The Sting of Comrade Hornet - Lux Magazine

The Sting of Comrade Hornet - Lux Magazine



The Sting of Comrade Hornet
When Korea's president staged a coup, feminists, queers, and K-pop fans swarmed the barricades to join the labor movement


By Youbin Kang

Illustrations by Miki Kim


Between December 2024 and April 2025, an unlikely alliance emerged in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square. Tens of thousands of Koreans gathered to demand the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol, who had attempted to stage a military coup. Among the protesters were the solemn, battle-hardened unionists — mostly men — who have been a mainstay of dissent since the 1980s pro-democracy movement. But they were now joined by large numbers of young women, queers, and K-pop fans waving neon lightsticks. “In a country where it is impossible to ignore the symbolism of martial law, I was enraged at Yoon. His seat was not given to him to wield abuse,” Park Soo-yeon, a college student, told me. Park and others like her earned the nickname “comrade hornets” for the speed with which they converged on sites of labor struggle.

During Yoon’s campaign for the presidency, he had pledged to abolish the Ministry of Women and Family, insisted that “structural sexism does not exist, discrimination is an individual problem,” and opposed the long-debated Anti-Discrimination Bill — a priority of feminists, queer people, and migrant workers — as unconstitutional “reverse discrimination.” In a country with the highest gender pay gap of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members, the president slashed funding to prevent gender-based violence, purged “gender equality” from policy language, and excised “gender discrimination” and “sexual/gender minorities” from school textbooks. He also pursued a harshly anti-labor agenda.

On the night of his coup attempt in early December, Yoon made a televised declaration of martial law, claiming, without evidence, that the nation needed protection from “North Korean communist and other antistate forces.” Labor networks activated immediately. Encrypted group chats summoned union members to the National Assembly complex, where lawmakers had a chance to vote against martial law. The Korean Metalworkers Union issued a statement pledging that they would stand “at the forefront of the resistance” and launched rolling strikes in the days that followed.

Yoon withdrew his martial law order, but the National Assembly and Constitutional Court would still have to decide on his impeachment and removal from office. The movement against the president began to grow and intensify. In late December, farmers with the Korean Peasants League drove their tractors toward Seoul. At a steep junction called Namtaeryeong, police erected barricades to block them. A call for aid spread across social media, and thousands rushed to join what would become a 28-hour occupation — until the police relented and let the tractors through. For the many comrade hornets present, the Namtaeryeong confrontation proved that individuals without ties to longstanding movements could show up and make change.

Gwanghwamun Square filled with young women who brought color and pop to the staid rituals of Korean protests. At night, the K-pop bop “Into the New World” by Girls’ Generation rang out over the crowd, adding its sweet optimism to the militant Minjung–gayo folk songs played by older labor activists. Feminists and disability-rights activists mingled with trade unionists. Park Soo-yeon, an art student from Cheongju, told me that she was particularly moved by the testimony of Kim Hyoung-su, a shipbuilder with the Metalworkers Union who was on a hunger strike to protest working conditions. Park sensed that she had joined a struggle that extended far beyond ousting Yoon. Hornet comrade Yae-eun ties a transgender solidarity headband on shipbuilder Kim Hyoung-su.

Shipbuilding is still one of South Korea’s largest industries, but the country’s young women have also long been export-worthy objects. The insect metaphor invoked by the comrade hornets recalls, and subverts, the “honeybee revues” in which young women danced and sang for U.S. servicemen at Seoul’s Walker Hill Hotel, under the sponsorship of Korea’s midcentury military dictatorship. Not to mention today’s buzzy K-pop idols, trained on subsistence stipends, who advertise electronics, skincare products, and Korean tourism to consumers worldwide.


Meanwhile, young women have become a domestic policy problem. Politicians from Yoon’s party, as well as the opposition, have wrung their hands over plunging birth rates and the refusal of women to perform reproductive labor. Korea’s “4B” and “Escape the Corset” movements — renouncing men, sex, marriage, and beauty norms — have proliferated online. The hornets were pursuing a different, real-life strategy. By forging solidarities face to face with trade unionists, they discovered a politics of collective struggle rather than individual refusal.

When Sim Mi-seop, a young activist in the square, first introduced herself as a feminist, she was met with jeers. She pushed through the discomfort; it was important for the democracy movement, she thought, to make her identities and allegiances known. “Minority voices are easily forgotten,” she told me. “Saying it out aloud in the square was a desperate cry to be remembered, to be written down in history.”

After the farmers’ win at Namtaeryeong, the shipbuilders’ union saw a surge in donations to its strike fund. It also noticed some unusual signatures accompanying those donations: “Namtaeryeong Nonbinary,” “Sex Worker,” “Genderqueer Existing,” “Welder’s Daughter.” The union, not sure what to expect, invited supporters to Geoje Island, off the southeast coast of the country, for a party on New Year’s Eve. Three hundred people boarded subsidized buses from Seoul — double the expected number. In response to the request of a queer activist, the union designated one section of the lodging area gender-neutral. As the sun rose over the ocean on New Year’s Day, “Into the New World” blared. That marked the hornets’ baptism. The shipbuilders decided to take their sit-in to Seoul.

In early 2025, the shipbuilder Kim Hyoung-su joined two other workers in a high-altitude protest. Park Jeong-hye had been laid off from an optical factory in the city of Gumi; Ko Jin-soo, a sushi chef, had been dismissed from Seoul’s Sejong Hotel. They occupied a CCTV tower, a burned factory roof, and a traffic-control post, respectively, refusing to come down for months.


The hornets became indispensable below. They ferried food and water, removed waste, and amplified the workers’ grievances on social media. At a metalworkers’ demonstration, I noticed men in their fifties sporting rainbow patches that read: “Queers among workers, Workers among queers.” Atop Sejong Hotel’s traffic tower, Ko Jin-soo was wrapped in a large rainbow banner. In Gumi, the union representing workers in an optical factory established an all-gender restroom in its makeshift office.

Comrade hornets, mostly in their twenties, added flair to union-style utility vests and the red headbands that signify labor rebellion. They dressed in quirky “uncle-adjacent” ways. Chae-yoon was nicknamed “Comrade Flute” for the instrument they always carried. Yae-eun, a charismatic nonbinary taekwondo athlete, declared their intention to become a welder. Yoo-jin, a baby-faced art student and newly out asexual, told me that she felt safer being queer at the protests than at home or school.

Middle-aged unionists were baffled yet grateful. When I spoke with Kim Jeong-bum, a laid-off metalsmith who was part of an encampment outside the Seoul labor ministry, he referenced the movie Pride, about the gay and lesbian activists who supported the Welsh miners’ strike in 1984. As he stirred a pot of ramen — vegan, to accommodate dietary restrictions — he explained that the hornets had reignited his passion for the movement. A young gay couple cuddled nearby.

But just like in Pride, tensions emerged. One unionist, employed by the E-Land conglomerate, told me that there had been backlash from Christian members of the rank-and-file when a rainbow flag was added to the union banner. When a hornet said, rather casually, that they wouldn’t mind taking a job at a shipyard, they were criticized for being dismissive of blue-collar work.

Some established activists worried that the young newcomers’ utopian fantasy of the labor movement would eventually collapse. Kim Hyoung-su atop a CCTV tower in a high-altitude protest.

In June, Kim Hyoung-su ended his occupation of the CCTV tower. His union finally won an acceptable collective bargaining agreement. I watched footage of him in tears at a press conference; he thanked two hornet comrades by name. I met him later, not far from Geoje, in Korea’s second-largest city of Busan. He was weathered but composed. When I asked him about movement strategy, he responded that solidarity work, like that between labor and hornets, was more than that. He saw it as world-building — practicing democracy by holding conversations across differences and learning to see one another as equals. “I sensed a deep resemblance,” he told me, “between outsourced shipbuilders and queer comrades who feel society has cast them aside.”

Labor rallies were not spaces of charity but of comradeship, and hornets sought to identify with the working class in different ways. Some were working in warehouses or taking gigs to survive. Others wanted to “industrialize,” or “salt” workplaces — to get hired in order to organize unions. Many enrolled in organizer trainings, aspiring to union staff positions. Others talked about getting professional degrees to become labor lawyers or arbitrators. Park Soo-yeon, the art student from Cheongju, explained that she had once seen herself as “an apprentice capitalist” but now believed that money was less important than earning respect for one’s labor.


The rallies and street occupations succeeded in forcing Yoon out of office — and into a jail cell. On June 3, an election was held to replace him, and Lee Jae-myung, the Democratic Party candidate and a former child factory worker, won by a large margin. He nominated a former rail worker and union president as labor minister. In July, there were moves in the National Assembly to extend outsourced workers’ right to freely associate and to limit claims for damages against striking workers.

Yet Lee, like his predecessor, did nothing to advance the Anti-Discrimination Bill that was still a goal of many disenfranchised groups. The question moving forward is whether the coalition forged in 2025 will now put its weight behind that campaign. In other words, whether the labor movement will reciprocate the comrade hornets’ solidarity. There were promising signs at the Seoul Pride festival. The labor contingent marched first, and over blaring music, one could hear the familiar, husky voice of Yae-eun, the taekwondo athlete. “Discrimination and hate,” they yelled, “the union movement will smash it with you!”

Youbin Kang is a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at City College of New York and the New York Public Library