Queer Korea

Abstract

What does it mean to be postcolonial, feminist/queer, and radically resistive in studying the politics of nonnormative sexual and gender identities? Edited by Todd Henry, Queer Korea suggests answers to this question through ten essays written by critical scholars whose disciplinary field is diverse in history, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, and literature. In particular, Queer Korea is a helpful book for those of you—like me—who have agonized about how to identify your scholarly identity as a postcolonial, feminist/queer, cultural, and humanist scholar in your field.Essays included in this volume collectively examine the systemic marginalization that has been historically imposed on nonnormative sexual and gender bodies in South Korea (hereafter Korea). In this book, queerness is determined as an inclusive and critical term to engage in examining the structural power that has silenced, erased, and assimilated all nonnormative expressions and desires in a global context. Interdisciplinary methods are used, including textual analysis, archival research, visual rhetorical analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, to explore the instrumental nature of discourses and practices in Korea.Through these collected essays, the main goal of Queer Korea is to interrupt Western-centered understanding of queerness from a postcolonial lens. In particular, Henry takes a queer of color critique as a means of generating an epistemological intervention to Westernized theorization of queer studies. The queer of color critique in this book refuses two processes. First, this postcolonial epistemology rejects nativist accounts of gender variance and nonnormative sexuality that minimize outside forces of globalizing structures; instead, it emphasizes the ability of local subjects to negotiate these forces. It reveals that Queer Korea construes queer subjects not as heteropatriarchal conformists but as empowered subjects with the power of resistance in the heteropatriarchal structures they have to live.Second, Henry uses the queer of color critique to deny the neoliberal capitalist logic of consumerism and atomization as the only way of liberating queer bodies in contemporary Asian societies. The queer of color critique challenges the ahistorical application of hetero/homonormativity rooted in an autonomous/rights-based model of LGBTI politics in white/Western countries as opposed to Asian expressions of same-sex sexuality and gender nonconformity. Queer Korea thereby directs its critical energy to provide a disruptive inquiry about Western-centered LGBTI studies and suggests empowering insights into queer resistance by examining specific local nonnormative subjects in Asian societies.In Queer Korea, Henry situates nonnormative Korean subjects in historical contexts of Japanese colonialism, civil wars, national division, and Cold War geopolitics and examines the struggles that nonnormative sexual and gender subjects have had through regulatory mechanisms of ethnoracial and heteropatriarchal purities in Korea. By doing so, Henry tries to find a new way to think and act beyond the politics of Western-centered global queering by highlighting locally politicized moments of queerness in the past and present Korea.In the first part of the book, “Unruly Subjects under Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity,” six chapters discuss the lived experience of unruly subjects and their subordinated status during the time of colonialism and authoritarian dictatorship in Korea. The first four chapters explore how queer subjects in colonial Korea were exploited by Korean modernist intellectuals as well as Japanese leaders to fortify heteropatriarchy. In addition, these chapters also provide antihegemonic narratives and analyses of queer subjects who have fought heterosexual patriarchy and colonial stratification in colonial Korea.In chapter 1, Merose Hwang examines how Korean nationalists have disposed of shamans, often classified as nonnormative identities in colonial Korea. Shamanism is considered deviant from Korea's path to modernity by Korean reformers; For their survival, shamans strategically took the pro-Japanese side and became political opportunists to participate in leading and performing national ceremonies of the Japanese empire. Hwang calls this political opportunism of shamans “colonial drag” or a radical form of anticolonial resistance. By performing not quite like a Japanese or Korean male or female, Hwang claims that shamans interrupt and drag their colonizers who have endeavored to demarcate great Japaneseness from barbaric Koreanness.In chapter 2, John Whittier Treat analyzes a queer poet Yi Sang's work Wings to challenge the notion that Korean authors write only as colonized subjects during the Japanese colonial occupation. Treat illustrates how Yi's poet suggests that what is queer is anticolonial and illustrates how imperial times have been interrupted through queer times that Yi imagined in his writing. Understanding queerness as longing for people to move onward and making them feel this world is not enough and something is missing, Treat interprets Wings as a queer as well as anticolonial text; Yi's text is both queer and anticolonial when the main character in Wings becomes estranged from the mainstream society as a way to resist Japanese imperial power and find a sexual refugee. Indeed, it is an anticolonial and queer resistance when Yi's story renounces heterosexual, imperialist, and nationalist forces that have pathologized nonreproductive bodies in colonial Korea.Pei Jean Chen examines the politics of free love in colonial Korea to expose the essential queerness of colonial modernity in chapter 3. Chen argues that literary representations of nonnormative sexuality and gender nonconformity are produced and function as a regulatory mechanism of heteropatriarchal normativity in colonial Korea. Chen analyzes the literature of homosexual loves in terms of the tension between self-authored (and thus free) and discursive or genealogical (and thus constraining) forms of knowledge. By depicting homosexual love as an engagement of choice, Chen argues that colonial literature seems to support the self-authored and free choice of sexuality and gender variance. However, homosexual love in literature often ends with tragic conclusions, delivering a negative message that individual adults who choose to pursue same-sex love will never be happy in the end.Lastly, Shine-ae Ha (translated by Kyunghee Eo) offers a feminist analysis of Korean literature as a queer intervention to provide uneven readings, the effects of, and the varied response to imperial subjectification during Asian-Pacific War. Ha points out that the abrupt discursive shift of same-sex love to more forbidden ones coincides with the onset of the total war. The total war forced Korean women to embrace traditional womanhood and move away from the modern femininity that they learned and embodied as New Women before the War. As a way of resistance, the desire for modernity/modern femininity has resurfaced in Korean literature written by women authors through feelings of great admiration and love for same-sex relationships. Thus, same-sex adoration and relationships reveal the female desire to remain as a modern woman outside the patriarchal and imperialist social order.The last two chapters in this section direct our attention to the postcolonial authoritarian period in Korea. In this time, the authors highlight two sociopolitical contexts to interrogate queerness in Korea: Cold-War politics and the mass dictatorship of controlling, disciplining, and normalizing people's bodies and lives to maintain a healthy and homogeneous national morality and culture. In chapter 5, Chung-Kang Kim examines the cultural appropriation of queer representations in B-grade gender comedy films made during the dictatorial regime of President Park Chung Hee (1961–79). By doing so, Kim reveals how an ideology of national development based on sexual normalcy invaded cultural spheres through the audiovisual medium and finds the kinds of antihegemonic resistance that can be imagined through these queer representations.In chapter 6, Todd Henry investigates reports about female–female relationships published in weeklies during the mid- to the late 1960s and demonstrates how the capitalist patriarchy has been maintained through popular participation under the operation of mass dictatorship. The author uses the term “mass dictatorship” to highlight how androcentric and heteropatriarchal ideology is sustained through persuasive systems of controlling and disciplining citizenry who repeatedly participate in normalizing practices of heteropatriarchal kinships. Henry finds that reports about female–female relationships in weeklies become framed in heteronormative and binary terms such as gender-normative labels such as bride/wife and groom/husband and end in tragedy (such as the protagonist's suicide) to satisfy their heterosexual male readers. By consuming narratives of deviant women, male-centered readership supports and advances a heterosexual ideology of sexual and gender normality.The second part of the book is “Citizens, Consumers, Soldiers, and Activists in Post-Authoritarian Times.” In the four chapters that make up this section, the authors highlight sexually nonconforming Korean subjects who have disproportionately experienced state violence, media scrutiny, social stigma, cultural alienation, and economic poverty under the global capitalist logics of consumerism and atomization. According to Henry, in this globalized and post-authoritarian period, the neoliberal logics of visibility politics, human rights, and multicultural diversity have shaped the lived experience of queer subjects in KoreaJohn (Song Pae) Cho starts the first chapter of this second part by describing the economic and cultural context of Korea and characterizing identity construction of gay and lesbians during the 1970s and 1980s. Showing that biopolitical familialism and neoliberal individualism were the two main factors to shape homosexual identities in Korea during this time, Cho claims that the Westernized LGBTQI studies do not fully explain the in-between/blurry/intermediate position of Korean queer bodies. This chapter is also important because Cho makes an explicit connection of his analysis to previous chapters engaging in the historical construction of queer subjects in colonial Korea.In chapter 8, Layong Shin locally contextualizes the concept of “homonormativity” mainly developed by scholars of queer studies in the West, who often equate normativity and heterosexuality. By highlighting the young queer women's subculture and the meaning of normativity, Shin argues that embracing gender/sexual normativity among Korean queer women is not necessarily a practice conforming to heterosexual dominance in Korean society. Taking local context, such as increased and institutionalized homophobia in school or at work, into account, Shin maintains that expressions of normativity among Korean queer women are a survival strategy for navigating Korean society in which homosexual identities have experienced economic hardship brought about by unemployment once they came out and looked too homosexual.In a similar but blunt way, Timothy Gizen critiques the Western-centered understanding of LGBTI subjects as atomizing neoliberal identities in chapter 9. The neoliberal celebration of queerness involves overemphasizing individual choice, autonomous agency, and human rights of queer subjects in a context of global capitalism. However, Gizen argues that sexual minorities in Korean militaries are still excluded from this Westernized neoliberal celebration of free/empowered/autonomous queer subjects. As a legally required obligation, all able-bodied men in Korea must serve two years of military service. As a system of masculinity produced, practiced, and fortified, the military has stigmatized and discriminated against sexual minorities as toxic masculinity. The heteronormative discrimination inevitably results in posttraumatic stress disorder after the military service among men in the sexual minority in civilian society. In the end, Gizen returns to his critique that it is inappropriate to examine the experience of Korean gay soldiers through a Westernized frame of neoliberal celebration when the militarized present of Korea still systemically imperils LGBTI subjects to deny their identities and desires.In chapter 10, Ruin (translated by Max Balhorn) unpacks how the state polices gender through the resident registration system in Korea. The resident registration system as a heteropatriarchal surveilling system has been used to control military conscription, regulate gender and sex, and police family relations. In particular, Ruin points out that the system depends on a binary division of sex, marking sex as either “(1) male” or “(2) female” on the identity card. In turn, the maintenance of the sex binary is used to reinforce maleness and masculinity to secure military conscription in Korea. Ruin finally calls attention to nonnormative sexual bodies whose struggle is closely related to changing or keeping their sex number on the identity card in Korea.Queer Korea successfully contributes to producing de-Westernized, postcolonial, and counter-hegemonic narratives of queerness in Asian countries. This knowledge production as a part of GLBTQ worldmaking is meaningful in and of itself because Queer Korea offers a space for scholars to analyze and explain local differences in understanding Korean queerness, which needs to be discussed in critical queer studies. As a reader, it is gratifying to feel and see the authors’ efforts to analyze and interpret the lived experiences and struggles of queer subjects in Korea from within, not from the outside. It would be even better if the book had included chapters examining current cultural representations such as the homosexualization of voguing dance in Korean media. As such, it is my hope that GLBTQI scholars will seek to further unpack the ideological domination of heteronormativity and disenfranchised representations of queerness insidiously operating in and through Korean popular culture.