Comparative Hermeneutics of Woongnyeo (熊女), Kitsune (狐/キツネ/狐女), and Gumiho (九尾狐): Toward a Transhumanistic Ecofeminism

This paper undertakes a hermeneutic and comparative-philosophical analysis of Woongnyeo (熊女), the Bear Woman of Korean primordial myth, alongside the Kitsune (狐/キツネ/狐女, shape-shifting fox woman) and the Korean Gumiho (九尾狐, 구미호, nine-tailed fox woman). These mythic female-animal figures inhabit liminal spaces between human and non-human life, historically coded as morally ambivalent or threatening, revealing enduring cultural anxieties about women, agency, and liminality. Tracing their narratives from the past—Woongnyeo’s ascetic transformation and nurturing role, the Kitsune’s and Gumiho’s transgressive portrayals—to contemporary reinterpretations, this study examines their potential to model interspecies relationality, ethical care, and ecological imagination. Reconfigured through a transhumanistic ecofeminist lens, these myths offer frameworks for a future in which humans, animals, and ecosystems co-flourish. Myth functions both as lens and method, connecting past, present, and future, cultivating relational imagination, critical ethical reflection, and hope as sustained, pragmatic, and transformative engagement with planetary and social futures.