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  • 2018 K'wiŏ Chŏnsa–Chŏnsa (前史) ·Chŏnsa (戰史)·Chŏnsa (戰士)1
  • Kim Keonhyung (bio)
    Translated by Seth Chandler (bio)

1. Emotional Theater of Tragic Self-Sacrifice

Just as feminism has led Korean literature to encounters with new readers and a new aesthetic sense, queer narrative is currently creating new directions as well. Having popped up sporadically throughout literary history, queer narratives have recently undergone an explosive expansion. As a result, a reading of Korean literature's queerness and queer representation itself is now urgent.

The first direct representations referencing queerness by name in the Korean literary world are Che Ho-ki's "Kei (Gay)" and "Sŭlp'ŭn Kei (Sad Gay)" (Munhak gwa Sahoe, Winter 1992). However, the speaker of these poems understands the word gay to mean transgender, as can be seen in the statement "My body / Isn't right for me" ("Gay").2 This ignorance of the categories [End Page 247] of queerness expresses the speaker's reasoning for voluntarily abandoning his male privilege. He paints his nails and wears a bra and skirt in order to attain a vicarious experience of his dead lover, asserting: "I'm not acting you. / I'm living your life." The male speaker of the poem (cross-)dresses like his dead female lover in order to meet the "you brought back to life in the mirror." Misusing the word "gay" to name cross-dressing,3 the speaker attempts to "Split my masculinity into branches / And build a nest of your femininity," and through this cisgender, heterosexual male's act of dressing in female likeness, "you," the dead lover, "Not the you I remember, / but now! you / with living freshness / return to life." Here the act of cross-dressing is nothing more than a rhetorical means to mourn the death of a woman and achieve a vicarious experience of her. This narrative of cross-dressing as a means to understand a deceased woman stretches all the way to Cheon Un-yeong's "Ŏmma do asidasip'i (As You Also Know, Mother)" (Munhak Tongne, Fall 2012). In this short story, following his mother's death, a middle-aged middle-class man experiences a sudden shock at the absence of the handtowels she had always prepared for him. Missing his mother's hoarse voice and struggling to imitate it, he puts on his mother's hanbok and makeup, and begins to sing in her hoarse voice in a dramatic scene. Through this act of cross-dressing, he feels the warmth of her visiting spirit and [End Page 248] arrives for the first time at an understanding of her life and sadness in a sort of warm "samo-gok."4

The way in which transness and cross-dressing become a means for a man to better understand a deceased woman and, through her, the world, is further illustrated in Kim Yeonsu's "Kogukŭi Kkot, Sŏng Sŭng-gyŏng (Flower of the Homeland, Sŏng Sŭng-gyŏng)" (Hyŏndae Munhak, August 1997). The narrative juxtaposes Chaemin and Sŭngjin, two characters who are attempting to understand Sŏng Sŭng-gyŏng, a Yonsei University art student who committed suicide by self-immolation and then jumping to her death. In the process of producing a documentary film entitled "Flower of the Homeland, Sŏng Sŭng-gyŏng," Chaemin rejects the project because of the demand to create a film depicting her as an activist hero, reminiscent of older-generation activism. Meanwhile Sŭngjin, Sŏng Sŭng-gyŏng's younger brother, roams the streets dressed in women's clothing in order to understand his sister. Fallen into a state of arrested development and loneliness after his sister's death, he has resolved to revive his sister in this way. Subjected to (sexual) violence by other men for being a "homo bastard" dressed in women's clothing, Sŭngjin interprets this as a vicarious experience of his sister's being chased down by riot police. The homophobia and hate-based violence of the offending men suddenly becomes the violence of the "riot police who chased my sister down," and is thereby reduced to a political symbol equated with the repression...

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