I visited GuUi (Gu-ŭi, pronounced as Goo-yi) Station to pay respect and took a few photos. I happened to drop by when it wasn’t so crowded, but apparently lots of people have been visiting to pay respect and keeping vigil at a makeshift shrine both on the platform upstairs (it’s an open-air elevated platform, not underground) and downstairs at the station entrance.

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 12:56am PDT

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 12:57am PDT

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 1:05am PDT

In addition to the post-it notes that have recently become common in these public shrines and the customary, funerary long-stemmed white chrysanthemums, people have been leaving birthday cakes (Mr. Kim died the day before his 20th birthday), instant cup noodles, snacks and other fast food—it was reported that he had an instant cup noodle in his bag because he rarely had time to eat on the job. Some of the notes also referred to this, e.g. “Hope you get to eat meat, not instant noodles where you are.” Some of my friends have been critical of this public dwelling on his youth and precarity, and the unspoken suggestion that perhaps the death of a young worker is somehow more deserving of public outrage and sympathy. But the cheap and portable (and terribly unhealthy!)instant cup noodles have long been seen as a symbol of precarity, poverty, and hard work.

Everyone knows that deaths, both sudden and long-time-coming, take place everywhere, all the time and every day, but this gruesome death has hit a particularly raw nerve in the public sphere, already grieving so many recent deaths. At a press conference held on May 31, the deceased Mr. Kim’s mother said that her son’s head was so horribly mutilated in the accident that she could not recognize her own son. She could identify his body only by the clothes he wore that day. She said that his screams must have sounded like the screeching brakes of the approaching train. I thought about this while I stood there watching and listening to the trains come and go over and over again, screeching and screaming in bone-chilling pitch.

Some travellers unknowingly exited from the very door of this horrific scene (Door 9-4) and were obviously taken aback to be stepping into a scene of public memorial, but for many, many others, this was just another spectacle that did not concern them. Whether indifferent or numb, they did not seem to hear the screams that filled the air.

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 12:57am PDT

“How painful it must have been, how painful it must be.” The majority of the notes were written by young people, at least from what I saw there, but a few of these others caught my eye. I would guess that this first one is written by someone who is not as accustomed to conventions of punctuation and spelling, whether by age, class, or education (or all of the above). See even the clumsy way the three hearts at the end are drawn.

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 1:01am PDT

“Tears in my eyes.” This one is also written from a parental perspective, mourning the death of someone who could be their son.

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 12:58am PDT

“Son! I love you! Son! I am sorry!” The sign-off as a “passenger who used this train station everyday” underscores this extraordinary death as part of the ordinary everyday death.

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 12:59am PDT

And finally, lots of connections to the Sewol Ferry disaster. Mr. Kim was born in 1997, the same year as that most of the Danwon High School students who were killed on the Sewol Ferry. There is compelling public sentiment that they in fact belong to 세월호 세대 or the “Sewol Generation” — overworked, precarious, abandoned.

Mourning at GuUi Station. May 31, 2016.

A photo posted by @dotorious on May 31, 2016 at 1:02am PDT

I’m giving a talk on queer & evangelical geopolitics next week in Seoul. It’s my first time giving a public academic-y talk in Korean (gulp) and also the first time giving a talk at… a church! (It’s the progressive Hyanglin Church). I must admit I’m a bit nervous about presenting alongside the prolific religious historian and esteemed critic, Kim Jin-ho, whose talk will be about evangelical homophobic alliance.

The event is organized by the TransChrist research group (critical researchers at the intersection of queer and religious studies), The Christian Institute for the 3rd Era (progressive Christian theologians and scholars), and Gilmok (progressive Christian network), and co-sponsored by the feminist Network for Glocal Activism (NGA) and Korean Society of Law and Policy on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI, a group of human rights attorneys and activist researchers). The 2016 Korea Queer Festival has also co-sponsored the event.

My talk is based on the article published last year in Munhwa/Kwahak (in Korean) on queer geopolitics from the vantage points of the diaspora with attention to minority politics. I’ll be talking about a bit of this and a bit of that, including queer activism and religious homophobia in the immigrant Korean American community in California in the 1990s. I look forward to seeing many familiar faces!

Organized by Asia Centre (Seoul National University), Vietnam National University (Hanoi), Leiden University (Leiden), and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). This CFP is for the first part on premodern and colonial periods. Proposals are due before 5 July 2016.

Vietnam and Korea as “Longue Durée” Subjects: Negotiating Tributary and Colonial Positions

Dates: 3 – 4 March 2017

Application deadline: 5 July 2016

Venue: Hanoi, Vietnam

The conference
Comparative studies are located at the heart of humanities and social science studies (Détienne 2000, Werner and Zimmermann 2004; Felsky & Friedman 2013), particularly in area studies (Anderson 1998, Lieberman 2009). In that field especially, implicit or explicit comparisons often determine certain conceptions of regional and sub-regional orders. For example, the study of East Asia is implicitly situated within a comparative approach to China and the Sinitic culture. What other “strange parallels” (Lieberman) could possibly be operational to set a “comparative gesture” (Robinson 2011) that would not be determined by usual ‘silo-style’ conceptions of Asia? How to trigger new connections and parallels in area studies?

In partnership with a number of universities and institutions, IIAS and its partners set out to address this “comparative gesture” by initiating a deliberate by-pass of dominant geometries and meta-narratives. One way to do so will be by organizing conferences or other forms of interactive platforms that would explore unexploited or only partially studied parallels and connections. In doing so, it will not only seek to contribute to renew how ‘Asian studies’ is methodological framed. By identifying new articulations beyond established approaches of global history, it seeks to underscore the intellectual merits – as well as limits – of comparisons as a social science and humanities method.

Conference 1:
Vietnam and Korea as Longue Durée Subjects: Negotiating Tributary and Colonial Positions
The first proposed event will focus on Korea and Vietnam, two major regional nations and societies in Asia: as great kingdoms in the pre-modern period they developed, sometimes within and sometimes outside of the Sinitic “tributary” system, strong political organizations and original civilizations. The vicissitudes of the modern and contemporary periods, first with the experience of colonial subjugation, then international warfare and civil conflicts resulting in division of the two countries set much connections and parallels in the two countries’ trajectories. Today, Vietnam and Korea continue to stand at the edge of the two great ideological systems that shaped the twentieth century, socialism and capitalism, yet in a divergent ways – Vietnam being reunified and having entered post-communist-pro-capitalist State authoritarianism while Korea remains divided between two models of statehood and governance.

The conference is conceived as an exploratory exercise to identify points of connections in which scholars of Vietnam and Korea could confront their work and engage their paradigms. As an ongoing project historically grounded with contemporary perspective situated within the larger Asia-global spectrum as well as for practical sake, the first part of the conference entitled Vietnam and Korea as Longue Durée Subjects: Negotiating Tributary and Colonial Positions will focus on two conventionally agreed historiographies of the countries’: their ‘pre-modern’ and ‘colonial’ periods. An underlying question this conference aims to address will be: How the Korean and Vietnamese states and their civil societies, concepts that shaped during the tributary system, became formulated during the modernization period?

Various approaches and disciplines are invited to interact.

Topics that would be particularly relevant for the conferences include – but should not be restricted to – the following:

• Ancient kingdoms: indigenization of Sinitic culture and resources; articulation with vernacular cultures (e.g. indigenous religious systems and beliefs);
• Pre-modern urban cultures, bureaucracies, statehood;
• Ways of dealing with the world and China: diplomatic cultures and techniques, exchange, commerce, piracy;
• Western incursions and missionary experiences in Korea and Vietnam
• Looking at China, Japan and other Asian countries from Korea and Vietnam;
• Writing and languages (relation to Chinese writing systems, and vernacularization processes; linguistic innovations and hybridization);
• Colonial experiences, including differences of governmentalities, processes of modernization; cities and modern urban cultures; transcultural experiments; forms of political (and cultural) resistance and contestation; new cosmopolitanisms.

Individual presentations may not be restricted to works explicitly comparing Korea and Vietnam, yet presenters have to bear in mind the ultimate purpose of framing debates in comparison between the two Asian countries and their societies. Likewise, studies from scholars specialized on China, Japan, and other Asian countries are welcome, provided they contribute to the general problematic of the workshop. Junior scholars are particularly encouraged to submit abstracts.

A second part of the conference, focusing on the contemporary Korean and Vietnamese conditions, from 1945 onward, will be held in Korea the following year.

Requirements
Paper proposals should be submitted via the form available on our website by Tuesday 5 July 2016. Successful applicants will be notified by 31 August 2016 and will be required to send a draft paper (6000 – 8000 words) by 15 January 2017. | Go to the submission form

Financial support
Participants are expected to pay their own travel and accommodation expenses. Limited financial support may be made available to some scholars who reside in Asia and some junior or low-income scholars from other parts of the world. If you would like to be considered for a grant, please submit the Grant Application Form in which you state the motivation for your request. Please also specify the kind of funding that you will apply for or will receive from other sources. Please note that the conference operates on a limited budget, and will not normally be able to provide more than a partial coverage of the costs of travel. The form should be submitted by 5 July 2016. Requests for funding received after this date will not be taken into consideration.

Information
Further information about the venue, suggestions for accommodation, and logistics will be provided on our webpage once the proposals have been accepted.

For questions, please contact Ms Martina van den Haak at m.c.van.den.haak@iias.nl

Steering Committee
Prof. Kang Myungkoo (SNUAC)
Prof. Nguyen Van Kim (VNU)
Prof. Remco Breuker (Leiden University)
Dr Valérie Gelézeau (EHESS)
Dr Philippe Peycam (IIAS)

An initiative directed by IIAS

A short piece I wrote in early May just came out in East Asia Forum Quarterly, published by the Australian National University. Parts of it already feel outdated, but I’m glad I highlighted the Christian Liberal Party (CLP), military conscription system, HIV/AIDS, and Islamophobia — all still very current issues. Homophobia, I made sure to point out, is both a public health and a public safety issue. Please think of this as a primer on my ongoing and upcoming work on queer (geo)politics.

A notable element of south Korea’s general elections in April 2016 was the hypervisibility of anti- gay political rhetoric, promulgated especially by the fledgling Christian Liberal Party (CLP). An ultra- conservative Protestant political party established in march 2016, the CLP ultimately failed to gain a seat in the National Assembly — but it came close, earning 2.6 per cent of votes nationwide, just shy of the 3 per cent required for a proportional representation seat. e increased prominence of formations like the CLP signals a new chapter in religiously charged political homophobia in south Korea. […]

Conservative Protestant forces have been particularly unkind to minorities—sexual minorities, immigrants and temporary migrants who constitute religious and ethnic minorities in south Korea, and trade unionists, dissidents and social justice activists who compose formidable political minorities. Conservative Protestants and homophobic political leaders have even linked LGBTQ equality with terrorism and radical Islam, as can be seen in the recent CLP slogans of ‘No to homosexuality, no to Islam, no to anti-Christianity’, all in the name of national security. some have gone as far as to call for a stop to immigration from muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. In their extreme and most troubling formations, homophobia is combined with Islamophobia and xenophobia to bring hatred and bigotry to new heights.

Read the HTML version (updated July 4, 2016), download the entire issue as PDF, or download my piece from Academia.edu.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Queer Commons: A Special Issue of GLQ

Editors:
Gavin Butt (University of Sussex)
Nadja Millner-Larsen (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Please send inquiries and submissions to:
GLQqueercommons@gmail.com

The concept of the commons has become a central category of contemporary political discourse. However, queer artistic and political initiatives which model or put into practice the form of the commons often fail to be registered within and by such discourse. This special issue asks whether or not it is possible therefore to theorise a queer commons, and – if it is – what it might look like within social, political and cultural practice. Can a queer commons be found across historical periods in, for example, various sexually dissident communities; from drag queen communes to anarcho-queer punk collectives? In the context of the ‘privatizing’ of the gay agenda in recent decades in the west, is the refusal of capitalist accumulation and ownership, typical of the commons form, at play within recent queer political rejections of marriage equality, for example, or rights-based legislation more broadly? Can public queer sex, promiscuity, and polyamory be understood as different modes of a “sexual commons”? How might queer migration activists and queer ecological movements be understood as striving for a better world in the shape of a queer commons? And can campaigns to share scientific knowledge and democratize drug access by trans- and HIV/AIDS-activists be seen as commons-forming?

We pose these questions enabled by the recent work of scholars, activists, and artists who have done much to lay the groundwork for the debates we wish to stage in this issue. Recent cultural theory has variously foregrounded the commons as a resource with non-exclusive rights of access or use, and it has turned to radical ontologies of the common in order to reconsider the essential multiplicity of personhood—a multiplicity (arguably) at the root of queer theory’s refutation of the singular subject. Meanwhile, Queer Studies has also deepened its account of political-economy by taking on the sexual economies of neoliberalism, global migration, and the intimacies of social reproduction. But even though the discourse of the commons has developed in concert with feminist theorizations of labor and anti-work politics (especially from within Italian autonomism), the relationship between queer theory and queer life on the one hand, and accounts of communization on the other, have typically been held apart. We thus envision this special issue as opening a site of productive convergence for these two trajectories of contemporary thought. Can the discourse of the commons help us to identify queer practices of group belonging and collectivization resistant to the violent exclusions of contemporary forms of social organization?

As scholars of visual art and performance, we would particularly welcome contributions which focus on art’s capacities to imagine, or even pre-figure, a queer commons. Ideas of a queer commons as utopian, and supporters / detractors of such an idea, would be especially welcome. In this regard, this special issue of GLQ is indebted to the work of the late queer performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz, both to his work on queer utopianism and his emergent work on the notion of the queer commons, tragically cut short by an early death.

We wish to solicit new scholarship from across the disciplinary divides and from different national and trans-national contexts. We are also interested in soliciting collectively authored work.

Contributions could additionally address:
– relations between discourses of the commons and of sexuality; the connections and disconnects between ideas of common ownership and of desire; the anti-proprietorial impulse in queer culture and politics
– DIY and self-organization; e.g. communitarian methods of organizing against violence without recourse to policing and criminalization
– radical ontological ideas and practices of being with or being-in-common; the world-making force of non-normative modes of association and filiation; queer takes on relational ontologies of multiplicity (e.g. Glissant’s ontology of world-in-relation or Nancy’s singular-plural)
– communalism in LGBTQI cultures; historical co-operatives or activist groups (e.g. Combahee River Collective); artist collectives.
– the common as demotic form: queer uses of the vulgar, vernacular and ‘low’ in the name of democracy
– relations between queer cultures and socialism, communism and/or anarchism
– global migration, queer mobilizations of refugee and exile communities
– queer theorizations of climate and ecological crises
– creative commons: queer techno-cultural spaces of communization and/or queer critiques of the neoliberalization of the creative commons;
– the body as a commons and a site of enclosure
– normativity and anti-normativity as it relates to the commons (e.g. separating out commonality from normativity)
– queer space: the logic of “safe space” as both a potential commons and a site of regulation/criminalization/securitization; questions of social and cultural access to queer space; exclusionary vs inclusionary principles more broadly (separatism, for example, or other group formations)
– intersectionality and the commons
– queer engagements with the organization of land-use and the politics of indigeneity
– queer accounts of alternative education and modes of pedagogical engagement

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies is a Duke University Press publication

**We are looking for short abstracts (500 words) for contributions to be considered for inclusion in this volume. Final contributions will be in the form of EITHER full academic essays OR shorter contributions to a commons “dossier”. Please mark your abstract “essay” or “dossier” to indicate your desired contribution type, and also include a one-page CV. Please send any enquiries and submissions to: GLQqueercommons@gmail.com

DEADLINE: September 16th, 2016.

CIRCULATE WIDELY AND CONSIDER CONTRIBUTING

I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of participating in the Toronto-based filmmaker and friend Richard Fung‘s latest film, Re:Orientations, currently on the film festival circuit. It premiered in Toronto in May, and just screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival a few days ago on August 15. The film revisits many of the original participants in Fung’s 1984 film, Orientations, and raises provocative questions about Asian Canadian gay and lesbian identities and the politics of community building and belonging. I can’t believe Orientations came out 32 years ago, coincidentally the same year I immigrated to the United States. I remember watching Orientations as an undergraduate, and it’s been a classic for a while in queer Asian American studies. Re:Orientations is a thoughtful and intelligent film, beautifully shot and brilliantly edited.

I’m a relative newcomer to the “Asian Canadian” formation but not to the “queer Asian” political spaces, and Richard has kindly included my commentaries about identity, politics, etc. Basically, I play a nerdy professor in the film.

I get the final words in the film, actually. It’s slightly misquoted in this Vancouver-based Daily Xtra article:

I’ll need to double check, but I think I also said that identitarian politics are still very important, but that that’s not all there is. That we must imagine more. That there must be more.

“Another Huayou customer, LG Chem, one of the world’s leading battery makers, told The Post it stopped buying Congo-sourced minerals late last year. Samsung SDI, another large battery maker, said that it is conducting an internal investigation but that “to the best of our knowledge,” while the company does use cobalt mined in Congo, it does not come from Huayou.”

Source: Cobalt mining for lithium ion batteries has a high human cost – Washington Post (September 30, 2016)

Recently at the George Washington University in Washington DC, I had the privilege of presenting a paper alongside three of my research collaborators in the AKS-supported Urban Aspirations project. It was part of GWU’s 24th Hahn Moo Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities, an annual event in the honour of the well-known novelist.

I argue in this paper that the transnational circuit of homophobia notably led by Christian conservatives is often oversimplified as a unilateral imposition or transplantation of the agenda of the American Christian Right. The recent emergence of political homophobia in South Korea, for example, is commonly characterized as mimicry, fashioned after the American evangelicals who notoriously pursued the so-called moral majority agenda concerning abortion and homosexuality. I do not deny the transpacific resemblance of this historical conjuncture, but I also argue for a more nuanced analysis with attention to South Korean and diasporic Korean American minority politics. By examining place-specific histories and imbricated political geographies of religiously inflected homophobia and queer activism, this paper imagines a more diffuse and multifocal constitution of transpacific politics.

I was cleaning up some files and thought I’d share this here. It’s from the “Spring Forward, Fall Back?: Progress and Challenges in Korean Gender Studies” panel organized by Hyaeweol Choi (Australian National University) at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) meeting in Seattle nearly a year ago on April 2, 2016. My co-panelists were Laurel Kendall (American Museum of Natural History), Jungwon Kim (Columbia University), Hyaeweol Choi (ANU), and Seung-Kyung Kim (University of Indiana). I didn’t expect to get so emotional during my presentation, but… ok, that’s a lie because I cry all the time and I think I got choked up at every single one of my public talks last year. No wonder, though. This was just 3 weeks after my beloved dog Puca died after being by my side for 14 years.

“Doing Queer Korean Studies in 2016”

Ju Hui Judy Han
University of Toronto

Gender is intimately bound with inequalities, not only between women and men but also in all social relations concerning class, sexuality, ethnicity, race, migration, and the nation. In the 2014 special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies I co-edited with my partner, Jennifer Chun, we emphasized the ongoing centrality of studying the contemporary dynamics of gender and politics in Korea as constitutive of the historical circumstances and material realities that shape people’s everyday experiences of power, inequality, subjugation, and marginalization.

In an effort to help diversify the field of Korean gender studies, in terms of non-normative gender expressions and sexual orientations, activist research, and Korean-language scholarship, I solicited and translated an article by Tari Young-Jung Na in that special issue, an article titled “The South Korean Gender System: LGBTI in the Contexts of Family, Legal Identity, and the Military.” A major discussion in that article is the extent to which the South Korean legal system is founded on a heteronormative gender binary — in gender-normative, heterosexual family-based system of mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, in gender-normative system of military conscription that relies on defining an able-bodied male through a variety of medical and legal technologies, and gender-normative systems of national identity registration mechanisms that marginalizes and excludes any persons with nonconforming sexual orientation or gender identity.

Na calls for a fundamental shift in binary thinking, and I wish this was easier to put into practice. Let me offer a very small personal example — getting a haircut. I could tell you more lurid stories about gender binaries that structure bath houses or gender-segregated public restrooms (“washrooms” in Canada), but to illustrate the everyday encounter with the heteronormative gender binary as a queer person with a somewhat non-conforming gender presentation, I’ll tell you quickly about something I deal with on a regular basis.

One of the advantages of living in a major metropolitan area like Toronto has been for me that I can walk into any number of Korean-owned hair salons near home. The benefits of finding low-price, competent hairdresser is often outweighed by the discomfort that comes with gender subjection — what constitutes a feminine look, and more specifically, just how short a woman’s haircut should be. I get weird looks, disapproving squints, and just outright rudeness. I went to place called Cinderella for a while when I first got to Toronto, but I just couldn’t get myself to keep going to a place called Cinderella. There were other hair salons, too, like G** and M***, but at both places, I couldn’t bear the owners’ and stylists’ racist rants against indigenous people, Black people, and sometimes, gay people. This problem is compounded by the fact that when I enter a hair salon, nobody expects me to speak Korean — which I am convinced is in part because of my queer appearance — and often, I don’t know until I walk up to pay afterwards whether I’d be charged $25 for a women’s cut or $15 for a men’s cut. Sometimes I’m recognized as a woman and pay more for it, and sometimes I’m misrecognized as a man and rewarded for it. It’s always a little disorienting.

This may seem like a very trivial example, and it’s not like I have time to launch a public education campaign for gender justice in hair salons. But I bring this up because some of us, especially those of us who embody gender transgression, bear the responsibility and the burden of challenging the status quo simply by existing. Simply by being who we are. As critical scholars and feminist teachers, as writers and activists, all of us need to be more clear-eyed about the politics of difference — not in theory or in the books, but in our disciplines, in our departments, and in our classrooms.

I’ve already spoken with some of you about a recent experience I had with giving an invited lecture to a Korean studies audience. The talk I gave was titled “How Pink Turned Red: Korean Christianity and Queer Geopolitics,” about the significance of geopolitics and minority politics in understanding queer activism and conservative Christian backlash in contemporary South Korea. It was a latest version of a series of articles I’ve been developing and presenting over the last few months at conferences and lectures across geography, anthropology, queer studies, Asian studies, and urban studies audiences, and as always, I very much value public presentations as opportunities to fine tune arguments and meet faculty and students who offer fantastic and insightful questions.

At this particular talk, the audience consisted mostly of undergraduate students taking Asian/Asian American studies courses. Unbeknownst to me, the vast majority of the audience (about 75 in the lecture hall) turned out to be Korean American or international Korean students. As soon as the talk was finished and it was time to ask questions, more than 20 hands enthusiastically shot up, and it stayed that way during the Q&A. Plenty of questions is always good to see, but the questions revealed a dismally uninformed/misinformed and disturbingly homophobic student body. Not everyone, obviously, but quite a lot of the questions were shockingly homophobic. In fact, I hadn’t received questions this bad in a while. I couldn’t tell if the crowd — many self-identified as Korean American and Christian, as it turned out — was especially homophobic or if a few just felt empowered to assert themselves shamelessly in public. What do I mean by homophobic? Here are some questions I received.

• “You mentioned sexual violence in the military. I have to serve in the military when I go back to Korea, and to be honest, I’m afraid. What if my superior is gay?” (As in, what if my gay superior in the military wants to rape me?)
• “Do you think churches will be able to stop the legalization of homosexuality?” (As in, can we help them?)
• “I’m a leader in the campus Christian group, and I disagree with your discussion of Christianity. The Bible clearly says that homosexuality is a sin, blah blah blah.” (I talked quite a lot about Christian solidarity with queer activism.)

I thought I handled the questions as well as I could have, and I did honestly enjoy fielding the barrage of wild questions. After all, I have been out as a queer person since 1990, and I have been done quite a lot of “Queer 101” type talks for over the last 20 or so years — first as an undergrad at Berkeley where I did a fair bit as a guest speaker at residence halls and classes to share my experiences about what it’s like to be queer, immigrant, and as an activist committed to social change.

After the adrenaline wore off, though, I felt a little sick, sad, and exhausted from what I can only describe as a disheartening, dehumanizing experience. I can only hope that the students learned something from the talk and the Q&A, perhaps even challenged by listening to a real live queer person (me), but I can’t deny that I felt subhuman and dirty, like I was spat on. After all these years, is this still all we got? Have we accomplished so very little?

Not only in our scholarship and disciplinary conversations, but also in our often very transnational classrooms, we have a lot of work that still needs to be done. The field of gender studies in Korean studies, or Korean gender studies, must do better to make critical connections and challenge bigotry in our classrooms, even it means having to assert ourselves and confronting those who deny our very existence. After all these years of progress and challenges, there is still plenty of work left to do.

Here are six (6) interesting calls for papers for the 2018 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New York City from 4 to 7 January, 2018. The presidential theme for the convention is #States of Insecurity.

Korean Forum sessions

Community in the Wake of the Social: Literary Insecurities in Modern and Contemporary Korea

“The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world,” wrote Jean-Luc Nancy, “is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.” At the same time, Nancy warns against a nostalgia for lost community that masks the fact of its “belated invention.” Community, according to Nancy, lies not at the origins of the social, but is rather what happens “in the wake of society.”

The ontological significance of a literature that relies on the category of “nation” is challenged in an era of globalization and migration; literature as a particular and well-defined aesthetic practice or form is disrupted as boundaries with other cultural products, particularly in the digital era, are perforated or redrawn. New technology and media and concomitant forms of sociality have resulted in a “generic” insecurity that calls into question the status of literature as a repository of communal memory while at the same time expanding its potential as an expression or performance of community.

This session seeks papers that critically address literary representations of community and/or the idea, practice, and status of the literary community itself in the Korean context. We are particularly interested in papers that deal with both the literary representation of community and the performance of literary community in various forms of media. Please send a 250-word abstract and 1-p CV by March 15, 2017 to Heekyoung Cho or Chris Hanscom.

Auditory Text in Premodern and Modern Korean Literature

Not only is literary text inscribed and read but is also voiced for the readerly ears. Does this renewed attention to sound and listening alter the way we read and understand literature in any significant manner? How might we seek a new understanding of the text’s voicing as integral to our literary reading? Does Korean literature offer any interesting instances where the meaningful readerly listening takes place with little or no visual access to the object of comprehension? Is there any meaningful boundary between what is oral and what is written in Korean literary contexts? How might we methodologically embed sound into Korean literary and cultural studies?

Marking a sharp turn from vision-centered literary and media analysis, this panel re-centers voice, hearing, and listening as ways to explore the cultural and political complexities of soundscape in premodern and modern Korean literature and culture. As part of the Korean Language, Literature, and Culture Forum session for the 2018 MLA Convention (New York), the panel seeks papers that examine the ways in which polyphonics, multiculturalism, technology, gender, and politics, among others, in the Korean context form, generate, and qualify the experiences of sound in the text. We especially welcome papers that discuss voice, hearing, and listening as embodied or disembodied textual experiences and also those work that explores auditory textual experimentation in various genres of premodern and modern Korean literature including new ways of understanding poetry, in which sound image traditionally has been treated as important. Deadline for submission of 250-word abstract and 1-p CV is 15 March 2017 to Jina Kim.

Thinking Korean Literature through Censorship and “Blacklisting” in the Age of Global Literature

Censorship and “blacklisting” are two of the most widely practiced methods of publication control by the state. From its inception, Modern Korean literature has undergone systematic censorship by agents of the Japanese colonial government. Although such prepublication censorship laws and operations have formally ceased in post-liberation Korea, publication control persists. Explicit or implicit self-censorship by authors, editors, and publishing houses also besets modern Korean literature. Most recently, the revelation that South Korean Park Geun Hye’s regime sponsored “blacklisting” operations and secretly controlled the disbursal of financial subsidies for publication stunned Korean civil society, whose formal democratization presumably ended the era of publication control.

The unending story of Korean literary publications and figures being subjected to state control impels us to rethink fundamental and theoretical notions of literature, authorship, and art. What modes of reading should literary critics and historians bear on censored literature and “blacklisted” writers? How do censorship and “blacklisting” complicate paradigms like Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” and Michel Foucault’s “author function”? How has publication control by the state weakened or strengthened the so-called literariness of literature? The panel invites papers that address questions of literary history and interpretive methods about the instability of literature as an institution under state control. We especially seek approaches that substantially or implicitly intervene in the idea of world literature through concrete cases of censored works and “blacklisting” or other forms of state intervention into the writing and publication of literature. 250-word abstract and 1-p CV by March 15, 2016; Kyeong-Hee Choi.

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (LLC) East Asian Forum’s guaranteed sessions

Disability and Human (In)Dignity in East Asian Literature and Film

This call seeks papers that provide comparative analysis of depictions of disability and human dignity, or the lack thereof, in East Asian literature and film. Those that compare two or more East Asian texts and contexts are especially welcome. The period is open. The following are some examples of the kinds of questions a paper might address. What are the central conflicts, questions, and political or cultural issues at stake when works of art represent disability and the disabled in East Asian context? How do such representations comment on the nature of the individual’s relationship to society? What are the ways in which such works from the past illustrate certain cultural issues of the contemporary East Asian life? Please send 250-word abstract and short CV to Kelly Jeong.

Cannibal Modernity in East Asian Literature and Film 

Papers investigating the trope of cannibalism as a response to modernity and/or contemporary global issues in East Asian literature and film. 250-word abstract and short CV by March 15 to Geraldine Fiss.

Transcultural Flows in East Asian Literature and Film

Papers addressing East-West and intra-Asian transcultural connections in literature and film, including literary/cinematic influence, translation, adaptation and other. 250-word abstract and short CV by March 15 to Geraldine Fiss.

“Becoming Visible, Becoming Political: Faith and Queer Activism in South Korea” has been published in Scholar & Feminist Online 14.2, published by The Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). It draws from the research I began in 2013 on urban aspirations and politics of religion, and it is part of my second book manuscript on queer geopolitics in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Some of the article’s political discussion has already become outdated, as former President Park Geun-hye has been impeached and removed from office, but there’s plenty here that would be of interest to any critical observers of religion, sexuality, and political activism.

This shocking event took place in Los Angeles on July 24, 2015. It’s a launch event for the US headquarters of the recently revived ultra-right-wing Northwest Youth League, a paramilitary gang known for massacring Korean civilians between 1947 and 54. The newspaper ad below announces the re-emergence of this horrific group, ostensibly formed to counter the “spread of pro-North Korea forces in South Korea and abroad,” with Los Angeles as “the international headquarters for pro-North Korea activism.” Note that the event was held at the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, a political representative of the immigrant Korean community, and that the event was co-sponsored by a veterans association and a group dedicated to commemorating the former President Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) as South Korea’s “founding president,” part of a growing right-wing movement that denies Rhee’s horrendous legacy of violent political repression among others.

Note that the event was held at the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, an official political representative of the immigrant Korean community, and that the event was co-sponsored by a veterans association and a group dedicated to commemorating the former President Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) as South Korea’s “founding president,” part of a right-wing movement that denies Rhee’s horrendous legacy of undemocratic rule and violent political repression.

Also see the Korea Exposé article, “South Korea’s angry young men.”

The LA event appears to have been full of angry old men, seeing from subsequent news coverage here and here. Their platform for action is as follows:

1. We love the Republic of Korea and the United States of America, and respect their history and tradition.
2. We have faith in the USA and ROK to protect our lives and property.
3. We fight against treason and corruption, and protect the weak.
4. We support the rule of law and advance liberal democracy.
5. We hold the truth, the Constitution, and the national interest as the basis for our actions.
6. We will sacrifice until the collapse of the Communist North Korean juche regime.

Looking forward to being in LA! :-O

Sounds like an interesting position.

The Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University welcomes applications for a Tenure-track Assistant Professorship in Northeast Asian Critical Humanities.  We seek teaching and research strengths in Japan and/or Korean studies, ideally including trans-national/inter-Asian empirical and theoretical interests. Applications are welcome from candidates working in modern, or across premodern and modern, contexts.  Candidates should be prepared to contribute to the undergraduate curriculum through courses in their fields of specialization as well as through survey and gateway courses. The successful candidate will enter a department that approaches Asian Humanities from diverse, but often complementary, disciplinary and theoretical arenas, including literature, film, media and visual culture, literary and intellectual history, religious studies, the investigation of imperial and colonial cultural forms and processes, translation studies, and study of modernities. While the Department of Asian Studies constitutes the teaching and tenure home for this position, the successful candidate will also make contributions to one or more of Cornell University’s thematic and area studies programs.  Ph.D. in hand by July 1, 2018, and publishing record or strong potential for publishing is important.  Submit by November 1, 2017, a letter of application, curriculum vitae, reading sample, statement of teaching experience, and three letters of recommendation electronically at https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/9700.

The Department of Asian Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell embrace diversity and seek candidates who will create a climate that attracts students and faculty of all races, nationalities and genders. We strongly encourage women and underrepresented minorities to apply. Cornell University is a recognized EEO/AA employer and educator, valuing AA/EEO, Protected Veterans, and Individuals with Disabilities.

There’s a new edited book out with the title of Challenges of Modernization and Governance in South Korea: The Sinking of the Sewol and Its Causes (Springer 2017). I know many of the editors and contributors to this collection, and I’m looking forward to reading the book. It’s an expensive book, but you can see the Table of Contents page and download the book’s Chapter 2 by Yoonkyung Lee for free. The book description reads as follows:

“Focusing on the sinking of the Sewol, a commercial ferry which capsized off the South Korean coast in April 2014, this book considers key issues of disaster, governance, civil society and the ideational transformation of human agents and their empowerment. Providing a lens through which to re-examine South Korean institutions, laws and practices, the volume examines the impact of the Sewol incident and what it reveals about the fault lines of South Korean society and governance. It addresses the repercussions of South Korea’s turn to a liberal democracy and neoliberal economy and reflects on the multilayered implications of the disaster in respect to the potential human costs of the country’s state-driven development policy and high stress modernisation. The book also highlights the relevance of the Korean experience for other societies on a similar developmental trajectories and facing similar challenges.”

The following is a position announcement for Cal State Long Beach. I don’t know much about the state of Korean language instruction or Korean Studies in the California State University system yet, but I will learn soon.

<begin excerpt> —

An interesting CFP from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. I suppose the question is “Does Hallyu matter?” and how.

“Korean Wave” Still Matters?  Present and Future Directions

7-8 June 2018

Monash University Caulfield Campus, Melbourne

Monash Asia Institute (MAI), Asian Cultural and Media Studies Research Cluster (ACMSRC) and Korean Studies Program of Monash University are pleased to welcome submissions of paper abstracts for the conference, “Korean Wave” Still Matters? Present and Future Directions”, which will be held on 7 & 8 June 2018.

Since its initial appearance in Taiwanese and Chinese media in 1997, the term Hallyu has meant different things to different people. It proved to be an effective nationalistic marketing and soft power strategy for the South Korean government and entertainment industries while many fans and casual users alike consumed South Korean cultural contents without any conscious regard for the interests of the state. It also has been received in diverse ways by a wide range of followers in terms of regions, gender, sexuality, ethnicity. As such, Korean Wave has been attracting scholarly interests of many researchers of diverse disciplines across and beyond Asian regions.

Acknowledging the recent vicennial of the Korean Wave, we welcome papers that revisit studies of the Korean Wave and discuss its present and future directions both in and outside of South Korea and Asian regions. Topics of interest include but are not limited to whether or how the discourse of Korean Wave or Hallyu remains relevant today and to whom, new and old sociocultural issues to be explored, South Korean popular culture’s interaction with other national/regional popular cultures and cultural industries such as Indonesian pop or the hip hop culture in China, global implications for the critical study of popular culture in a digital age.

Please submit your proposed title, abstract (200 words max), and brief bio-data (50 words max) to MAI-Enquiries@monash.edu by 20 November 2017. Please clearly put “Korean Wave” in the subject line. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by mid December. Please kindly be advised that we will not be able to offer financial support for participants’ travel costs, but we will try to cover postgraduate students’ accommodation, if partially. There will be no registration fee for the conference.

Any enquiries should be directed to MAI-Enquiries@monash.edu

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Korean Studies

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Department of Asian Studies (http://asianstudies.unc.edu) invites applications for a tenure-track position in Korean studies at the rank of Assistant Professor, to begin July 1, 2018. The Department seeks a promising scholar and teacher who will actively contribute to the intellectual mission of a research institution. Duties will include teaching, research, and service. Participation in the continued development of the Department’s program in Korean studies is expected.

The Department of Asian Studies welcomes applicants with doctoral degree in hand or near completion in Korean studies, Korean language and literature, or related fields such as, but not limited to, anthropology, modern history, qualitative sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, visual studies, or performance studies. Native or near-native fluency in Korean and English and demonstrated potential for innovative scholarship are also required. A candidate hired with doctorate in hand can anticipate an initial appointment as Assistant Professor. A candidate hired with doctorate nearly completed can anticipate an initial appointment as Instructor.

Qualified applicants should submit an online application at http://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/128323. Application materials should include a detailed letter, CV, sample syllabi, and a writing sample. Paper or email applications will not be accepted.

Applicants will also be required to identify the names, titles, and email addresses of four professional references at the time of application. Recommenders identified by the applicant will be contacted via email with instructions for uploading their letters of recommendation.

The Department of Asian Studies embraces diversity and seeks to foster a climate where diversity is valued in all its forms. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran.

Review of applications will begin November 8, 2017. The search will remain open until the position is filled.

The Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies

The Dept of East Asian Languages and Literatures at The George Washington University (http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/eall/) invites applications for an open rank, tenure-track or tenured faculty position in Korean Literature and Culture, anticipated to start as early as Fall 2018.

PhD in Korean literature or a closely-related field, native or near native fluency in Korean and English, and evidence of excellence in teaching Korean literature and Culture at college level, as demonstrated by evaluations, and active research experience in the field of Korean literature and culture, as indicated by scholarly publications. ABD applicants will be considered but must complete all requirements for the PhD by date of appointment. The successful candidate is expected to maintain an active research and publication agenda in Korean literature and to teach Korean literature and culture courses. Academic rank and salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Complete the online faculty application and upload a cover letter, C.V., samples of scholarly publications, statement of research and teaching interests, course evaluations and a teaching portfolio (which should include sample syllabi and teaching materials). In addition, ask three recommenders to send a letter of recommendation to: Dr. Shoko Hamano, Chair, Dept. of East Asian Langs. & Lits., The George Washington University, Rome Hall 452, 801 22nd St., N.W., Washington, DC 20052. Review of applications will begin on December 18, 2017 and will continue until the position is filled. Only complete applications will be considered.

https://www.gwu.jobs/postings/47122