Queer Experimental Writing in Korean Literature of the 2010s

Abstract

This article examines how queer literature’s experiment in the deconstruction of the representational model addresses not only modernist formalistic aesthetics but also the political imagination of future communities. The three short stories analyzed here transform themselves into a space where the reader actively engages in a visceral relationship with the texts. In this process, the reader becomes an equal player in the supposedly authorial act of textual production. This enmeshment of the author/text/reader in queer experimental writing embodies an alternative method of social belonging in which the textual existence of literary works enacts an association between anonymous individuals. From the proliferation of queer literature produced in Korea in the 2010s, I have chosen to examine Yun Ihyeong’s “Luka,” Hwang Jeong-eun’s “Bone Thief” and Jeong Jidon’s “The Book of the Future.” These stories all offer themselves as a space for reordering the author/text/reader hierarchy, which makes them representative works of experimental queer writing. In addition, thanks to this feature, the three texts under examination use their performativity to activate the imagination of queer and alternative communities.