Criminalizing Adultery: Law, Marriage, and Monogamous Heterosexuality in South Korea

For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by  Apr. 2 at 4:00 pm for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event.

Speaker: Jisoo M. Kim, Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, George Washington University

Moderator: Jungwon Kim, King Sejong Associate Professor of Korean Studies, EALAC, Columbia University

Throughout the twentieth century, many countries decriminalized adultery to advance individual rights, gender equality, and sexual autonomy. However, South Korea remained one of the few non-Muslim countries to criminalize adultery until the Constitutional Court struck down the law in 2015. While legal experts called for decriminalization, arguing that the state should not regulate private affairs, women’s advocacy groups supported the law as a means of “protecting” women. This presentation examines why South Korea resisted the global trend and why feminists backed the law. It argues that the criminalization of adultery was shaped by the principles of marital purity (honin ŭi sun’gyŏl) and gender equality in marriage, as enshrined in Article 20 of the 1948 Founding Constitution. These legal foundations reinforced monogamous marriage and regulated marital sexuality in postcolonial Korea.

Speaker’s Bio: Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation associate professor of history, international affairs, and East Asian languages and literatures at George Washington University. She is the author of an award-winning book, The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was translated into Korean (2020), Chinese (forthcoming in 2025), and Japanese (under preparation). She is the co-editor of JaHyun Kim Haboush’s posthumous book, The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation (Columbia University Press, 2016; with William Haboush), and the editor of Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture(University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming 2025). Kim is currently a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2024-2025), completing a book project tentatively titled Criminalizing Adultery: Monogamous Marriage, Concubinage, and Intimate Equality in Korea Since the Fifteenth Century. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies and serves on several editorial boards. She was the Founding Director of the Institute for Korean Studies (2017-2024) and the Co-Founding Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-2024) at GW. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

This event is hosted by the Center for Korea Research.

Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.