On February 3, 2005, the Constitutional Court ruled that the household system was unconstitutional.
With this, the household head system, which played a central role in gender discrimination in Korean society, was abolished.
The family head system, which grants the head of the household exclusive parental rights and property rights and passes them on to male direct descendants first, has created countless instances of inequality and discrimination in Korean society over the past half century.

Although the legal head of household disappeared with the abolition of the household system, its legacy remains in civil law, social welfare systems, and numerous other legal systems, and continues to exert a strong influence.
Korean society still demands that individuals acquire social 'status' through the formation of a 'normal family' that follows heteronormativity.
Only relationships “formed by marriage, blood, or adoption” are recognized as legal families, and individuals/relationships that do not meet this standard are denied the right to be considered family and experience inequality, discrimination, and stigma.

This book names this Korean society as a "family status society" and examines Korean family politics over the 20 years since the abolition of the household head system.
Thirteen authors analyze the scene of family politics with agendas generated from their respective positions.
In particular, it persistently questions 'family' from the perspectives of minorities such as transgender people, children and adolescents, single parents, married immigrant women, unmarried women, people with disabilities, same-sex couples, and single-person households.
This is because the space of care, intimacy, and solidarity created by those who have been oppressed and expelled from the existing family system is driving a new society.

In Korean society, the movement to abolish the household headship system was an important step in family politics, publicizing that the family is not a natural thing but an institutional project of the state that reinforces gender discrimination.
It also created a trend that recognized the family as a transformative space for planning and imagining new relationships from a human rights and civil rights perspective.
So, has the abolition of the household head system "completed" the new family politics? If the abolition of the household head system is viewed solely as the legal disappearance of the household head, then the post-household head system may already be complete.
However, even after the abolition of the household headship system, the family system continues to reinforce the "normality of the family" through a patriarchal and capitalist system centered on men, heterosexuality, marriage, and the non-disabled. We can easily confirm this normality operating throughout Korean society.
--- p.7~8

Crucially, the foundation of the Japanese colonial era's household system, such as the sole inheritance of the eldest son, and the legal incompetence of married women who were tied to a householder and could not even have their own personal seal or property rights, were not Joseon customs but originated from the Meiji Civil Code of Japan.
The customary investigation was conducted based on this gender-inequality system of Japanese civil law.
In other words, Japan virtually invented and created Korean customs through custom research, and applied the household system of Japanese civil law to Korea based on these invented customs.
--- p.29~30

Everyone is born with a designated gender and, within the family registration system, women are assigned roles as daughter, wife, or mother, while men are assigned roles as son, husband, or father.
The family system, built on the foundation of gender distinction, cannot properly recognize those who are in conflict with it because it does not imagine a system outside of this distinction, and cannot properly recognize them as a status system.
The discrimination and disadvantages that arise as a result become solely the burden of the individual.
This gender system is also closely linked to state control over sexuality.
--- p.61~62

The state has shifted the responsibility for the survival and care of individual family members onto families through a controlling and restrictive welfare system and a "family first, welfare later" operating method, and has even passed on the costs.
The key to this strategy is to reliably reproduce the family that will take charge of it.
The state has defined the policy targets as 'households' and 'generations' and has implemented policies by delivering and managing services, regarding the family, rather than the individual, as the basic unit of society.
It has always made us identify individuals within the group of household/generation/family.
--- p.114~115

Ultimately, the category of "women in need of protection" functions as a mechanism that systematically and socially calls out poor, homeless, and husbandless women, while simultaneously pathologizing and stigmatizing the labor of women who have survived in poverty, rendering them invisible.
It is also a hierarchical gender norm that is constructed by distinguishing the lives of heterosexual, middle-class women who have the potential to carry out ‘normal families,’ ‘normal childbirth,’ and ‘normal parenting,’ from the lives of ‘unqualified’ women who already lack the possibility of doing so.
The normal family order, which has operated through the intersection of sexual stigma, poverty, and the gender system, limits women's place in life to their roles within the heterosexual patriarchal family.
--- p.143

Under current law, family members can make decisions on behalf of individuals (Act on Organ Transplantation, Public Official Election Act) and access personal information of family members (Medical Service Act, Basic Disaster and Safety Management Act).
The family is supported as a unified community (National Pension Act, Act on Prevention and Compensation for School Accidents), a community of care (Act on Equal Employment Opportunity for Men and Women and Support for Work-Family Balance), and recognized as a community of economic interests (Income Tax Act).
In other words, the family is involved in the overall design of a citizen's social safety net.
--- p.242~243

The right to form a family shifts the current family-centered social model to one centered on the individual by defining family based on the relationships that each individual imagines and creates.
And when we shift the smallest unit of modern society from the family group to the individual, the defaults for relationships and citizens change.
Single-person households are one of the main agents of this social change, realizing the right to form a family at the smallest level.
(…) It is time for systems and policies to change so that everyone can enjoy equal citizenship rights as an individual, not just as a family member, but as an individual, included in the social safety net.

--- p.287~288