1. The Gendered Infrastructure of Technology: Sexual Violence, Feminist Resistance, and Digital Conflict in South Korea

South Korea’s rapid technological transformation has reshaped the conditions through which gender relations, conflict, and power are both produced and contested. The emergence of digital sexual violence - from hidden-camera exploitation and the Nth Room case to AI-based sexual imagery generation and modification -, demonstrates how technological infrastructures may perpetuate existing gendered inequalities while expanding the scale, speed, anonymity, and persistence of violence. At the same time, digital spaces have become important sites of feminist resistance, political mobilization, and counterpublic formation, existing alongside the growth of misogynistic online communities and gender backlash. The ‘new technological era’, which promised a borderless utopia, has instead given way to a new frontier defined by increasingly complex and growing dynamics between the genders. The concept of ‘digital gender’ is developed to capture these intersecting processes and to examine how technology mediates and facilitates the reproduction, contestation, and transformation of gendered power. This analysis delineates the connection between historical gender inequality, modern digital sexual violence, feminist counterpublics, the manosphere, and evolving regulatory measures, revealing a persistent cycle of technological advancement, gendered victimization, political activism, institutional acknowledgment, and subsequent technological modification. This self-perpetuating cycle begins with the exploitation of women rooted in the nation’s socio-cultural traditions and progresses toward the technological exploitation of the female body. Encrypted and semi-anonymous digital networks, along with technological improvements in artificial intelligence, have exacerbated pre-existing forms of voyeurism and allowed for the systematic reproduction and circulation of sexual violence, culminating in what is now known as digital sexual violence (DSV). In response, women have appropriated these same digital technologies to oppose patriarchy and gender injustice, forming groups that advocate for a shift away from conventional gender norms. Taken together, these regularly occurring phenomena of violence, resistance, and backlash show that technology in South Korea is no longer viewed as a neutral tool for progress. Rather, it has become a fundamental infrastructure for producing and intensifying significant forms of social fragmentation, with implications that extend beyond gender relations to the country's demographic and democratic future.