Writing Femininity in Public Relations Practice

초록

This study examines how female public relations practitioners in South Korea define and practice feminine writing, and how such praxis shapes their narrative and occupational identities. Although public relations are quantitatively feminized, women's feminine subjectivities remain qualitatively constrained by organizational hierarchies and masculine-coded discursive norms. Drawing on Cixous's concept of & eacute;criture f & eacute;minine and feminist hermeneutic phenomenology, the study analyzes in-depth interviews with eight in-house practitioners using grounded theory. Findings reveal that feminization is often normalized through emotional feeling rules, masking persistent vertical gender gaps in leadership positions. In practice, feminine public relations writing emerges not as self-expressive authorship but as relational mediation between organizational goals and public aesthetics. Practitioners enact empathy, responsiveness, and multiplicity by attuning to publics' words, media logics, and internal organizational tone, often subordinating their personal voices to institutional discourse. While narrative identity is negotiated through caution, silence, and strategic self-effacement, occupational identity is more agentically constructed through authenticity, emotional intelligence, meticulousness, and strategic discernment. The study advances feminist public relations scholarship by distinguishing between quantitative feminization and qualitative discursive transformation of feminine subjectivity, situating feminine writing within institutional constraints, and foregrounding the culturally specific positionality of Korean women practitioners. It argues that feminine writing functions as an embedded yet muted epistemology that enriches organization-public relationships.

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