Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. x, 388 pp. (B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0290-1.
On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutional. This meant that a progressive homonormative narrative focused on the acquisition of civil rights—the gay liberation movement, supposedly triggered by the Stonewall Riots and given crucial impetus by the AIDS epidemic—had been accomplished. Comparatively, South Korea still lags far behind the United States. Indeed, Korean queer communities have been struggling to follow such a narrative, and it has not been easy for them to achieve civil rights step by step as in the US. I think the fundamental reason why LGBTQ Koreans have not seen such progress is that they have not experienced the severe or explicit oppression based on sexual identity as have such communities in Western countries (in addition to not having had an overt heyday of queer subculture). In sum, there has been no obvious hegemonic discourse regarding homosexuality in Korea. That is, there has been no internal or external catalyst to make the queer community unite firmly with a collective resistance.
Thus, Queer Korea is trying to place Korean queers and their non-normative practices of observing Korea as a space “closely connected to such historical processes as colonial modernity, authoritarian development, and neoliberal familialism” (8), even though they have not exactly included queers as defined by (Western) identity politics. As the editor Todd A. Henry writes, Korean queerness “emerges as an important dynamic of Korean history and a revealing analytic of its society and culture, rather than appearing as a disruptive force or an internecine form of subversion” (8). This can allude to tacit visibility without “coming out,” or “differed and deferred” visibility, which does not converge simply into identity politics. So even if a person came out as queer, this act would be oriented toward a relational performance rather than identitarian practice. Such persons would already be queer as a result of trying to live in a non-normative relationship and a non-straight temporality, but not necessarily recognized and identified as a certain sexual minority.
Queer Korea is divided into two parts. The first part (“Unruly Subjects Under Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity”) consists of chapters chronologically covering the period from the Japanese colonial era to the dictatorial regime of president Park Chung-hee, and examining (in)visible queer subjects. The second part (“Citizens, Consumers, Soldiers, and Activists in Postauthoritarian Times”) introduces chapters dealing with queers who tried cope with the double oppression of a heteronormative patriarchal family and homophobic neoliberal society.
In the first part, Merose Hwang terms the female ritual specialists of the 1920s as colonial drag performers. These performances were not limited to any specific gendered-ethnic identity, but instead pushed such boundaries. This leads to the author’s assumption that “colonial policies could be manipulated through parodic imitation and repetition, meaning and value subversion, and heteronormative performance in an effort to destabilize truth about one’s own ethno-spiritual identity” (71). From this perspective, the colonial drag performance is both anticolonial movement and queer resistance, which unsettles not only gender and sexual identity, but also ethno-spiritual identity. John Whittier Treat proposes “a compromise that allows us an anticolonial and queer reading all at once” (101). In Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” (1936), Treat analyzes Na, the narrator who might reflect the author himself, as a queer subject who has lost his way in the colonial straight time where “the future must be endlessly deferred, never now and always ‘not yet’” (111).
Pei Jean Chen argues that same-sex love in colonial Korea to be “an important site to explore alternative possibilities for ‘queer modes of life’” (126). According to her, a famous case of a lesbian couple who committed suicide together should be reconsidered as a resistant and relational practice that confronts and ruptures heteronormative history. Furthermore, as Shin-ae Ha writes, the women who longed for the temporary experience of same-sex love in an all-girl’s school in the 1920s, were more attracted to the modern identity embedded in a homoromantic past than to the colonial subject for a utopian future achievable by winning the Pacific War.
Chung-kang Kim and Todd Henry focus on queer representations in the media during the authoritarian Park era. Kim tries to find queerness in Namja kisaeng, one of the gender comedy films popular in the late 1960s. These kinds of films inserted scenes of incongruity as tactics to avoid the strict censorship of the time. As a result, unintentionally, they could combine both a narrative of national propaganda and a representation of non-normative sexuality to create a liminal space. Following this, Henry relates stories of same-sex marriage between women as cautionary tales to intensify the “collective dignity of cisgender heteropartiarchy” (243) in weekly magazines published in 1970s and 1980s.
In the second part, John Cho and Layoung Shin analyze alternative practices of contemporary Korean gays and lesbians who do not follow Western models of identity and visibility politics. Gays relish a consumerist lifestyle even if they avoid coming out to family members, an act which would compromise Confucian family values and neoliberal desire; whereas lesbians tend to avoid looking mannish and hide their sexuality in order to secure jobs and survive in a neoliberal society, rather than for the purposes of assimilating into heteronormative society.
Timothy Gitzen observes gay soldiers suffering from pre-traumatic stress due to the toxic masculinity found in the Korean military, and finally, Ruin, who identifies as MTF transgender, insists that her appearance—judged by social bias and her new national identification card as prescribed by law—still cannot impart any authentic information about her. Both Gitzen and Ruin speculate about queer bodies, which are always affectively deviant, even though they might be regulated according to heteronormative systems.
Queer Korea reads Korean modern history through a queer lens, not only to visualize the invisible or ambiguous queers whose practices do not seem to readily conform to typical Western models, but who also invent expanded or open-ended queerness based on Korean-ness in a sociocultural context. Ultimately, this queer reading proves a significant endeavour for interpreting history in a dense and multilayered way, which allows us to understand it more profoundly and thoroughly.
Kyungtae Kim
Independent Scholar, Seoul