a social movement, it must move away from expression of anger and towards a process of persuasion, and suggested that this can be observed through the perspective of recognition struggle. Recognition struggle here is a combination of the struggle for power and legitimatization. Hyper-connected and super-intelligent, the 4th industrial revolution created a space where everything is an image and extinct. Such digital environment gives rise to anonymous attention-seekers. It’s an age where the virtual is deemed the original, and the distance or hierarchy between the offline and online worlds are collapsed. Lee talked about the failure of capitalistic urban economy and neoliberal competitive society, as well as backlash and cyborg feminists combined with such digital environment. The seminar offered the opportunity to think about the position of art for a society of possibilities for abjects, the non-categorized beings which, in Julia Kristeva’s perspective, are ‘neither subject nor object but abject.’