Transcultural Consumption through a “Queer” Narrative: Douglas Maxwell’s Our Bad Magnet in Seoul

Although Korean director Choo Min Ju translation and adaptation of Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell’s coming-of-age drama Our Bad Magnet may look like a straightforward case of East-to-West intercultural appropriation, this essay argues that Choo’s insertion of a new romantic narrative between two male characters not only “queers” the text, but offers the Western observer an alternative entrance into the discussion of appropriation that queers the idea of the intercultural itself. Rather than approaching Maxwell’s text as a source to which the director remains indebted in the creation of her own intercultural synthesis, the essay reads Choo’s Our Bad Magnet as the transcultural consumption of a resource, not only on the part of Choo, but also by the very active online theatre fan community in Seoul. Her production intervenes not only in contemporary mainstream Korean culture’s dominant attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, but also the Western theatre scholar’s assumptions about the relationship between “source” and “target” cultures in acts of intercultural transference and consumption.