" 퀴어 아카이브와 아카이브 퀴어링 하기: 한국 퀴어영화의 도전과 과제"

Abstract

The publication of A History of Korean Queer Cinema (2019), the first attempt to build an archive of its kind, fulfills a long overdue wish for a legitimate inventory of LGBTQ films produced in South Korea, and invites an equally needed discussion on the parameters of Korean queer cinema. This paper investigates queerness portrayed in Korean queer cinema in order to show the paradoxical desires inherent in queer archives and the imperative to attend to such paradox in sustaining viable archives. The first part of the paper draws on Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of “counterarchive” and argues that archiving queer cinema should translate to an act of counterarchiving, whose process involves archiving LGBTQ materials, on the one hand, and queering the notion of the archive per se, on the other hand, to break free from normalization. Then, I move to analyze A History of Korean Queer Cinema and a feature film directed by Kyung-mook Kim, Stateless Things (2012), as embodying each of the two processes respectively. I end with a quick comment on Weekends (2016), a feel good documentary following a gay choir, “G Voice.” Whereas this kind of cheerfully romantic portrait of gay people rules the queer cinematic scene of South Korea, my contention is that this film fails to create new forms of queer knowledge and should be exempt from the counterarchive.