Meera Choi

Research

Heterosexual refusal

My dissertation-to-book project, The Rise of Heterosexual Refusal: Gender Politics and Family Change in South Korea, asks how political consciousness emerges and what refusal makes possible—as well as impossible—as a practice of social transformation. Drawing on 130 life history interviews with young women, many active in the 4B movement that rejects dating, sex, marriage, and childbearing, I examine how refusals of heterosexuality function as feminist praxis while being shaped and constrained by neoliberal capitalism and rising authoritarianism. I theorize refusal as a relational and collective practice of struggle, forged through ambivalence, exhaustion, and critique.

Publications:

  • Meera Choi, “Heterosexual Refusal as an Activism Against Witch Hunts Amid South Korea’s Lowest Fertility Context.” [revise and resubmit]
  • Meera Choi, “From Intimacy to Injury: Popular Feminist Uses of Gaslighting to Reframe Heterosexuality in South Korea” [under review]

Awards:

  • 2024 Coser Dissertation Proposal Award, Eastern Sociological Society (Honorable Mention)
  • 2024 Martin P. Levine Dissertation Award (Co-winner: $1500), American Sociological Association, Sexualities Section

Next project: IDEOLOGICAL MOBILITIES: TRANSNATIONAL AND DECOLONIAL POLITICS ACROSS SPACE, TIME, AND EMPIRE

My second book project builds on The Rise of Heterosexual Refusal to explore how feminist refusal emerges as a geographically situated and temporally evolving practice of ideological disruption. Through digital ethnography and multi-sited fieldwork, the project examines how South Korean 4B feminists and anti-feminist men navigate online spaces, how these digital terrains intensify ideological polarization, and how feminist movements circulate transnationally—particularly as 4B ideas are rearticulated in the United States and Latin America. By tracing how refusal is sustained, reconfigured, or abandoned across the life course and across borders, the book interrogates how political consciousness takes shape amid economic precarity, migration, regional inequality, and global capitalism. Taking a decolonial feminist perspective, Ideological Mobilities contributes to transnational feminist theory, migration studies, and feminist geography.

Next project: THE LIMITS OF GENDER CONFLICT

This project investigates how the dominant narrative of “gender conflict” in South Korea—framing gender relations as a binary political struggle between men and women—shapes people’s understandings of gender, intimacy, and family. Drawing on interviews with 60 South Korean men, I analyze how this conflict framework has structured men’s perceptions of women and of themselves, and I place these narratives in dialogue with women’s accounts of heterosexual refusal to illuminate the asymmetries and misrecognitions that emerge. Moving forward, I will expand the study to include interviews with gender-diverse individuals, situating their experiences as critical to unpacking the limitations of binary conflict and to envisioning alternative frameworks for intimacy and social life.

Care-work, Gender, and Space

I study how caregiving and belonging are shaped in urban spaces through feminist geography and critical urbanism. My research on South Korea’s “no-kids zones” shows how commercial bans on children and caregivers reflect neoliberal logics that prioritize profit over care, framing parenting as disruptive to market life. Drawing on interviews with parents, non-parents, and service workers, I analyze how these spaces stigmatize caregiving and heighten the visibility of mothers in particular, while also revealing a broader cultural view that positions care and market participation as incompatible.

Publications:

  • Meera Choi, Youngcho Lee “Spatial Norms as Traversable and Gendered: A Study of Parental Experiences of No-Kids Zones in South Korea.” Gender, Place, and Culture (2024)
  • Meera Choi, Youngcho Lee, “Parenting Culture in a Neoliberal Market Society and the ‘No-Kids Zone’ Controversy in South Korea.” [revise and resubmit]

Asian american mental health and wellbeing

Another line of research examines how crises—epidemiological, economic, or demographic—reshape social life, well-being, and care. In collaborative work on COVID-19 and social relationships in the US, I analyze how the pandemic and its social and economic disruptions transformed relationships, safety, and health.

Selected Publications:

  • Meera Choi, Hannah Tessler, Grace Kao “Friendship in Times of Crisis: How Social Bonds Buffered the Impact of Economic Precarity on Well-Being During COVID-19.” Sociology (Forthcoming)
  • Meera Choi, Hannah Tessler, Grace Kao “Heightened Vulnerabilities to Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Intersectional Analysis.” Ethnic and Racial Studies (2025)
  • Hannah Tessler, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao “The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 45(4), 636-646. (2020)