Queer Asia has been a burgeoning and fertile field in Anglophone academia since the late 1990s.Footnote 1 Much of the existing queer Asia scholarship has strived to respond to, if not explicitly criticize, the deeply problematic binary positions in earlier generations of global gay studies that either imagined a universalization of Euro-American gender and sexual identity politics across the globe or emphasized an indigenization of various expressions of gender and sexuality as simple reflections of local non-Western traditions (pp. 22–25).Footnote 2 The new anthology Queer Korea, edited by Todd A. Henry and published by Duke University Press as part of its Perverse Modernities series, is, without doubt, a remarkable and long overdue scholarly effort that fundamentally advances the development and diversity of Asian queer studies in the post-2020 era.
The book consists of an introduction and ten interdisciplinary, multi-methodological chapters. Organized into two sections, the ten chapters explore a diverse range of topics, such as queer voices in the religious domain, queer literary narratives and styles, schoolgirls’ homoeroticism, cross-dressing women in the financially and politically challenging wartime period, drag in 1960s B-grade films, female homoeroticism reported in newspaper weeklies, “fanco” (fan cosplay) cultures, gay men's anxiety and stress regarding the military service system, transgender and queer social activism, and transgender groups’ intervention in the state's identity registration system. Different from most of the existing English-language scholarship in South Korean feminist and queer studies, which pays the most attention to contemporary Korean cinema, or K-drama and K-pop (Hallyu),Footnote 3 this book's primary interests are the struggles and promises of colonial, postcolonial, neoliberal, and globalized queer subjects in an ethnonationalist, (post)authoritarian, and highly heteropatriarchal society. It adroitly unveils how the inhabitance, survival, and representations of non-normative gender and sexuality are both circumscribed and enacted by discourses on “colonial modernity, authoritarian development, and neoliberal familialism” (pp. 8–9).
The intriguing queer media and cultural events and products spanning modern and contemporary Korean periods evaluated in the book also serve as persuasive and provocative counterexamples to the blatant “queer blindness” (p. 8) in much of the previous scholarship in Asian studies. The book thus powerfully ridicules both White-centered, middle-class-focused Anglophone queer studies and ethnonationalist, heteronormative-dominated area studies that have “consistently ignored or thought away” the existence of gender, sexual, classed, and ethnic nonconforming groups and cultures within “the operation of successive and intersecting structures of power, including colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and neoliberalism” (p. 8).
In the introductory chapter, “Queer Korea: Toward a Field of Engagement,” Henry provides an effective and timely theoretical (and historicized) account of queer Korean cultures and studies. Rather than simply scanning the lives and activism of gender and sexual minorities in Korean history, Henry meticulously explains the analytical lenses and frameworks adopted by his contributors to radically redefine and research queer cultures and subjects. He calls particular attention to “the lived experiences of ‘unruly’ subjects and their subordinated status in archival, visual, literary, and ethnographic registers” (pp. 10–11) and to the “vital connections between manifestations of unruly bodies during the (post)colonial era and the current struggles of queer subjects on and beyond the peninsula” (p. 21). In other words, Queer Korea provokingly interrogates the ways in which non-identity-based queerness has thrived, metamorphosed, and been inflected by public and popular cultures throughout the modern history of the Korean peninsula and in the contemporary period.
The first part of the book, “Unruly Subjects under Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity,” contains six chapters, beginning with Merose Hwang's “Ritual Specialists in Colonial Drag.” Employing the notions of “colonial spiritual assimilation,” “shamanic nationalism,” and “colonial drag” (p. 56), Hwang studies how shamanism became an active arena for queer female negotiation, performance, and articulation while also being politically manipulated by colonial and nationalist powers in 1920s Korea. Chapter 2, “Telling Queer Time in a Straight Empire” by John Whittier Treat, focuses on two concepts—“colonial time and queer time” (p. 91)—to comprehend the literary features and personal life of the writer Yi Sang in colonial Korea. In his “postcolonial and queer readings” (p. 103), Treat links the writings and life stories of Yi, viewing Yi's prose as a queer product that frustrates both nationalist-heterosexual-reproductive imaginings of past and future Korean society and the imperialist and arbitrary reality of Japanese-colonized Korea in the 1930s.
In the third chapter, “Problematizing Love,” Pei Jean Chen presents a critique of heteronormative-charged modern sexological knowledge on “love, marriage, and motherhood” (p. 119) imported from the West and Japan and circulated within colonial Korean public and literary discourses. Chen finds that while the transcultural promotion of the modern notion of “love” helped sustain “idealized practices of reproductive heterosexuality” in colonial Korea, “the spiritual love between schoolgirls” evaded social sanction and was tolerated in its public culture (p. 124). Paradoxically, this was because homoeroticism between young women was culturally imagined as “spiritual” and “a symbol of civilization” in the period from the 1910s to the 1930s, when Korea was desperate to modernize itself (p. 130). Ultimately, these self-conflicting discourses on modern love rendered female homoeroticism a platonic, youth practice that was “cherished (mostly celebrating its pure emotion) and forcibly given up (to become qualified as an adult citizen)” (p. 132).
Chapter 4, “Femininity under the Wartime System and the Symptomacity of Female Same-Sex Love” by Shih-ae Ha (translated by Kyunghee Eo), explores the similar topic of literary imaginings of homoeroticism between schoolgirls by female writers in imperial wartime Korea. Ha locates her analysis in the gendered and ethnicized historical context of mainstream Korean society during a period when modernization and (de)colonization led to the configuring of new female gender and sexual subjectivities. She finds that same-sex romance between young women was employed as a “literary trope of female resistance against the patriarchal social order of the wartime system” (p. 152).
The final two chapters in the first part of the book, “A Female-Dressed Man Sings a National Epic” by Chung-kang Kim and “Queer Lives as Cautionary Tales” by Henry, examine popular media representations of Korean female gender and sexual non-normativities in the postwar era. Kim reveals the complex ways in which the nation's heteronormative familial cultures, dictatorial developmentalist policies, local film industry, and film censorship system all worked to paradoxically facilitate transgressive visualizations of and narrative modes centered on “an ambiguous queer sexuality” (p. 185) in Korean B-grade gender comedy films of the 1960s. Henry's investigation explores reports on female homoeroticism in the Korean newspaper weeklies published in the authoritarian period (between the 1950s and the 1980s), which he finds “queersploitative” (p. 210) and often framed through a capitalistic, heteronormalizing gaze.
While the first part of the book strives to contest the modernizing and decolonizing discourses of modern Korea, the second part, “Citizens, Consumers, Soldiers, and Activists in Postauthoritarian Times,” focuses on the globalist and neoliberal transformations of contemporary South Korea. It begins with “The Three Faces of South Korea's Male Homosexuality” by John (Song Pae) Cho, which examines gay men's continuous negotiations with the government's national projects and gendered ideologies for expressing queer desire in familial and public spaces. Spanning gay male culture of three periods from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, namely the “late developmentalist, liberal, and neoliberal” (p. 264) eras, Cho's analysis identifies the discursive strategies employed by Korean gay men to form and mediate queer subjectivities while carefully navigating the state's “biopolitical familialism” (p. 26) and “neoliberal individualism” (p. 281) in various historical moments and spaces shaped by the economic, political, and technological forces and transformation within mainstream society.
Chapter 8, “Avoiding T'ibu (Obvious Butchness)” by Layoung Shin, provides a critical reading of fanco, a contemporary fannish practice often involving cross-dressing and popular among young South Koreans in the past several decades (p. 295). Shin's ethnographic research indicates that while the fanco community served as a queer space for many young butch lesbians in the 2000s, it became increasingly less friendly toward and less inclusive of queer, especially masculine, women in the 2010s (p. 296). Shin attributes this shift to the invisibility and lack of acceptance of butch lesbians in the fan community over the past decade to “the increased social recognition of homosexuality and the growth of homophobia” in South Korea (p. 297). However, problematizing the too-often Western-specific concept of “homonormativity” (p. 300), Shin also reads young masculine queer women's intentional hiding, if not rejecting, of female masculinity in public spaces and social circles as a subjective, self-normalizing, and indispensable survival tactic that responds to the increasingly commercialized, homophobic mainstream culture of contemporary South Korea.
The last two chapters, “Ripples of Trauma” by Timothy Gitzen and “Mobile Numbers and Gender Transitions” by Ruin (translated by Max Balhorn), address how gay and transgender people experience and survive the normatively gendered, misogynistic, homophobic, and ethnonationalist social structures and processes of post-1990 South Korea, such as its mandatory military service and compulsory identity information registration system. Gitzen takes issues with the “toxic masculinity” (p. 326) and heteronormative-driving abuse culture prevalent in the military training and service systems. His study vividly captures the unbearable stress and brutal bullying experienced by many young gay male soldiers.
Lastly, Ruin presents a stimulating discussion of the state's resident registration system, originally developed in the colonial Korean period, which effectively subjects contemporary citizens to the government's strict political surveillance and its social policing of a gender-binarist culture. While both chapters discuss contemporary South Korean LGBTQ right movements that have been opposing these normative national cultures, Ruin's deconstructive analysis delineates a somewhat ironic picture of how the institutionalization of transgender people's right to change their gender identity information in the national registration system and the formalized procedures for the recognition and legalization of transgender identity within a society whose “familial and kinship systems” are based on a normative gender binary (p. 364) further delegitimize certain unruly desires, bodies, and subjects.
Queer Korea is an illuminating, theoretically robust, and beautifully written scholarly work that captures a variety of sensational, paradoxical, and touching (and sometimes also distressing) queer representations, queer lives, queer sufferings, and queer desires on the Korean peninsula. The editor and contributors scrutinize the existence, emergence, and proliferation of queer subjectivities simultaneously prescribed and proscribed by local and transnational sociocultural inequalities, political turbulence, economic transformation, and circulations and proliferation of gender and sexual knowledge. The book enriches queer of color and Asian queer studies with fresh examinations of several severely understudied topics in both fields, such as (hetero)commercialized queer female images and narratives in colonial and wartime Asia and the mutually implicative relationships between feminist consciousness and queer subjectivity during the self-modernization and (de)colonialization of the Korean peninsula.
The book develops queer Asian studies by provocatively highlighting queer (as Henry puts it, “unruly”) bodies and subjects as an enduring and indispensable element of Korean normative society, media, and culture over the past century. It might come as a surprise to some readers that there is no chapter in Queer Korea devoted to the flourishing, queer-tinted contemporary K-pop industries, especially to the “unruly” bodies, nonnormative performances, and nonconforming personas of K-pop stars. This can be partly explained by the already-rich scholarship on the Korean wave in Anglophone academia. Nevertheless, some chapters in the book (such as chapters 5, 6, and 8) offer relevant and captivating discussions of the queer-exploiting media industries of modern and contemporary Korea and their normative, yet queer-generative, censorial practices. This might lead readers to wonder about the interconnections between these queer facets of commercial media cultures and the intensive “queerbaiting” and “fanservice” strategies that have been blatantly employed by the post-2010 Korean entertainment industries.Footnote 4
In particular, it would be insightful to see Layoung Shin extend her analysis by explicating why the butch-denying and female masculinity-avoiding popular and public cultures in post-2010 Korea she describes widely celebrated the queer coupling of same-sex K-pop stars. A case in point is the industry's queer high-profiling of the visibly androgynous, if not lesbian-connotated, Taiwanese American female singer Amber Liu. She rose to stardom as a non-ethnic-Korean member of one of the most popular K-pop girl groups, f(x), which debuted in South Korea under the auspices of SM Entertainment in 2009 and remained active in the industry until 2016.Footnote 5 Of course, these omissions do not prevent Queer Korea from serving as an invaluable and much-needed guide to the intricacies and interlocking discourses of queerness and normativity in Korean society of the past, present, and future.
The book will be of great value and relevance to scholars, students, activists, and general readers interested in Korea studies, Asian film, media, and literary studies, and global queer studies. Its critical theoretical engagement with the scholarship on queer China and queer Sinophone cultures and the useful connections it draws between queer Korean cultures, East Asian colonial histories and postcolonial globalist developments, inter-Asian women's and feminist cultures, and Asian and Western LGBTQ scholarship will also be useful for academics working to decolonialize and de-Westernize gender and sexuality studies in general.
