Profits of Queerness: Media, Medicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980

This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study reassesses South Korea’s tumultuous period of authoritarian development (1950–1980) through obfuscated but illuminating histories of “queerness,” defined as gender variance, same-sex sexuality, and atypical anatomies, among other nonnormative expressions. Rather than primarily view these topics through minoritarian and/or liberal lenses, Todd Henry adopts a universalizing approach to examine how social conformity to dimorphic expectations of gender, sex, and sexuality were foundational to the operation of militarized capitalism in this postcolonial and still-divided nation, giving rise to rigid boundaries and hierarchized valuations of human life through biopolitical assessments of citizenship. As such, he encourages scholars of Korean studies to pursue more fully embodied approaches, while urging practitioners of LGBTI Studies to include (post)colonial, “Hot War,” and non-Western cultures in their Euro-American-centric theorizing.

Drawing on a broad range of understudied sources, including scientific reports, journalistic exposés, question-and-answer columns, newspaper cartoons, popular films, and oral histories, Profits of Queerness meticulously documents how the commanding but contested intersection of mass media, sexual medicine, and state/everyday policing helped establish and maintain such categorical distinctions as “men” versus “women” and “healthy” versus “deviant,” among other (re)productive dyads. Henry argues that a combination of sensationalizing reporters, pathologizing physicians, surveilling police officers, and everyday vigilantes contributed to a “mass dictatorship” that led South Korea(ns) toward androcentric, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist goals, ones often concealed by congratulatory narratives of the country’s “miraculous” recovery from the Korean War (1950–1953) and its industrialized “take-off” under the developmental dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (1961–1979). To highlight the unruly agency of queer and intersex persons repeatedly silenced in such triumphant accounts, he deploys the bottom-up notion of “shadow reading,” tracing how marginalized actors transformed pejorative representations, diagnoses, and rulings into self-empowerment on the fringes of an illiberal polity. Henry thus demonstrates how a contradictory mixture of “queerphobia” and “queerphilia” intersected as a central dynamic of “hetero-authoritarianism,” concepts needed to grasp and survive new (and ongoing) forms of psychosomatic domination (re)emerging across the world today.

Todd A. Henry is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.

Source: publisher’s website