AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities

11. Representation, Politics, Ethics: Rethinking Homosexuality in Contemporary Korean Cinema and Discourses

ELEVEN REPRESENTATION, POLITICS, ETHICS Rethinking Homosexuality in Contemporary Korean Cinema and Discourses Jin-Hyung Park In this chapter, I try to reconsider the significance of the historical moment of the mid-1990s for queer studies and cinematic discourses in Korea today. However, when the national label is brought to an issue like homosexuality, I meet a specific problem. In most academic writings about LGBTQ issues written in Korea, I notice that theoretical concepts such as “identity” and “sexual minority” are imported from theoretical developments based on studies done in the West, while “Korea/Korean” refers simply to the realistic context that is awkwardly added to the theoretical concepts. While, as Rey Chow observes, Western readers require writings from the non-Western world to be classified by the nation-state of their origin,1 Korean readers, on the other hand, seem uncomfortable when the label of their nationality appears in the title of theoretical writings on homosexuality, rare though such appearances are. Sometimes, this situation implies developmentism, as in “We’re not ready yet” before we can deal with homosexuality. This attitude conspires with the non-Western academic elitism that places geo-history in the realm of the “purely empirical” and requires Western concepts and theories to explain it. The division of a field into Korean “raw materials” and Western theoretical devices in Korean academia shows that the epistemological hierarchy of “the Western” and “the non-Western” is reinforced and 198 . JI N-H Y UNG PA RK internalized even in non-Western academic scenes. This situation becomes particularly apparent when academia deals with allegedly “unfamiliar” issues such as homosexuality. Nevertheless, like other theories from the West, queer theory has arrived onto the discursive battlefield in Korea and has rapidly spread to become articulated with various other discourses, including feminism (which has been desperately seeking alliances with other theories of the oppressed) and several other political discourses on “minorities.” Queer theory and criticism are the most marginalized and the most potent among the critical discourses in Korea today, at least regarding their status in academia. But queer theory faces new problems when its potential as “marginal” is acknowledged without question. Differences in race, class, or socioeconomic and geopolitical status remain unexamined under the overarching umbrella of the queer. But what really matters is that queer theory’s potential as a marginal politics is in danger of being located and reabsorbed into the center of academic markets in Korea. Starting by acknowledging my own position as a queer scholar in Northeast Asia, I wish to highlight the risk that queer theory faces in Korean academic discourses. Specifically, I raise the necessity of speculative rethinking on queer matters in Korea in the light of representations of homosexuality in contemporary Korean cinema, in their relation both to cinematic discourses and LGBTQ discourses in Korea. I think through these questions by means of a discussion of Road Movie (2002), a controversial Korean queer film. Analyzing the textual dynamics of Road Movie, I propose that the film activates a humanist desire for the interpolation of queer subjectivity and queer desire within heterosexual discourse. I also reveal the operation of discursive dynamics in Korean film criticism, which valorize and tolerate threatening homosexuality/homoeroticism in dominant cine-historical and aesthetic discourses by stressing the aesthetic category of “road movie.” Based on the idea that the queer sensibility in Korean visual culture has been strongly affected and even controlled by “radical/elite” academic discourses such as sexuality studies, this analysis focuses on the specific ways that the popularization of elitism and film as “high art” in Korean cine-culture, and the politics of “identity” and universality inherent in the humanism of LGBTQ discourses, have controlled queer sensibility. How have these discourses maintained their dynamics of “othering” the queer? What can be represented and what cannot in contemporary Korean films; and what can be imagined in the gap between the representable and the unrepresentable? RE THI NK I NG HOMOS E XUA LIT Y I N KORE A N CI NE M A . 199 Queer, Identity and Minority Responding to changes in social context, the 1990s, and especially the mid1990s , are often represented as a moment of disjuncture and (dis)continuity in Korea. In sociopolitical and economic history, this moment is often described as associated with democratization, the dwindling of political struggle such as the students’ anti-dictatorship movement of 1980s, and the expansion of consumerist, late-capitalist...