Queer Korea

"In the past 30 years, discourses on queerness and the central political issues of LGBT life that originate in the United States-- like same-sex marriage-- have been exported and used to identify the presence of queer community in other parts of the world. QUEER KOREA brings together historical, ethnographic, and literary essays that establish a queer historiography of Korea. Editor Todd Henry asserts that Western forms of queerness, and the reading practices used to identify queerness in the American academy, are insufficient to describe the range of queer life on the Korean peninsula. He argues that particular developments in Korean modernity-- including its histories of colonialism, nationalism, and authoritarianism from the turn of the century to the Cold War-- have informed the language and politics of queerness in Korea and the Korean diaspora. In addition to compiling the first volume focused on queerness in Korea, including work from the South Korean academy, this volume asserts that placing queerness at the center of Korean studies, rather than at the margins, produces new analytic possibilities for the field. The chapters are divided into three parts. The chapters in Part I, "Unruly Subjects and Colonial Modernity," trace the origins of queer subjectivity in modern Korea through political struggles against Japanese colonial rule, and anti-communist/anti-capitalist conflict during the Korean War. In one chapter John Treat reads scenes of migration between a colonized satellite city in Korea to the center of Japanese imperialism in Tokyo in modernist writer Yi Sang's short story "Wings." Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz's concepts of utopia and disidentification, Treat argues that Yi's characters and prose both move between Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist forms of power in ways that assert the queerness of the colonial subject. Part II, "Gender, Kinship, and Nation Under Cold War," includes chapters that link geopolitical shifts during the Cold War to emergent forms of gender and sexual variance in Korean popular culture. Kim Chung-kang's essay looks at how the trope of male cross-dressing in South Korean B-movies developed as a critical response to a resurgence of family-centered, patriarchal politics under Park Chung Hee's authoritarian government. She argues that this form of non-binary representation constituted critical refusal of hegemonic politics in a moment when Korea's mass culture was highly regulated. In Part III, "Consumer, Soldier, and Citizen in Post-Authoritarian Times," essays examine contemporary forms of queer expression in Korea and the Korean diaspora. In one essay Timothy Gitzens examines how extensive efforts to identify and relegate gay men in Korea's military reinforce how ideas of nationhood and masculinity converge in South Korea's system of compulsory military service. Gitzens argues that the military's anti-gay surveillance tactics foment a kind of toxic masculinity that transfers anti-gay violence from service to civilian life in a traumatic cycle. This edited collection will be of interest to readers in Asian studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer studies"--