Queer Korea

Front matter

QUEER KOREA

PERVERSE MODERNITIES A series .— ` edited by Jack Halberstam y and Lisa Lowe

Duke University Press Durham and London 2020

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction Queer Korea: Toward a Field of Engagement Todd A. Henry 1

PART | UNRULY SUBJECTS UNDER COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITY

Introduction

QUEER KOREA

TOWARD A FIELD OF ENGAGEMENT n September 7, 2013, two South Korean men—gaudily clad in shiny,

wedding ceremony in downtown Seoul! Along the Ch'ónggye Stream, a site of recreation typically occupied by straight couples and heterosexual families, Kim/Cho Kwang-su, a gay activist and filmmaker, and Kim Süng-hwan, his longtime boyfriend and cinematic collaborator, professed their love for one another at a Las Vegas-style spectacle. In addition to congratulatory remarks offered by media celebrities, the wedding ceremony included upbeat songs performed by the gay men’s chorus and a musical serenade comically enacted by the newlyweds themselves. Even more controversial, Kim/ Cho and Kim vowed to use their symbolic union as a national test case for marriage equality, contributing their wedding donations (ch’ugiiigiim) to create a private organization in support of other same-sex couples. However, even before the country’s judicial system (which ultimately denied them a marriage license in 2016) could deliberate on the legality of their relationship, fundamentalist Christians waged an equally spectacular protest by covering the stage with human feces, reminding well-wishers and event onlookers of the Bibles purported denunciation of homosexuality as sinful.” Since this dramatic confrontation, most progressive politicians have succumbed to ultraconservative constituents who regularly use pride festivals and other queer celebrations to oppose policies aimed at protecting "sexual minorities" (sóngsosuja). For example, in 2014, just months after being elected to a second term as the mayor of Seoul, Pak Wón-sun suggested that South Korea become the first country in Asia to legalize gay marriage, if only as a token gesture of tolerance aimed at proving the country's cosmopolitan credentials to the region and the wider world.? But, unfortunately for South Korean proponents of same-sex unions, including Kim/Cho and Kim, Taiwan won that honor in May 2017 when the Constitutional Court passed a landmark ruling establishing the illegality of current marriage laws, a decision that has paved the way for gay and lesbian couples in that Asian nation to wed.

From the vantage point of queer activists who have repeatedly called on government officials to adopt nondiscriminatory policies toward LGBTI citizens and their continued demonization by fundamentalist conservatives who brazenly claim that "anal sex is not a human right" (hangmun seksii inkwón i anida), it appears that South Korea, like Taiwan, can be located along a teleological, if highly contentious, trajectory of liberal inclusion at whose end point stands the Holy Grail of marriage equality. Indeed, over the past fifteen years, movements advancing marriage equality have quickly gained currency across many parts of the world, with same-sex weddings becoming legal in much of Western Europe and North America, parts of Latin America and Oceania, and one nation in Africa. In this sense, Pak Wón-suns controversial call for South Korea to engage in what might be called *matrimonial one-upmanship" and activists' own citation of global precedents, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in favor of gay marriage, suggest that the country simply lags behind other parts ofthe world in this respect.* According to this progressive model of “global queering" (on which more later), South Korea will, with the passage of time, eventually join its more advanced counterparts, as the country has since the 1980s in terms of capitalist development and procedural democracy?

However, a closer examination of the sexual minority movement and the conservative heteronationalists who oppose such activism reveal a related but different narrative of queer life in this postcolonial, postauthoritarian society—one that has tended to fall outside the empirical and epistemological purview of a queer studies that continues to privilege North America and Western Europe. Indeed, that most LGBTI-identified South Koreans (for whom marriage equality is ostensibly being advanced) refuse to take a public stance on this fraught issue suggests the need to interrogate the social consequences and intimate stakes of making known or visible their non-normative sexuality or gender variance. As in other parts of the world, in South Korea the practice of marriage not only involves two atomized individuals seeking legal recognition from the state but also deeply implicates family members, intimate friends, and co-workers. For most heterosexual couples entering matrimony, these overlapping communities play crucial roles in actively promoting— but, in the case of queer subjects, potentially endangering— their material security and psychological well-being. Even for the most vocal advocates of same-sex marriage, including Kim/Cho Kwang-su, it took several years to convince his partner, Kim Siing-hwan—and, by extension, his partner's family—to acquiesce to a public ceremony that undoubtedly would catapult them into the national limelight. Although ultimately deciding to bless their sons’ relationship, participation by the couples parents at the 2013 wedding ceremony, which included an emotional speech by Kim/ Cho Kwang-su's mother, subjected them and other relatives to the possibility of what might be called “homophobia (or transphobia) by association,” a concept invoked by several authors in this volume. A variant of “guilt by association" (yónjwaje), a system of collective culpability that was used both before and after the Korean War (1950-53) to punish family members of alleged communists, the phrase refers to a similar stigma that marginalizes sexual minorities and, by extension, their kin.” Such homophobic and transphobic associations can even follow queer Koreans into the diaspora. In the U.S., for example, church and other organizations often form the community around which diasporics seek to protect themselves against racial violence and the economic vicissitudes of their host country, but where they also regularly encounter the anti-LGBTI agenda of conservative community groups." In this sense, the visible participation of some parents in support of their "out" children at recent pride festivals and other public events marks a highly controversial dimension of a queer politics that, in South Korea as elsewhere, remains as much family-oriented as individually based.?

In recent years, the plight of sexual minorities has become a rallying point for some progressive-minded individuals, particularly among millennial South Koreans who, when compared with their older counterparts, tend to support cultural diversity. But the increased visibility and heightened stakes of same-sex marriage have ironically diverted the attention of many non-normative communities away from public advocacy for liberal forms of inclusion, human rights protection, and identity-based politics. Especially in the current age of neoliberal consumption, the internet and other digital technologies, such as smart phone-based dating applications, have enabled a new generation of South Koreans to pursue a wide range of self-oriented practices of intimacy, but without necessarily creating public personas that subject them to endangering forms of alienation from family, society, or nation. Although a Western-centric lens might simplistically characterize their lives as “closeted,” alocally grounded analytic insists that individuals politicized as sexual minorities have deftly carved out an “under-the-radar” presence.” Such clandestine sociality in both on- and off-line spaces has allowed LGBTI South Koreans to cultivate intimacies with other gender-variant or sexually non-normative subjects while attempting to shield themselves from the public scrutiny that only a small number of activists, such as Kim/Cho Kwang-su and Kim Süng-hwan, are willing to endure. Just as remarkable as the large crowds that gathered along the Ch'ónggye Stream in the fall of 2013 to support their symbolic union were many more under-the-radar queers who avoided participating in the celebration precisely because they feared that their presence at that public site would subject them to the kind of legibility they had worked so carefully to avoid." In spite of these efforts, high-ranking military officers have, in recent years, exploited digital technologies to infiltrate gay male subcultures. Subjecting active-duty soldiers to arcane regulations that criminalize same-sex acts (even when consensual and done off base), high-ranking leaders have transformed the private practice of anal sex (kyegan) into charged matters of public concern and national security.

Although same-sex marriage poignantly underscores one fraught aspect of queer life in South Korea today, other historical modes of same-sex sexuality, cross-gender identification, and non-normative intimacies—on the Korean Peninsula and in the diaspora, as well as in relation to Asia and the wider world— remain a troubling oversight that the present volume seeks to address. This blind spot not only plagues present debates about acceptable boundaries of hotly debated issues, such as class inequalities, rampant suicide, sexual harassment, and patriarchal domination as well as labor migration and citizenship rights. It also limits how the past is imagined and recounted in terms of similarly contested processes of Korean modernity, which include colonial rule, nationalist politics, and authoritarian development. The problematic occlusion of queerness in the politicized narration of history is perhaps most apparent in the medias power to frame present manifestations of non-normative practices of gender and sexuality in terms of past traditions, especially by highlighting the purported lack thereof. To return to the frenzied fanfare of 2013, mainstream newspapers heralded the union of Kim/Cho Kwang-su and Kim Süng-hwan as the country's first same-sex wedding." To be sure, efforts to gain official recognition of their relationship marked a turning point insofar as their public ceremony sparked a national debate over legal definitions of matrimony.? However, lost in sensational accounts of this recent case is that gay marriage— whether performed as public ceremonies seeking state protection, conducted to dignify queer relationships in the eyes of family and friends, or adopted as a practical mechanism to protect the economic well-being of marginalized individuals—is neither new nor foreign to the peninsula. Indeed, alarmist reports of the 2013 celebration overlooked previous attempts by same-sex couples to secure recognition of their unions. For example, as early as 2004 a lesbian woman tried to sue her ex-girlfriend to have their relationship accepted as a de facto marriage (sasilhon), an arrangement that protects most heterosexual partners who do not officially wed one another. In the end, the court refused to rule on this attempt to divide the lesbian couple's assets. But the presiding judge, a young man who had studied European precedents, did respond to the precarious situation of sexual minorities by advocating civil unions as a possible way of protecting their relationships.

Although this progressive proposal remains politically unpopular and has yet to bear legal fruit, South Korea boasts an even longer but largely unknown history of same-sex unions, particularly among working-class women. As my contribution documents, such bonds took root after the Korean War, a deadly conflict that severely disrupted heteropatriarchal kinship practices. In response to gynocentric subcultures that emerged in the wake of this national tragedy, journalists routinely covered female-female wedding ceremonies from the 1950s to the 1980s, if only as an entertaining tactic of profitmaking that minimized the economic struggles of single or abandoned women. Not unlike media accounts of the 2013 celebration, postwar reports repeatedly cited these queer unions as the county's first, even to the point of obvious incredulity. Their accuracy notwithstanding, sensational accounts of same-sex weddings, I argue, sought to accommodate nonconforming practices of kinship into the country's hetero-marital culture. They did so by describing male-dressed women as "husbands" and female-dressed women as their “wives,” rather than referencing the subcultural terms paji-ssi (Ms. Pants) and ch'ima-ssi (Ms. Skirt) used by queer women to express their desires for one another. Underscoring the unsustainability and evanescence of their relationships, such profitmaking reports also functioned as cautionary tales aimed at redirecting subversive forms of homoeroticism toward advancing the (re)productive goals of capitalist accumulation and national loyalty.

In addition to offering historicized accounts that recall such charged moments of social and cultural anxiety, Queer Korea examines the ongoing effects of these pasts in “a field of power that seeks to silence, erase, and assimilate all non-normative expressions and desires."6 To this end, we use interdisciplinary methods such as close reading, archival research, visual analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork to trace the understudied ways in which queerness has been represented and, more often than not, exploited to consolidate idealized notions of family and community, as well as compulsory paths of development and citizenship. By exploring the instrumentalist nature of discourses and practices of non-normative sexuality and gender variance, the volume challenges privileged but limited forms of knowledge that have tended to advance nationalist trajectories and similarly homogenizing operations of power. Like media accounts, most academic narratives of Korea continue to neglect critical insights offered by a sustained focus on queerness, which they often implicitly consider a foreign or threatening presence to collective images of the self, whether defined in national, religious, sexual/ gendered, or other terms. To be sure, the number of students interested in LGBTI-related topics at South Korean universities has grown dramatically in recent years. But in a society that discouraged queer subjects from documenting or verbalizing their experiences until at least the 1990s, even the most eager researchers struggle to locate relevant texts to analyze and willing informants to interview. Perhaps more detrimental, many students lack institutional support for their research, forcing some to pursue graduate degrees at overseas universities. Although a small coterie of dedicated scholars have succeeded in publishing pioneering studies on non-normative sexuality and gender variance, few can succeed in an academy that remains disinterested in, if not hostile to, queer studies." For their part, most activists, although often trained in graduate programs, are so occupied with countering LGBTI discrimination that they cannot adequately investigate how past representations of “problematic” bodies endanger their present-oriented tactics of survival.

Such epistemological and political conditions inform the urgent nature of this intellectual project, which began as an international conference, film festival, and art installation at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in the fall of 2014. From its inception, the project, then entitled “Remembering Queer Korea,’ aimed to facilitate a multilingual and multidirectional traffic in textual and visual forms, both from Korean contexts to English ones and vice versa. Unfortunately, readers of this volume no longer have access to the films that UCSD subtitled and screened in partnership with the Pacific Arts Movement, a San Diego-based film organization, or a version of Siren Eun Young Jung's “(Off)Stage/Masterclass (2013)," an exhibition that addressed the nearly forgotten history of South Korea's all-female theater (yósóng kukkük).? However, that spirit of transnational dialogue appears here in terms of two expertly translated essays by scholars and activists based in South Korea. These essays offer readers unprecedented access to pioneering research on queer Korea produced by intellectuals working in linguistic and cultural environments that differ from, but engage with, those of our English-language authors, many of whom were also raised in Korean and diasporic communities.

As editor, I thus attempted to foreground scholars, filmmakers, and artists based in South Korea on whom many of us based outside the peninsula rely for inspiration. But in the end, many essays published in this volume were written by academics anchored in North America. A critical and geographic distance from Korea likely enabled these authors to approach their subjects without having to negotiate the myriad institutional and cultural barriers that make generating knowledge about queerness on the peninsula so difficult. Such conditions are perhaps most noticeable in the notable absence of work on North Korea, information about which most scholars lack access or interest.2° However, this apparent dearth does not mean that North Korea fails to impinge on the consciousness of South Korea—or that South Korea fails to impinge on the consciousness of the North. Nor should it signal that North Korea cannot or should not be a part of what is written about the peninsula, which remains dominated by a focus on South Korea. If these rival states succeed in formally ending the Korean War (or eventually reunifying) and opening their borders to one another, silenced histories of non-normative sexuality and gender variance in North Korea will likely teach us much about the lived experiences of this postcolonial authoritarian state, one guided by nationalistsocialist principles and Kim family rule. Indeed, the guiding premise of Queer Korea is that such Cold War geopolitics directly inform the vernacular languages and the local politics of non-normativity on the peninsula and among its diasporic communities. As such, the chapters that follow do not simply explore these trans- and intranational articulations of queerness as recuperative exercises that only aim to locate LGBTI subjects in Korean history. By authenticating their marginalized position in the nation, the resurrection of such “subjugated knowledges” will likely benefit sexual minorities, especially those who embrace identity politics and other forms of liberal inclusion. While encouraging these possibilities, we also explore past expressions of Korean queerness to reveal the regulatory mechanisms and resistant forces foreclosed or enabled by a shifting set of geopolitical conditions and related epistemologies. We aim to support related narratives of and struggles for empowerment—for example, by the disabled, foreign migrants, “half-bloods,” single women, and the proletarian classes—that revolve around similar and overlapping dynamics of mystification, obfuscation, and marginalization.

In this spirit, Queer Korea problematizes how practices of non-normative sexuality and gender variance have been consistently ignored or thought away, as suggested earlier by the purported novelty and foreignness of same-sex marriage. To counter such popular and academic myths, we attend to pervasive forms of "queer blindness" that surround the peninsula and its inhabitants, typically described in nationalist narratives as the collective victims of Japanese colonialism, civil war, national division, Cold War rivalries, and other tragedies of the twentieth century (and before). Due to these traumatic experiences, scholars have tended to frame Korean society and culture in terms of ethnoracial and heteropatriarchal purities. To be sure, these "survivalist epistemologies" aimed to create living spaces for a community understood as consistently beleaguered by outside forces. However, both nationalist and postnationalist narratives have overlooked critical light that non-normative sexuality and gender variance can shed on the operation of successive and intersecting structures of power, including colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and neoliberalism. When considered in these expansive ways, queerness emerges as an important dynamic of Korean history and a revealing analytic of its society and culture, rather than appearing as a disruptive force or an internecine form of subversion.

In addition to queering a Korean studies that remains nationalistically heteronormative, our examination of the peninsula contributes to critiques of queer studies that have focused on displacing Euro-American forms of non-normative sexuality and gender variance. Despite its ongoing reputation as the world's “hermit kingdom, the peninsula functioned as a particularly intense site of transnationality during both the colonial and postcolonial periods.” Queer studies of Korea thus serve as much more than an Orientalist object of inquiry or a Cold War application of area studies.” In the essays that follow, Korea serves as a critical space to examine what Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel have called the “geopolitics of queer studies'—in this case, one closely connected to such historical processes as colonial modernity, authoritarian development, and neoliberal familialism.? Like much new scholarship on queer Asia, the volume aims to “provincialize” approaches to non-normative sexuality and gender nonconformity that remain anchored in North American and Western European contexts of liberal pluralism and multicultural assimilation. As the example of same-sex marriage mentioned earlier illustrates, some South Korean activists are clearly pushing their state to create the conditions necessary for the political inclusion of sexual minorities as normalized objects of human rights. However, in a postcolonial society that, even after the formal end of authoritarian rule in 1993, continues to exclude them from such protections and regularly exposes them to various forms of cultural alienation, most queer subjects have consciously avoided the kind of public visibility that typically undergirds identity politics. Foregrounding such predicaments, Queer Korea shifts our attention to historical junctures when nonliberal regimes have sought to control the purported monstrosity of bodily differences or erase them as threats to organic conceptions of family, society, nation, or empire. In highlighting these politicized moments of the peninsula's past, we strive to formulate new ways to think and act beyond the politics of despair and violence that have come to dominate the present.“ Although legal arrangements such as same-sex marriage may solve this predicament for some individuals, we should not assume that its liberal and assimilationist tenants will necessarily create conditions of survival and well-being for many others whose life practices relegate them to the fringes of social respectability and cultural acceptability. Perhaps it is only from this uncomfortably queer position, or what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism,’ that marginalized subjects on the peninsula and in similar sites of abjection can imagine new possibilities for liberation, but ones that do not necessarily rely on a hostile state or a sensationalizing media to promote their economic viability and emotional fulfillment.”

Unruly Subjects under Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity

Whether the object of empirical study or the subject of critical analysis, queerness has remained largely invisible in research on the peninsula, buried under male- and elite-centered accounts that have overwhelmingly focused on the tribulations of a modernizing nation. In historical accounts of Korea, the experiences of Japanese rule (1910-45) and, later, of anticommunist or anticapitalist development under postcolonial authoritarianism have tended to dominate, leaving little room for non-normative stories of the past.2° When mentioned at all, individuals who do not figure as “proper” subjects of these collectivized narratives— including, but not limited to, those engaging in non-normative sexuality or exhibiting gender variance—were made hypervisible as social threats or, worse yet, rendered as pro-Japanese collaborators.” Although such labels gained currency during the colonial era, pundits later deployed them as potent tools of subjectification during and after the Korean War.” In the ongoing context of Cold War politics, triumphant expressions of heteronormativity and cisgenderism have persisted as powerful ideologies of national security that aim to promote and ensure bodily purity on both sides of the 38th Parallel. In North Korea, for example, media and literary images of reproductive wholesomeness continue to function as a key strategy of collective mobilization in its historic struggle against an allegedly hedonistic south, which, along with the U.S., its patron state, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leaders regularly accuse of fomenting homosexuality and related "perversions.? Much the same can be said of South Korea, where in recent years a growing number of fundamentalist Christians boldly charge sexual minorities with harboring pro- North Korean tendencies and spreading the AIDS virus, but without providing evidence to validate their exaggerated and exclusionary claims.?? In these alarmist formulas, “homophobia (and transphobia) by association” extends far beyond the stigmatizing confines of one’s biological family, transforming individual expressions of non-normative sexuality or gender variance into national threats that purportedly demand vigilant surveillance, repeated punishment, and even further marginalization.

Through such instrumentalist discourses of deviance, representations of queerness have aimed to accommodate nonconforming bodily practices to the (re)productive aims of successive regimes on the Korean Peninsula.*! Although never fully successful, these “epistemological interventions,” as I call them in my essay on female homoeroticism (see chapter 6), worked to assimilate the imagined monstrosity of corporal differences, harnessing them to collective ends. When not already denigrated in these ways, nationalist and most postnationalist scholars have largelyignored the subcultures of “perverse” bodies, deeming them insignificant or embarrassing to their respective intellectual agendas, whether feminist, Marxist, or otherwise. By contrast, the authors in this volume actively recall such moments of forgetfulness and denunciation in both historical and epistemological processes of cultural homogenization. Together, they question such heteronormalizing forces as imperialism, nationalism, militarism, and industrialization, focusing on the lived experiences of

“unruly” subjects and their subordinated status in archival, visual, literary, and ethnographic registers. Meanwhile, we eschew ghettoized approaches to marginality that treat queerness only in terms of minority or visibility paradigms. As mentioned earlier, this liberal model emerged in South Korea only during the 1990s and still does not include North Korea. Rather than assuming the pervasiveness of a globalized logic of identity politics, we deploy queer analytics to interrogate disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical structures of normalization that have come to weigh on all residents of the peninsula, albeit in considerably uneven ways. Queer Korea thus seeks to complicate narratives that tend to advance, rather than to question, collective state goals, such as androcentric familialism and capitalist (or socialist) development.

Several decades before Japanese officials managed to forcibly annex the peninsula in 1910, a concerned group of male intellectuals, most trained in the Confucian classics, appointed themselves as the patriarchal guardians ofthe Chosón Court (1392-1910), which, in their view, desperately required “modernization" to retain national autonomy. Although sharing many of the same reformist goals, these elites adamantly opposed the tactics of their lower-class counterparts, including the millenarian ideas advocated by Eastern Learning (tonghak) adherents and the antiestablishment agendas of other grassroots movements, including the first generation of Korean feminists.” To guide the masses under their tutelage, some nationalist leaders abandoned Confucian praxis in favor of Western- and Japanese-inspired models of “civilization and enlightenment" (munmyóng kaehwa). However, the epistemic frames of this modernist paradigm tended to replicate those of their imperialist counterparts, thereby undercutting the ability of nationalists to retain Korea’s sovereignty.? Although couched in familiar terms of Confucian statecraft, even “Eastern values and Western skills” (tongdo sógi), an indigenous style of modernization aimed at placating conservative court stalwarts, also foundered as a strategy to protect the Great Han Empire (1897-1910) at a dangerous time of imperialist incursions.** After annexation, the nature and pace of reform fell into the hands of Japanese rulers who adroitly hijacked the nation-building efforts of Korean elites while actively resurrecting and idealizing heteropatriarchal traditions as the moral basis of a new colonial modernity, not unlike early Meiji leaders had done at home.

For emasculated leaders now expected to serve a foreign empire, the traumatic experience of Japanese occupation informed which individuals appeared in an increasingly defensive narrative of the nation and how Koreans were positioned, or sought to position themselves, as legitimate subjects of that collective history. For example, patriarchal invocations of womens lowly status as a worrisome barometer of Korea purportedly lagging “level of civilization" (mindo) nationalized the concerns of this marginalized, but increasingly vocal, subpopulation. On the one hand, bourgeois instrumentalizations of illiterate Korean women produced an androcentric view of femininity that ironically converged with imperialist and Christian views of “benighted” and “heathen” subjects in desperate need of education, if only to promote their cultivation as “wise mothers and good wives" (hyónmo yangch'à). On the other hand, such male-dominated discourses did encourage a small group of educated New Women (sinyósóng) to seek liberation from a refortified system of heteropatriarchy.*°

Amid this gender warfare, government officials, medical doctors, and other regulatory professionals in colonial Korea came to define “women” and “men” in epistemologically binary and biologically dimorphic terms. In mirrorlike fashion, these terms extended to equally rigid notions of femininity and masculinity. Such powerful categories of sex and gender worked to obfuscate a wide range of queer practices and non-normative life courses adopted by colonized Koreans and Japanese settlers.*° During the Asia-Pacific War (1937-45), officials adopted the same binary paradigm to categorize “imperial subjects” (hwang guk sinmin) as dutifully abiding by or treacherously deviating from bodily norms aimed at maintaining a system of reproductive heterosexuality on which colonial capitalism relied. A lack of empirical traces in colonialist, nationalist, and missionary archives, especially those voiced by queer subjects themselves, have restricted scholars’ ability to appreciate how unruly bodies were, like those of so-called New Women, of critical importance to the powerful confluence of imperialism and nationalism, as well as other modes of collective mobilization and individual contestation, such as socialism and anarchism.*”

In her essay on shamanism, Merose Hwang reveals this important point by demonstrating the understudied role that this folk religion, later described as the quintessential spirit of the Korean people, played in the regulatory imagination of both imperial authorities and colonized nationalists. She locates the queerness of sorcerers, fortunetellers, and female entertainers—a motley group placed under police surveillance by the Government-General and the intellectual scrutiny of native intellectuals—in their ability to disrupt eliteand male-dominated formulas of colonial modernity, both of which treated popular practices of spiritual healing as superstition. For bourgeois nationalists seeking to promote a morally “healthy” society as the foundation of independence, members of the Sowi Church Guild thus figured as an unruly problem of (self-)governance. Although accused by male nationalists as collaborators (a label many would later apply to them), adherents of the guild boldly dressed in the cultural garb of their colonial overlords as devotees of Shinto, the Japanese spirituality used by the Government-General to “assimilate" Koreans.?? Imagining the marginalized perspective of the guild, Hwang argues that its resourceful members, many of them female masters of ritual performance, donned the disruptive "drag" of spiritual respectability to survive under an increasingly watchful regime, especially in the wake of a major nationalist uprising in 1919. Even as they provided their colonizers with outward compliance, shamans questioned elites’ embrace of heteropatriarchy and their concern with controlling the nations religious traditions. Hwang also shows that colonial-period efforts at regulation followed longer histories of state violence and social displacement, contexts that explain why disaffected Koreans gravitated to these healers.

Rather than being denigrated as a dangerous presence in their colonized nation, shamanic leaders appeared in another politicized guise as heroically resistant, even in their very queerness. Hwang thus reveals that Korean ritualists straddled a narrow space among colonial control, cultural erasure, and nationalist appropriation. Although reviled for not marrying women and accused of engaging in sexual perversion, well-known male intellectuals such as Ch'oe Nam-són (1890-1957) and Yi Nüng-hwa (1869-1945) exploited the precolonial traditions of these marginalized women to forge a glorious story of the nation, one that re-centered Korea and Manchuria in a larger, continental culture of shamanism. Having elevated this Pan-Korean identity above a Japan-dominated ideology of common ancestry, transgender practices, same-sex unions, and other queer customs now appeared as core attributes of a proud indigenous culture. If masculinized under the guidance of nationalist intellectuals, this culture could, according to their heteronormalizing agenda, serve as a bulwark against colonial assimilation. Demonstrating how shamans negotiated their position and livelihood through archives of official denunciation and cultural appropriation, Hwang highlights the subversive nature of these popular ritualists, exposing the powerful but contradictory dynamics of colonial rule and nationalist politics.