Queer Korea ed. by Todd A. Henry (review)

Queer Korea is an urgent and critical addition to the Perverse Modernities series from Duke University Press. This is the first edited volume in the English language dedicated to the marginalized narratives of nonnormative sexuality and gender nonconformity on the Korean Peninsula in and beyond the twentieth century, bringing into conversation cultural historians, scholars of film and literature, anthropologists, and queer/trans activist-scholars from North America and East Asia.

The book began as a live event held in the fall of 2014 at the University of California, San Diego. "Remembering Queer Korea" encompassed an international academic conference, film festival, and art exhibition. While this event featured scholars, filmmakers, and visual artists alike, the Queer Korea volume is in large part an academic compilation that nonetheless continues in the spirit of interdisciplinary dialogues among the scholar-activists working in English and Korean languages. In calling them scholar-activists I acknowledge the academic activism performed by the contributors to this volume in telling the stories of queer Koreans whose oppressions have been instrumental to the consolidated structures of power that shaped the Korean Peninsula's recent century: colonialism, nationalism, global capitalism, and neoliberal familialism. With queerness as a critical analytic reflecting on this ongoing trauma and bringing to fore the systemic erasure of certain lived histories, Queer Korea also works in solidarity with the critical Korean-language works by South Korea–based queer feminist scholars and LGBTI activists in the past three decades.

The ten chapters of Queer Korea comprise as much a collective call to action as stand-alone essays that dialogically perform a queer intervention into modern Korean history, literature, culture, and society. Structurally, Queer Korea is divided into two parts according to the historical, political, social, and cultural processes that shaped Korea's twentieth century: the first six chapters trace the eight decades of colonial and postcolonial modernity, from the late 1910s until the 1980s; the next four chapters are on the recent three decades of postauthoritarian South Korea, from the 1990s to present. The two parts of Queer Korea also vary in terms of the contributors' fields of expertise. The first part is written by cultural historians and literary and film scholars, who actively recall and remember the unruly subjects systemically marginalized by the state; they do this through extensive archival research and textual analyses of historical records, novels and short stories, newspaper reports and images, B-films, and magazines. The second part is written by anthropologists, gender and sexuality scholars, and queer activist-researchers in South Korea, whose scholarly designations are often as porous as their lived experiences cutting across the rigorous ethnographies that center the voices of contemporary queer citizens.

Retelling the narratives of queer Koreans that were silenced, misrepresented, and otherwise rendered invisible through the heteropatriarchal current of history, the first half of Queer Korea also serves as an archive reclaiming their subjectivity. Merose Hwang's first chapter presents a nuanced reading of Korean shamans who carved out spaces of subversion through what she calls "colonial drag," resisting the heteronormative familialism prescribed by the imperial modernity and nationalist patriarchy. If Hwang demonstrates how the queerness of these shamans invoked double anxiety from both imperialist and nationalist powers alike, John Whittier Treat brings together queer and postcolonial critiques to further illuminate the essential queerness of colonial modernity in Yi Sang's "Wings" (1936). Next, Pei Jean Chen interprets the modern notion of love as a civilizing project through the case studies of sin sosŏl (new novel) and public media discourses produced from the 1910s to the 1930s. Chen's analysis demonstrating the pathologizing of tongsŏng'ae (same-sex love) and the institutionalization of the false equality of love is followed by Shin-ae Ha's chapter (translated by Kyunghee Eo) on literature commenting on female same-sex love penned by women during the imperial wartime system (1937–45). Then, Chung-kang Kim interrogates how normative sexuality was constructed in the Park Chung Hee era through what she...