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| Two young bisexual women dressed up to make a point about the purest kind of matrimony at the 2018 Queer Culture Festival and parade last Saturday. They wanted to show their support for same-sex marriage in Korea. Photos by Michael Hurt |
By Michael Hurt
Korea is queering
In 1991, Paris was burning. When I was a freshman in college, I could barely wrap my brain around that film — Paris Is Burning." I could barely process what I was seeing. I had never seen such aberrant behaviors, had no idea that it constituted a vibrant (and seemingly? fun!) gay (and black/Latino!?) subculture, nor how someone could possibly have recorded it so honestly in all its apparently unadulterated vibrancy and glory.
It was truly ahead of its time, which is a phrase that simply describes a cultural product, idea or person who exists a few (or many!) years ahead of the social norms required to appreciate that product, idea or person in terms of the greatness that it will obviously be seen later, when the world is ready. But of course, now, the culture of the drag ball and extreme "reading" is just mainstream entertainment, another night of bingeing "RuPaul's Drag Race" on Netflix.
Raised as I was in a time of four television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS), three races (caucasoid, negroid and mongoloid, as my social studies textbooks said) and no inkling of anything other than the two, clearly defined sexes of male or female, the cultural sphere in the 1980s and 1990s was easy to navigate. At the very least, social categories were rigid and everyone knew their place, or at least how to go about trading them. No one I knew was trying to "deconstruct" them or understand the social forces that led to their creation. Everyone I knew in life was nominally straight and "normal" ― and "gay" was an insult. Gayness itself was aberrant, perverted and bad. One might even catch that new "gay disease" if they got too close.
Social constructions
My point is that since I did the bulk of my growing up in 1980s-90s America, a "time of blissful comfort" and the last time popular culture lived so squarely within the shadow of that illusion, my notions of everyday normalcy shared the common assumptions that most people had of certain social categories, such as black, white, red and yellow, girls and boys, and even what it meant to be American. And then I started to take sociology with a funny, dowdy little professor with white hair like Einstein. His name was Professor Martin Martel and he said that race and other categories were merely "social constructions."
Since I am the type of person who was inclined to believe what old white-haired college professors dressed in tweed blazers teaching sociology at an Ivy League university had to say, I went with it. It was a bit hard to wrap my mind around ― like "Paris Is Burning" ― but I went with it.
Now, the thing that Prof. Martel was saying wasn't that the apparent social fact of one's blackness is all in your head ― since if the police see a "suspicious-looking black man," they will respond and behave accordingly ― and I would not be convincing in my plea of "Kind sir, I am not black because that is a mere social construction!" And the fact of having dark skin, a broad nose, or tightly curled hair, is not made up. It is real, as real as the flesh on my body, as plain as the nose on my face. But ― and here is the professor's big but ― the social category that puts all of those things into the category "black" and assigns other meanings to the category ― dangerous, dumb, libidinous, savage ― are indeed society's constructions and they happened for a reason.
And the broad category of blackness that says one drop of black blood makes one black had roots in the racialized caste system that came with American slavery, along with the sexual predations of white slave owners who had a vested interest in protecting their property and reputation by making the progeny of countless sexual liaisons with the women they owned into just more property ― the ultimate free labor. It's why in many southern American states there are still statutes that define black as anyone with 1/32nd or even 1/64th black ancestry. And it's why we still think of people who look very phenotypically different from one another ― take Will Smith, Idris Elba and Drake, for instance ― as members of the same category.
And even after the human genome has been sequenced and shown that there are more meaningful differences within the category than across them (which would logically mean the category has no meaning), we still believe in the categories' reality. Because of nose shape, hair texture and skin color ― just about the most meaningless things about humans there are. And we know now that blood and tissue types, genetic predisposition to diseases (with a few exceptions) and many other things do not correlate well to our definition of "races." But yet we stubbornly cling to the idea and refuse to let go. Many Americans find this argument hard to take.
Now, the same is true for gender in Korea, where boys are boys and girls are girls. Because girls in Korea are essentially different. They tend to be shyer than men. (Cuz socialization.) Women are more into beauty and appearance. (Cuz socialization.) Men are more fixated on sex. (Cuz socialization.) Men and women look different, from head to toe, and walk, talk, sit and even eat differently. (Cuz socialization.) Korea has to have a military! Women can't compete physically hand-to-hand with men. (Cuz socialization. And look at Israel.) In Korea, the fact ― as plain as day ― that men and women are different is a very difficult thing to try and contest.
It's equally hard to tell Americans that race is just a social hang-up. Koreans tend to have more trouble believing that gender ain't a thing. And this is because both societies depended on the social categories of race and gender to enable their discriminatory caste systems that formed the very basis of identity in them. It's hard to hear, but the United States has been a racial caste system from 1619 to the present day. (Although the Civil Rights Movement allowed the illusion of equality after 1965. But if you asked Rodney King in 1991, Eric Garner in 2014, Philando Castile in 2017, or Harith Augustus just over the past weekend, you'd know this wasn't the case. In Korea, men and women are nominally equal, but if you actually worked in a large organization here while pregnant or tried to file a sexual harassment charge within it at any time, you'd find yourself likely disabused of that idea.
In short, being white or black (or anything) in America is the primary social prism through which to see one's life and identity, while in Korea, for most Koreans, being a man or woman is. And taking away these fundamental bases of everything one knows about society or even oneself is something many people cannot take. It's one reason many Americans reacted like seeing a pig walk upright when Rachel Dolezal was exposed in her passing but gave Caitlin Jenner a reluctant and conditional pass, and why many (older) Koreans cannot accept sexual/gender categories being mucked around with.
Understood this way, the picture below actually makes a certain kind of social sense.
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| A member of the anti-gay protest directly across from the Queer Culture Festival plays a traditional Korean jang-gu on its side, with the words "I hate homosexuality" writ large on her vest. Photo by Michael Hurt |
Tradition and purity
The battle to define cultural normalcy rages hot in contemporary Korea, with one of its fiercest battlegrounds being the realm of sexual and myriad other identities. The battlegrounds are most strongly and obviously delineated by age, with the folks in the Queer Culture Festival being generally in their 30s and below and marked by a diverse assortment of political interests, ethnicities, and personalities.
Those gathered in a ring around the Queer Culture Festival are almost all, without visible exception, made up of Christian political protesters who don't disguise that they believe homosexuality or alternative sexual identities to be not only immoral but fundamentally un-Korean as well. This is the semiotic argument being made that links items of traditional culture (traditional Korean dress ― the hanbok), and banging on sideways-turned traditional Korean drums to make the point.
More interestingly, this argument for the sanctity of tradition seems to go along with a visual/symbolic argument for purity, understood in terms of the purity of gender categories and marriage, especially as this is represented by good, young virginal girls. The vast majority of the drum beaters are women and girls, with few (almost singular) exceptions. The leadership is where most of the older men sit ― literally ― and do most of the talking. The women seem to do most of the dinging, drum beating and other forms of protest performance labor.
The most notable case of protest performance of purity I witnessed at these protests actually came two years ago, at the first big Queer Culture Festival. I've never seen a performance quite like it, before or since.
The way the link is made between the purity of national tradition, the virtuous, virginal young maiden and inherent goodness is actually strongly argued. And not because of the Korean choreographers in 2018, but because of the far earlier link made between the inherent goodness of traditional Germanity, gender and the nation, all wrapped up in the women's body ― all the way back in the 1930s, when Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was drawing these links in German art, music and performance culture.
Sure, the ideological uses are different, but the linkages between nation, identity and womanhood are there, which is why one sees young Korean women performing "ballet" ― a Western art form in its origins ― to the "Blue Danube Waltz" in 2015. This was part of an argument to maintain pure gender (and implied, national) categories. This linkage is the ultimate appeal ― you draw the line at binary gender categories and traditional sexual relations, because, if you lose that, you lose Koreanness itself. Unlike American-style Christian homophobes, who appeal to biblical scripture, Korean Christian homophobes appeal to vaunted tradition in the face of much-dreaded change. These bizarre performances are part of the last gasp of an older, increasingly irrelevant, generation.
The great battle for Korea
I've stated elsewhere that the biggest shift in Korean society has been in the realm of identity, as dictated by the younger generation being possessed of a different set of ideological "firmware" that keeps society up and running, and makes everything make sense to people who study, work, love and strive daily in Korean society.
The older generation, birthed as it was in the developmental period of Korean modernity, when everything was to be done for the sake of the nation and the concentric, patriarchal power circles of president, father and teacher easily recognized the clear categories that made that system work. One was a Korean, a man, a loyal worker, a father, in that descending order of roles. Logically, the things in the world that made those categories make sense were non-Korean, woman, boss and mother/wife, respectively. If one is born to believe those categories to be as real as fire, water, earth or wind, challenging those essential truisms is maddeningly nonsensical and threatening.
However, if one was born in Korea's developed period, when computers and internet were ubiquitous, chat services such as Buddy Buddy or social network services such as Cyworld were as natural as television was to a prior generation ―or more recently, was born in a time when Facebook or even Instagram was always around and comfortable as a baby's blanket ― then it's an entirely different world.
Identity is malleable. It's as customizable as a Cyworld/Wii/Playstation/Samsung Galaxy avatar. Hair and eye and skin color are selectable options, as is gender, body type and clothing. Add to the reality of customization the additional fact that this all takes place within the consumer context of purchasing/earning points for options, and one enters the realm that anyone now under the age of 25 in Korea has always occupied.
You aren't a rigid anything anymore ― you can always upgrade, you can always change, given the right amount of motivation and money. This way of thinking is only possible in a time of hypermodernity, which I've talked about beforein relation to the recently erupted fashion culture among Korean youth.
In the end, Korean youth today tend to be fairly agnostic about the minor differences found in race and ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexuality or the kind of clothes one wears. The older generation in Korea values these things not just because of the advanced age of its members but because it thinks them vitally important. They place you in the group, in society, in the world. They make you make sense to others. The younger generation has been trained ― by both teachers using education ministry curricula and savvy marketers who've turned students and youth into equally savvy consumers ― to conceive of their identities as functions of the marketplace at a level quite natural to a nation in which each generation within compressed development is used to being an island unto itself and completely unlike the others adjacent to it.
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| If teenagers aren't supposed to be study machines free of the market anymore, with lines of makeup marketed to them, then of course, they will change, as expected and desired. |
In a nation in which a generation of Confucian farmers and a landed gentry sits right next to one birthed in the scorched-earth capitalism-by force right after the Korean War, that gave way to a country that dove into an information economy, then an information-enabled pure consumer economy, you now have a rising generation of youth who could not care less about rigid notions of identity, in which strict gender roles and rules now seem nearly as meaningless class divisions of the Joseon era.
And this makes the older generation seem like strangers in a truly strange land. This is not just a "generational rift" or a "gap." This is about completely different Koreas co-existing on top of one another. One has to die. One will live.
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| Photos by Michael Hurt |
The desperation of the older generation of Christian Koreans is but the most acute manifestation of this huge difference between these Koreas. And the terrain of sexual identity and gender roles is the hottest battleground. That it occurs through the focus of putative Christianity in Korea is merely a function of the fact the Korean Christians seem to become the most easily aggrieved, the first offended, because of scriptural codes and the inherently ideological nature of the evangelical, Protestant Christianity establishment in Korea. This isn't about moral codes or feeling aggrieved as Christians in Korea; the reason the Korean Christians are so extra about this is because the physical site of queer culture at City Hall, for them, is very much understood as a struggle about what it will mean to be Korean both now and into the future.
Dr. Michael Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. He researches youth, subcultures and street fashion as a research professor at the University of Seoul and also writes on visual sociology and cultural studies at his blog and book development site Deconstructing Korea.
