Thrill Me: Queerness, Spectatorship, and the Utopian Performative in South Korean Musical Theatre

Abstract

This article explores how the staging of transnational musical productions articulates changing perceptions of queer identity by considering the South Korean remounting of the off-Broadway musical Thrill Me (2007). I argue that Thrill Me reflects what Jill Dolan terms a “utopian performative” in that by watching the musical, many women spectators related to queer subjects in ways that transgressed but did not threaten the gender norms of South Korean society. Through close readings of the source and target scripts on the page and in performance, I provide an account of the origins of key contemporary South Korean musical theatre conventions and examine the commodification of queering in such theatre. In complex ways, South Korean women spectators used theatre to evade suffocating gender and economic norms as audiences were encouraged to identify with ambiguously marked gay male queerness. Their commodification of queer subjects did reinforce generalizations about marginalized identities; however, at times, the spectacularization of under-represented minorities can offer a method of survival for other oppressed gender categories.