Sexing East Asian History

Abstract

Sexing East Asian History Sabine Frühstück (bio) Todd A. Henry, ed. Queer Korea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 400 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781478001928 (cl); 9781478002901 (pb). Howard Chiang. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 416 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780231185783 (cl); 9780231185790 (pb); 9780231546331 (ebook). Howard Chiang, ed. Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. 272 pp. ISBN 9780295743462 (cl); 9780295743479 (pb). Recently, the flagship Journal of Asian Studies devoted a substantial portion of its November 2020 issue to reflections on the impact of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) on the historiography of gender and sexuality in Asia over the last thirty years. Three of that historiography's leading pioneers—Gail Hershatter (China), Tamara Loos (Southeast Asia), and Geeta Patel (South Asia)—uniformly acknowledge the game-changing quality of Butler's book.1 In a parallel recent move, the historiography of gender and sexuality has been more frequently deployed regarding regional rather than either national or global frameworks, in part due to the fact that "global history" has lost its initial glamor. Conversely, it is more difficult to determine what impact the historiography of gender and sexuality out of Asia has had on Euro-American theory. Although its representative reach is minimal given both the quantity of scholarly production in the region itself and the size of its population, a range of publishing venues suggests that the history of gender and sexuality out of Asia is in the process of securing a place within the larger field. In addition to its solid footprint in this journal, it is featured in recent issues of The Journal of Homosexuality and, slightly less substantially, The Journal of the History of Sexuality. The works reviewed here make powerful contributions to the field of gender and sexuality studies at large—as well as (in part) to women's history and, of course, Asian Studies. Until recently, queer sexualities have been notoriously underacknowledged in both Korea and China—in contrast to the increasing devotion to interstitial loci and queer identities in current scholarship that recognize the troubled nature of sex and gender elsewhere. Indeed, when sexuality in Korea has been the focus of academic and public attention, it is often with regards to either the victimized (heteronormative) female former sex slaves of the Japanese empire or the globally prominent male [End Page 153] representatives of K-pop's sexualities. Queer Korea, by contrast, is a collective, multidisciplinary pursuit with two goals: to queer the field of Korean Studies, which editor Todd A. Henry, a rising star in the field, (uncontroversially) diagnoses as "nationalistically heteronormative;" and to critique the field of queer studies that has remained stubbornly Euro-America-centric (8). As Henry notes in an exemplary introduction, Christian rhetoric in part informs the frequently aggressive posturing of South Korean conservatives against sexual and gender minorities; one result of such posturing has been that individuals characterized by their non-normative sexualities and gender variances are denied full citizenship rights. Korean conservatives frame their refusal to grant those rights with respect to "past traditions, especially by highlighting the purported lack thereof" (4). It is worth noting that, even on the superficial level of conservative rhetoric, this position differs from that of the country's (largely non-Christian) neighbor and former colonial ruler Japan; Japanese conservatives evoke traditions with an added declaration, stating that traditional Japan has always been "accepting" of such individuals and practices and, thus—to the chagrin of Japanese queer rights activists—there is no need to explicitly formulate rights for non-normative genders and sexualities.2 Henry's introduction suggests that it is primarily fundamentalist Christians who enact reactionary speech and politics in South Korea. But in so doing he downplays the degree to which militarization both governs homo- and transphobia and helps to conceal the fragility of heteronormative masculinity. Few able-bodied men in Korea escape the country's mandatory military service—which is sustained in part by the continuing threat of a hostile regime in the North, and in part by the shadow of military...