South Korea: GLBT Politics

and Technology (1994-2008)

John (Song Pae) Cho
PhD Candidate, Anthropology,
UIUC
 Revised
Anti-discrimination Bill
• Due to pressure from big business and Christians,
sexual orientation deleted along with 7 other
items
• Emergency Coalition of South Korea LGBT
Rights Groups formed
• Technology used to expand the GLBT community
and to engage in new forms of activism,
deepening democracy especially in relations to
issues of gender/sexuality in everyday life
 GLBT Movement (1994-7)
• Before 1994: ‘No homosexuals’; foreign
phenomenon; decadent Western culture
• Gay subculture; ‘tongsung-yuneja’ vs.
‘tongsungeja’; ‘free-floating desire’ or
‘womanly man’;
• ‘Chodonghwe’ (1994)
• ‘Chingusai’ (1994) and ‘KiriKiri’ (1994)
• ‘Come Together’ (1995) and ‘001’ (1995)
• Perverted desire into GLBT ‘identity’ and
‘community’
 GLBT Movement (cont’d)
• Bulletin Board Services (Hitel, Chollian,
Nownuri) (1995)
• ‘AIDS education in Namsan’
• New technology used by marginalized groups
(youth and GLBT) in Korean society
• Expansion of GLBT community and
movement
• Labor strike against revision of Labor and
National Security Laws(1997) and protest
against homophobic textbooks (1997)
 Asian Financial Crisis
(‘IMF Crisis’) in 1997
• Mass unemployment
• Election of Kim Dae-jung
• Neoliberal restructuring
• Neo-familism (revive the ‘collapsed’ family
and boost low-fertility rate)
• Informatization push (transition from
manufacturing to knowledge-based economy)
• South Korea: most ‘networked’ nation in the
world
 Exzone Incident
• Exzone (1997): first gay Internet site
• Create ‘gay Internet family’
• Ministry of Information and Communications
(MIC)’s blockage of gay Internet sites in 2001
• Youth Protection Law: homosexuality ‘harmful
to minors’
• Exzone sues the state for unconstitutional and
wins the case in 2003
• Era of ‘human rights’ for GLBT and ‘sexual
citizenship’
• Election of Roh Moo-hyun: election of first
‘Internet’ president in 2001
 Anti-Discrimination Bill
• Designed to strengthen National Rights
Commission Act, introduced by ‘Kim Dae Jung
(human rights president’) in 1997
• Legacy of Roh Moo Hyun’s liberal rule
• Election of Lee Myung-bak in 2009
• Christian Right and the politicisation of
homosexuality
• Conjuncture of neoliberalism,
neoconservatism, and neofamilism
• GLBT identities under attack; GLBT being
driven back into family
 Technology and Revised
ADB Protests
• Emergency meetings: ‘bungae’
(lightning meeting): aesthetics/emotion
• Flash mobs (surprise, fun)
• One person protests (leveraging
technology)
• New forms of protest that expand
democracy into everyday realms of
gender and sexuality
 Discussion Points
• New terrain of sexual politics (attack on gay
identity; loss of living conditions for GLBT;
right to consume but not be out)
• New strategies of organizing and resistance
Internet, body, images, and feeling
• ‘Affective labor’ (Hardt and Negri 2004) and
‘immaterial labor’ (Lazzarato 1996);
social/emotion-producing machine
• Issues of visibility/invisibility: no law against
homosexuality; caught between family and
state’; family and affect; strategies of
‘collective coming out’