The Wedding Banquet Revisited: "Contract Marriages" Between Korean Gays and Lesbians

This paper examines how Korean gays and lesbians negotiate South Korea's heteronormative system anchored in the heterosexual and patriarchal family through marriages of convenience ("contract marriages"). Korean gays and lesbians pursue contract marriages in order to fulfill their filial duties to marry, while maintaining their gay and lesbian lifestyles. Yet, in pursuing contract marriages as individuals but in the service of conforming to the family, they both reinscribe and transform the heteronormative values of marriage, family, and children. They also challenge the Westernized model of the "out and proud" gay or lesbian.