Todd and Alfredo

On hunger strikes, ritual shaving, and the peculiar grammar of protest in South Korea

In the summer of 2023, Lee Jae-myung, the leader of South Korea’s Democratic Party, stopped eating. He set up camp outside the National Assembly in Seoul, surrounded by dozens of supporters, as television cameras tracked the daily decline of his vital signs. Around the same time, several opposition lawmakers appeared before the press with razors in hand and shaved their heads clean, their bare scalps gleaming under the studio lights. Neither scene was unusual. Both, in fact, were as Korean as kimchi and parliamentary gridlock.

Hunger strikes and ritual head-shaving occupy a singular place in the repertoire of South Korean political theater. When words fail—or when words, however true, fail to land—the body steps in. This is not a new development, nor is it merely a tactical calculation. It is something older and stranger: a cultural grammar, written in flesh, that tells us a great deal about the society that keeps reaching for it.

A Tradition of Suffering

The hunger strike in Korea has deep roots. In the Joseon dynasty, Confucian scholars who wished to protest the king’s misrule or the injustice of a court decision would refuse food—not as a negotiating tactic, but as the ultimate demonstration of loyalty. To place one’s body at risk, to override the animal instinct toward self-preservation, was to say, in effect: I regard this cause as worth more than my life. The abstention from food was proof, and proof was necessary, because sincerity, in the Confucian tradition, demanded evidence.

This tradition found new urgency under Japanese colonial rule and, later, under the successive military governments that governed South Korea from the early 1960s through the late 1980s. Workers, students, and dissidents who had no leverage—no legal standing, no access to the press, no protection from the state—discovered that the body itself could be a form of speech. In prison cells and on factory floors, the hunger strike became the last resort of those who had exhausted every other. It was, simultaneously, a weapon and a sacrament.

By the time South Korea democratized in 1987, the hunger strike had been absorbed into the national political vocabulary as shorthand for serious resistance. To go on hunger strike was to signal that one meant it—that this was not performance, but conviction.

The Sociology of a Shaved Head

Head-shaving carries a different and, in some ways, more complex freight. Confucian tradition holds that the body—hair, skin, and all—is inherited from one’s parents and must not be carelessly damaged. The classical injunction “shin che bal bu, su ji bu mo” (身體髮膚，受之父母) insists that the body received from one’s parents must not be harmed. To shave one’s head, then, is to renounce that inheritance—to declare, publicly and irreversibly (at least for a few weeks), that the situation at hand supersedes even the obligations of filial piety.

There is also the matter of visual immediacy. A hunger strike is, by definition, invisible: the suffering occurs inside, and one must take it on faith. A shaved head announces itself in an instant. The razor passes, and something has changed—something that cannot be unsaid. The naked scalp carries a double valence: it speaks of vulnerability and of resolve simultaneously. “I am serious enough,” the gesture says, “to do this in front of you.” The moment a camera captures it, the shaving becomes a media event. This is not incidental. It is the point.

The Economy of Authentic Suffering

Why does this work—or why has it worked, for as long as it has? The answer lies in a particular strand of Korean social culture that might be called the authenticity imperative. In Korean public life, the credibility of a claim is routinely measured by the willingness to sacrifice for it. The distinction between those who merely speak and those who act through their bodies runs deep. Physical suffering, when made public, confers moral authority. It is, in a sense, the capitalization of pain—the conversion of bodily endurance into social and political standing.

This is not unique to politicians. Across Korean society—among factory workers staging aerial sit-ins on industrial cranes, among families of victims who shave their heads outside courthouses, among activists who refuse food on the steps of government ministries—the same logic operates. When the formal channels of redress feel closed or corrupted, the body becomes the final podium. The implicit argument is always the same: if I am willing to do this, how can you doubt that I mean what I say?

The Ritual and Its Exhaustion

And yet something has shifted. The very frequency with which hunger strikes and head-shavings are invoked has begun to erode their power. Rituals sustain meaning through repetition, but they can also be emptied by it. When a hunger strike ends after four days, or a politician emerges from a head-shaving ceremony looking refreshed and camera-ready, the gesture invites skepticism. Is this conviction, or is this choreography?

The cultural sociologist in me is less interested in adjudicating individual cases than in what their proliferation reveals about the society that keeps producing them. The widespread resort to bodily protest is, paradoxically, an index of institutional failure. A citizenry that trusts its courts, its legislature, and its press to hear genuine grievances does not need to starve itself to be taken seriously. The persistence of these rituals in contemporary South Korea—a wealthy, educated, formally democratic society—suggests that the architecture of civic trust remains, in important respects, unfinished.

Toward a Politics Beyond the Body

Hunger strikes and head-shavings are not, in the end, simply protest tactics. They are a condensed archive of Korean historical experience: of Confucian bodies and colonial oppression, of authoritarian silencing and democratic longing, of a culture that has learned, over centuries, to say with the flesh what it cannot safely say otherwise. We should be slow to dismiss them as theater and equally slow to romanticize them as heroism. The question worth asking is what conditions would have to obtain for them to become unnecessary—for a person to feel, with some confidence, that speaking would be enough. A society in which that were true would be one worth having. The fact that we are not yet there is, itself, something to chew on. TM (Vaughan, 2026)