Rethinking Delayed Marriage and Fertility Decline in East Asia: An Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Feminism, and Generation in the South Korean Case

ABSTRACT

In this article, we review existing literature on delayed marriage and declining fertility in East Asia, and propose an intersectional framework that situates demographic change within economic constraints, gendered institutions, and sociopolitical transformations. Building on existing economic, demographic, and sociological studies, we argue that bringing intersectional perspectives, linking gender inequality, feminist politics, and generational value shifts, can enrich scholarship on delayed marriage and fertility decline by showing that family formation and childbearing are not merely influenced by, but constituted through, these intersecting social forces in three key ways: (1) it extends economic and structural account by foregrounding gendered workplace regimes, long‐working hour culture, and unequal divisions of household and care labor that make the marriage package especially costly for women, (2) it enables the inclusion of feminist movements, such as the Escape the Corset movement and the “4B” lifestyle, within demographic accounts of intimacy and reproduction, (3) it specifies how resistance to patriarchal family norms and generational shifts toward autonomy and egalitarianism reclassify marriage and childbearing as contingent, elective projects rather than default life‐course obligations. To illustrate this argument, we use South Korea as an empirical case, showing how intersecting feminist discourses and generational schism combine with structural economic pressures to produce distinctive patterns of delayed marriage and lowest‐low fertility across East Asia.