Embedded Files
April 11th, 2025
Jinsook Kim’s article Sticky Activism tracks the social and political landscape following a highly publicized hate-motivated 2016 murder case in South Korea.
Photo of Jinsook Kim, PhD
On May 17, 2016, a twenty-three-year-old woman was stabbed to death in a public bathroom near Gangnam subway station
When the attack first occurred though, mainstream Korean news networks undercut the misogynistic elements of the crime by describing the killing as "random" and "motiveless". But then, a remarkable feminist movement emerged, or perhaps resurged in response to this mischaracterization by the media, seeking to resist male-dominated hegemony in South Korea.
As Kim points out, Gangam Station wouldn’t be the first instance of sticky notes being used for collective public resistance and protest. During the 2014 Umbrella movement in Hong Kong, protestors affixed thousands of sticky notes to a wall directly outside of the Hong Kong Government central offices, forming what is now known as the Lennon Wall. After the 2016 American presidential election, New Yorkers attached sticky notes to the walls of subway stations as a form of therapy and protest to then President-elect (and now current President) Donald Trump.
Photo from The Guardian
Photo from Smithsonian magazine
What is now known as the Gagnam Station murder case not only sparked widespread resistance to gender-based violence against women in South Korea, but it also embodies a fascinating example of how exceptional affective energy can be harnessed through the use of both digital and analog media. For Kim, the use of sticky notes are representative of a broader form of activism she calls sticky note activism. It’s more than just a play on words; sticky note activism embraces the stickiness in its name, which we can define as the ability for media to capture the attention of its subjects. Kim also argues that this sticky note activism has helped to form affective counterpublics. These are movements which employ the experiences and emotions of marginalized people in order to combat an oppressive hegemonic structure.
In South Korea, May of 2016, many women responded by expressing their solidarity with the woman who was murdered, and a twitter account called @0517am1–a handle which corresponds to the date and time of the murder–suggested that people leave post-it notes at Exit 10 of Gagnam station. Pretty quickly, thousands of women were writing about their experiences with misogyny, gender-based violence, and hate–all on the same colourful sticky notes that we use to remind ourselves to eat the three day-old leftovers in the fridge before they go bad. These sticky notes almost completely covered Gagnam Station exit 10.
Photo from Hankyoreh
Sticky notes and forms of media
Sticky notes and forms of media
Although women in this movement leveraged sticky notes, a form of analog media, the use of digital media–including in particular SNSs–was also critical to the success and eventual widespread reach of the movement. Women on these platforms were successful in reaching countless supporters–many of them newfound–by sharing their own experiences with misogyny or by criticizing patriarchal societal practices. Those who encountered the sticky notes IRL could capture and share their own images of these sticky notes on social media, and a feminist activist group also made use of transcriptions to record and archive many passionate speeches, which were made at Exit 10 in the days after the murder. In this sense, digital media could be used to archive analog media like sticky notes. Digital archives of the sticky notes and the messages they carry survive today.
And even though we might view sticky notes as a rather ephemeral media form, this is probably because of the way that we use them more than anything, that is, their implicit instructions for use tell us to throw them out once they have been used, and they are rarely thought of as a method of recording information (in this sense, a sheet of paper is probably less ephemeral than a sticky note). Yet, the participants of this renewed feminist movement elected to use them anyway.
Maybe it’s a “safety in numbers” thing: if I were to write a message of resistance and solidarity on a sticky note and then stick it onto a wall in a little-known back alley, it’s quite possible that nobody other than myself would ever read it. With tens of thousands of sticky notes attached to a wall in the centre of the busiest part of the city, Gagnam Station Exit 10 became a sort of mural of sticky notes that were certain to be noticed by many.
Balancing media forms
Balancing media forms
It’s possible still, even for such an incredible moment of collective social action to be at least partially forgotten. In this way, the importance of the digital archiving that took place at Exit 10 is perhaps greater than it seems. For only then–against a backdrop of active, widespread and decentralized digital archiving–could posting these sticky notes became a possibility for a movement that was uninterested in simply temporary or superficial change, and which would be unwilling to accept reversals of progress in future years.
Photo from Korea Herald
Many of my questions when I first read this article were related to the impact of the use of sticky notes. In particular, are sticky notes (or more generally, analog forms of media) more affective, and if so, why? Kim answers this through the lens of stickiness, noting an idea from British writer Sara Ahmed that “if a word is used in a certain way, again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic; it becomes a form of signing.” We can understand this as the idea that media and words become more affective through repetitive exposure. At the same time, when compared to online messages and posts, sticky notes posted at Exit 10 were perceived as more authentic, heartfelt, and human. Why does it seem like sticky notes become more powerful the more they are used, yet the opposite is true for digital forms of media?
Consider hashtags: the digital analogue (no pun intended) of sticky notes. On any given hashtag, say #saranamatda (which means “survived” in Korean, and was widely used following the Gagnam Station murder case) there could be tens of thousands of unique posts. Many of those posts might be because posters searched for the hashtag intentionally, found posts with the hashtag unintentionally, or were directed to posts under the hashtag through an algorithm. In digital spaces, we don’t know. There is some missing human aspect to digital posts.
Physical and digital spaces
Physical and digital spaces
Those who wrote and posted sticky notes at Exit 10 took physical time to physically write a note, before physically posting it at the physical location that catalyzed the movement. Notice my emphasis on the physical. The use of analog media affords us the ability to come together in a physical space; we don’t have the choice to do anything else. Through being tied indefinitely to physical space, analog media requires us to have IRL encounters, where we can internalize that embedded affect of analog content, while also interacting with each other.
But don’t be fooled, when it comes to media, it’s not as simple as analog > digital. Earlier, I mentioned Kim’s explanation of how the use of digital archiving and the effectiveness of SNSs of spreading information were similarly important to the movement. The interplay between the two media forms–digital and analog–can be quite powerful if the affective energy of analog media is harnessed, while the effectiveness of digital media and digital tools to spread messages is simultaneously deployed. If you don’t agree with me, you might agree with Kim, who explains this perfectly in her article:
But don’t be fooled, when it comes to media, it’s not as simple as analog > digital. Earlier, I mentioned Kim’s explanation of how the use of digital archiving and the effectiveness of SNSs of spreading information were similarly important to the movement. The interplay between the two media forms–digital and analog–can be quite powerful if the affective energy of analog media is harnessed, while the effectiveness of digital media and digital tools to spread messages is simultaneously deployed. If you don’t agree with me, you might agree with Kim, who explains this perfectly in her article:
…while digital media [was] necessary to extend the mobilization and reach of activism, sticky notes, as an analog medium, were felt to lend credence to the activists’ voices and actions, reflecting the importance of authenticity for the legitimacy of contemporary political mobilization.
Jinsook Kim, Sticky Activism
Maybe digital spaces and physical spaces are effectively disjoint–or at least in the way that we perceive them–in order for analogous actions in one space to mean something entirely different in the other. Even though many of those who took time to write sticky notes may too have encountered the protest incidentally, their actions were still physical, and there must be something so human about that.
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