Queer Korea

Description

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. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Queer Korea: Toward a Field of Engagement/ Todd A. Henry Part I. Unruly Subjects Under Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity 1. Ritual Specialists in Colonial Drag: Shamanic Interventions in 1920s Korea / Merose Hwang 2. Telling Queer Time in a Straight Empire: Yi Sang’s “Wings” (1936) / John Whittier Treat 3. Problematizing Love: The Intimate Event and Same-Sex Love in Colonial Korea / Pei Jean Chen 4. Femininity under the Wartime System and the Symptomacity of Female Same-Sex Love / Shin-ae Ha (Translated by Kyunghee Eo) 5. A Female-Dressed Man Sings a National Epic: The Film Male Kisaeng and the Politics of Gender and Sexuality in 1960s South Korea / Chung-kang Kim 6. Queer Lives as Cautionary Tales: Female Homoeroticism and the Heteropatriarchal Imagination of Authoritarian South Korea / Todd A. Henry Part II. Citizens, Consumers, Soldiers, and Activists in Postauthoritarian Times 7. The Three Faces of South Korea’s Male Homosexuality: Pogal, Iban, and Neoliberal Gay / John (Song Pae) Cho 8. Avoiding T’ibu (Obvious Butchness): Invisibility as a Survival Strategy among Young Queer Women in South Korea / Layoung Shin 9. Ripples of Trauma: Queer Bodies and the Temporality of Violence in the South Korean Military / Timothy Gitzen 10. Mobile Numbers and Gender Transitions: The Resident Registration System, the Nation-State, and Trans/gender Identities / Ruin (Translated by Max Balhorn) Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y