Banal Security

Front matter

Timothy Gitzen

Banal security

Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses

Chapter 1: Of Specters, Soldiers, and Sodomy Chapter 2: Queer States of Security

Chapter 3: Narratives of Biopolitical Surveillance Chapter 4: Relationality in the Time of Viruses Chapter 5: The Terrorism Zeitgeist

Epilogue: Security’s Undoing

Notes References

Index xiii

121 153 183

191 201 223

Figures

Map of South Korea

Figure 1: 2015 KQCF Diagram Figure 2: Homosexual Disease Figure 3: Conquering MERS Figure 4: Quarantine Barricades Figure 5: Christian Party Platform Figure 6: LGBT Out

Figure 7: No Entry

Figure 8: Interrogation Room

For Jaewon and a friendship as brilliant as the cosmos

Acknowledgements

It is perhaps a futile effort to find a way to thank everyone who has helped shape the research, conception, and writing of this book given the fact that, when writing a book, one never fully knows how random encounters and conversations affect the all-encompassing process that is the writing of a book. So, I ask for grace for the inherent incompleteness of these acknowledgments and those individuals I inadvertently leave out. The people named herein are to be thanked for their contribution, but I also view them as part of my own intellectual genealogy and journey.

I am first and foremost indebted to my South Korean interlocutors as they shared their experiences, thoughts, and critiques during my fieldwork and after. While I had not initially conceived of a project that focused on the lives of Korean queer activists, their determination in their work, their conviction in their daily lives, weaved into the social justice imperative that became the backbone of this book. They instilled in me many of the characteristics I carry forward in my research and teaching: an eye toward social change and justice. Their friendships and shared stories are quintessential not only to this book but to who I am as an academic, a researcher, an educator, and a person.

The profound effect those friendships and stories had on me and my work is telling, but also fits within the training I was receiving at the University of Minnesota under the guidance of David Valentine. In hindsight it should have made sense at the time of research that I was drawn to queer activism given David's own work and influence on my methodological and theoretical disposition. David did more than just ask a few inquisitive questions: he took the leap with me. His mentorviii Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses ship, keen writerly eye, and adaptability over the years were part and parcel of my training, fieldwork, and writing of this book. But, above all, he taught me perhaps the most important lesson that I share with colleagues, mentees, and students: lead through kindness. In these pandemic and politically insecure times, such a lesson matters even more.

Kindness and generosity also best describe Ilana Gershon, a dear friend, mentor, and my academic fairy godsister. No matter how big or small the problem I am facing may be, I know she will be there to problem-solve and call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called. We immediately bonded over our love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and have grown even closer with our shared interests in popular culture, good coffee, and the ridiculousness of the academic job market. Yet Ilana is also someone who can listen to me talk about my research and find the lines that connect the seemingly disparate dots: see the forest when all I see are the trees. She saw firsthand the trials and tribulations—and understands quite well the roller coaster of emotions I felt—of crafting and publishing this book. I am lucky to have her as a friend and have her in my proverbial corner.

Friendships form the bedrock of this book, and one remains instrumental in my life as a scholar. Elliott Prasse-Freeman is one of the few individuals who has read several drafts of this book, and in fact reads drafts of virtually everything I write. Our regular communication keeps me grounded, and our conversations make me a better scholar. Elliott challenges me to think deeper, to “turn the dialectical key one more time” in my thinking and my writing. I am a significantly better anthropologist, thinker, and writer because of him, and his intellectual prowess weaves through the pages of this book in ways that perhaps only I can see. We are cut from the same cloth, both with unwavering work ethics and an innate desire to be and do better.

Acknowledgements ix

Blair Williams, and Mike Crandol. In addition, the friendship I formed with Samantha Porter has, to this day, been one of the most important and supportive relationships in both my professional and personal lives.

I was grateful to spend a year as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in the Institute for Korean Studies at Indiana University and work with Seung-kyung Kim. Along with the guidance of John Finch, Susan Hwang, and Sara Friedman, my time at Indiana helped cultivate the outline of this book and parts of its first draft. I also formed an intellectual and personal friendship with Benjamin Ale-Ebrahim, who continues to be a sounding board for all things queer and media.

Perhaps the most unexpected journey I made in the path to write this book came in 2019, when I moved to Hong Kong for a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. The time spent in Hong Kong—turbulent thanks to both prodemocracy protests and the Covid-19 pandemic—resulted in the current iteration of this book. I am grateful to Giorgio Biancorosso for taking a chance on me and my research and his guidance in the Society, along with Paul Cha, Alvin Wong, and Elizabeth LaCouture for their unwavering kindness and guidance while in Hong Kong. In addition, special thanks are due to my fellow colleagues from my time at HKU: Claire Gullander-Rolet, Catherine Culvahouse Fox, Linus Huang, Pete Millwood, Trude Renwick, Dylan Suher, Beth Harper, David Karlander, Scott Trigg, Yunfei Bai, Areti Theofilopoulou, and Nicholas Y. H. Wong. HKU is also where I met a ragtag group of anthropologists from other departments who were encouraging in the writing of this book. I am especially thankful to Laura Meek for reading draft chapters, for her friendship, and for our fancy lunches and dinners that we continue to this day.

While my time at Wake Forest University has so far been short, it has been filled with supportive colleagues in the Anthropology Department and across the college. These include Margaret Bender, Sherri Lawson Clark, Steve Folmar, Karin Friederic, Andrew Gurstelle, Jieun Lee, Ellen Miller, Nisrine Rahal, Paul Thacker, Mir Yarfitz, and Rosemary McCarthy. Special thanks are due to Jessica MacLellan and Julie Velazquez Runk for their friendship and support as all three of us adjust to life at Wake Forest.

I am fortunate as well to have accumulated a growing number of friends and colleagues in academia that deserve acknowledgment, x Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses including Jennifer Patico, Cassandra White, John (Song Pae) Cho, Bonnie Tilland, Juwon Lee, Wonkeun Chun, Horim Yi, Hae Seo Kim, Elias Alexander, Yookyeong Im, Alex Nelson, Sam Perry, CedarBough Saeji, Seong-Jo Jeong, Yonglim Choung, and Donghyeon Lim. I am also indebted to Seoul National University’s Institute of Cross-Cultural Studies for hosting me during much of my fieldwork, along with the faculty at Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Center for both training me in advanced Korean and indulging in my flights of fancy. Furthermore, I am incredibly thankful for the efforts of Helsinki University Press, the AHEAD series and editorial board, along with Hanne Appelqvist and Anna-Mari Vesterinen for their continued support of my vision for this book.

Finally, what is an acknowledgment if not a place to thank family, my father in particular, who is responsible for my work ethic and has supported me every step of the way. Mathew Wachtor, an unmatchable best friend, has been with me through thick and thin and remains a central pillar that keeps me grounded.

Portions of Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 have been previously published in “The Limits of Family: Military Law and Sex Panics in Contemporary South Korea” in the journal positions: asia critique 29(3), and “Viral Entanglements: Biosecurity, Sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in South Korea” in the journal Current Anthropology 64(2). Parts of the book were first explored in an Anthropology News piece entitled “On Banal Security” on June 17, 2020. Part of Chapter 3 was originally published in Items: Insights from the Social Sciences on September 23, 2021 in the article “Pandemic Surveillance and Homophobia in South Korea” with Wonkeun Chun as part of the series “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences.” Reprinted with permission. Items is a digital publication of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This book was supported by the 2022 Korean Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-P-006). Parts of this research were also assisted by the Social Science Research Council's Rapid-Response Grants on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences, with funds provided by the SSRC, the Henry Luce Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Finally, portions of this research and writing have been funded by the

Acknowledgements xi

Korea Foundation, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Minnesota. I use known or preferred spellings of Korean names throughout the book. Other transliterated Korean names or words follow the McCune-Reischauer Romanization system. All usages of “Korea” refer to South Korea. All Korean translations are my own, assisted by dictionaries and friends, unless noted otherwise.

xii Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses

130°

Yellow Sea

34° = 0 100 km 7 JAPANS: e) Q z z

| | Demilitarized zone Elevation (mamsl)

== State border i Above 1,000

Map of South Korea. Map designed by Hannu Linkola.

Preface

The Time of Viruses

The Covid-19 pandemic seemed to usher in the time of viruses. Sitting comfortably in a predominately maskless North Carolina, United States, in December 2022, four vaccination shots deep, I look back at the pandemic’s dominance and the multiple millions of people dead in the last three years while also looking forward at a guaranteed uncertainty about the future: what happens when the next one hits? Many scientists claim that this pandemic was just the beginning; not only is the next virus on the horizon but it is most likely already here. While the 1918 influenza pandemic that saw a third of the world’s population infected may have left a viral mark on the 20th century, the quickening of different viral outbreaks in the 21st century—from various animal influenzas (e.g., swine flu and bird flu) to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV)—frames the Covid-19 pandemic as the latest, albeit significantly more intense, biosecurity threat facing the world. It is this turn to the virus and its biosecurity implications, the threat it poses to national and even global populations, that engenders a sense that we have truly entered the time of viruses.

Yet, while Covid-19 seemed to usher in the time of viruses, for queer communities that era began long ago. For queer men in the United States, the time of viruses often meant a literal death sentence. Indeed, the 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of the AIDS epidemic, caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), with hundreds of thousands of deaths while the Reagan administration did little to address the situation. That said, the social and political effects were more ambiguous. While social stigma made the queer body a vector xiv Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses of disease through HIV from the 1980s onwards, activist groups such as Act Up politicized the virus and created communities of solidarity.

For South Korean queer men, by contrast, HIV did not provide the opportunity for such rehabilitation. This was due to the restriction of the public sphere and a collective hatred of homosexuality that ran even deeper than in the United States. What was worse, where American men with HIV bore no impact on security concerns, this book demonstrates how the mundaneness of national security in Korea, brought on by over half a century of perpetual North Korean threats, transformed queer men through HIV into a threat to the very survival of the nation. I argue that it is this context, what I call banal security, that compels queer Koreans to participate in their own securitization for the sake of biopolitical inclusion into the Korean citizenry. This intervention facilitates connections to other contexts where similar features inhere, providing the ethnographic material herein a trajectory outside the silo of Korea.

HIV became one way for the South Korean government and Korean citizens to interpret queer Koreans as disruptions and threats to the nation’s security, but it is not the only one. Not only are the bodies of queer men—assumed to be HIV-positive—considered biological threats to the purity of the Korean family and nation, but queer soldiers supposedly leave the military compromised and open for an attack. Queer soldiers do this, judicial rulings stipulate, by distracting other soldiers with their nonnormativity and the possibility of sex, and such distraction pulls otherwise capable and loyal soldiers, read as straight, away from their duties. Consequently, queer cultures and peoples are equated to threats to Korean culture, and queer festival participants require constant police supervision as potential disruptions. The Covid-19 pandemic certainly exacerbated some of these threat associations with an early May 2020 outbreak inside gay bars and clubs, as I explore in a subsequent chapter. Not only was this outbreak not the first viral epidemic in Korea to entangle queer Koreans to viruses and stigmas at the microbial level but it fit within a more convoluted narrative and framing that saw queer Koreans, queer activism/politics, and national security uncomfortably entwined. While uncomfortable for queer Koreans and activists, especially as national security compels participation from all national subjects, I demonstrate in the chapters that follow how this seemingly bizarre entanglement of sexuality and security speaks to a sociocultural logic in Korea that builds on over 70 years of history.

Preface xv

To speak of the time of viruses in South Korea, then, is to both centralize the queer Korean body as the viral figure—the queer body as the threat from within that corrupts “healthy” Koreans—and trace the immediate antecedents of this current (and future) viral era. It is to expand the parameters of the time of viruses to before the Covid-19 pandemic, recognizing that the discrimination that befell queer folks in the wake of that May 2020 outbreak was part of a wider enlacement of security and sexuality that routinely produces security-laden discrimination.

The work for this book began from earlier stories shared with me by college-aged queer South Korean men about their relationships with each other and their families. I was a graduate student from the US learning Korean and Korean Studies when I met them, navigating my own relationships as a gay man who had recently come out. I watched as they began talking about military service, the dread that they faced in anticipating their service as queer men. Yet what started as an ethnography of the military transformed in scale and scope during fieldwork in 2013, as the object of national security came into focus despite how mundane national security had become as a result of continuous North-South tensions.

North Korea does pose a legitimate threat to the South insofar as North Korea has attempted presidential assassinations; has taken South Koreans hostage; presumably sank the ROKS Cheonan in 2010, killing 46; bombarded Yeonpyeong Island in 2010, killing five to ten individuals; and continues to enunciate threats against South Korea. But these threats have existed since the armistice agreement between North and South was signed in 1953, and, while the South's authoritarian decades from the 1960s to the 1980s witnessed most of the North’s provocations, the threat is always there, mere miles from South Korea's capital. These reminders of the military, security, and the threat of North Korea pervade South Korea, but the discourses surrounding these infrastructures, policies, and events—that the threat from North Korea is imminent—equally contribute to not only their pervasion but their usage in Koreans’ daily lives. More surprising, citizens, politicians, doctors, military officers, judges, and presidents were mobilizing national security to target queer Koreans, claiming that queer xvi Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses soldiers disrupt military readiness, that homosexuals are carriers of disease, and that queer folks are threats to familial, ethnic, and cultural purity. In part, this book asks how this happened: how did national security become a discourse to be mobilized against gender and sexual minorities? What does such mobilization and treatment of queer folks as national security disruptions and threats say, then, about Korea, the nation, and security? And what does an anthropological approach to national security in Korea entail? Queerness became my answer and my method, the way to see national security as an object in dire need of excavation and critique. Queerness compels me to challenge the totalizing and mystical qualities of national security by looking to those deemed disruptions and threats—and the margins whence they came. Doing so traces the ways national security manufactures normativity that enables security institutions, states, and citizens to thus target the nonnormative as disruptions and threats.

Methods and Ethics

This book is the result of an amalgamation of different research methods spanning from 2013 to 2021, combining ethnography with qualitative interviews, analysis of science and technology studies, critical legal analysis, queer theory, and discourse analysis.

The ethnographic fieldwork that punctuates the book began in the summers of 2013 and 2014, continuing through 2015 and 2016, with follow-up trips in the fall of 2019. It consisted primarily of participant observation at protests, workshops, symposiums, gatherings, discussions, parties, festivals, and press events related to queer people and issues. This included events such as the discussion by South Korea's Human Rights Organizations Network of the UN Human Rights Committee's 2015 report into civil and political rights in the country, the LGBTI Human Rights Forum, and the Korean Queer Culture Festival. I was also involved in queer activist organizations, and as a result I met several key activists. Interviews thus emerged primarily out of my participant observation and happened intermittently throughout my fieldwork. Here, it is important to recognize my positionality as a cisgender white man with US citizenship; this facilitated some of my relationships and conversations while at times hindering others.

Engagement with interlocutors and interviewees took place in conjunction with both the University of Minnesota's Institutional Review

Preface xvii

Board (IRB) and the University of Hong Kong’s Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), both of which I was affiliated with while conducting my research. My dissertation (2018) and a book chapter based on it were also derived from this fieldwork. I was publicly accused of ethical lapses in those writings, a situation which I addressed in a statement available on my website (www.timothygitzen.com/statement). The present volume does not include any mention of individuals discussed in this online statement or the stories they shared with me.

All of those I interviewed during my fieldwork knew who I was and about my research given my growing reputation as a researcher with activists and organizations. I obtained verbal informed consent from my interlocutors, some of whom also provided written consent. All names of interlocutors and interviewees used in this book are pseudonyms that I created. In some cases I have credited different data obtained from a single interlocutor or interviewee to multiple individuals, while in other instances I have merged multiple interlocutors or interviewees into a composite character. The purpose of both of these strategies was to further anonymize interlocutors and interviewees. Observations of public events, particularly those in outside public spaces, did not focus on individuals, and I do not include any identifying information in my accounts of those events.

One subset of qualitative interviews featured in Chapter 3 was collected between 2020 and 2021 during a collaborative project with my colleague in Korea, Wonkeun Chun. Twenty-four Korean individuals were interviewed about the May 2020 outbreak of Covid-19 that happened in gay bars and clubs in the queer districts of Itaewon (It’aewon) and Jongro (Chongno) in Seoul, South Korea. Most interviewees were gay, they ranged in age from their early 20s to their mid-40s, and they either frequented these spaces or worked with individuals who did so. Interviews and transcriptions were completed by Chun and three research assistants in Seoul, while I conducted all the data analysis and writing associated with the interview data. All interviewees featured in Chapter 3 provided written informed consent, and Chun is in possession of the consent forms. All the transcribed interview data was anonymized by Chun and the team prior to my analysis and writing.

The inclusion of Covid-19-related data made sense for multiple reasons. Not only were the surveillance practices I had witnessed earlier, between 2013 and 2016, intensified after the May 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, but there was a return of the medical discrimination and xviii Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses association of queer folks with biosecurity logics and practices evident during the 2015 outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

I consider analysis of science and technology studies, critical legal analysis, and discourse analysis part of the anthropological toolbox, but they also appropriately intersect with feminist and queer studies. I examine laws and judicial rulings (Chapter 1), the use of surveillance technologies (Chapter 3), public health and medical policies and practices (Chapter 4), elections and an antiterrorism bill (Chapter 5), and a variety of recent media reports pertaining to security, protests, and viral outbreaks (throughout each chapter). I mention these different methodological and analytical forms to state that while I identify as a queer anthropologist, this book targets a wider audience beyond anthropology. I consider it a transdisciplinary book, especially given the queer theorists that fundamentally inform it (as I explore in the Introduction).

Most of my fieldwork took place in Seoul during the presidency of Park Geun-hye (Pak Ktin-hye) (2013-2017) and the control of the National Assembly by her conservative party (Liberty Korea Party). Park was impeached in early 2017 after months of historic candlelight vigils denouncing her corruption. At the time of my fieldwork, however, Park’s unpopularity was still growing, mobilizing in response to her perceived mishandling of the 2014 Sewðl ferry disaster, in which 304 people died when the ferry sank, including 250 high-school students. Under Park, Korea experienced a resurgence of authoritarian policies, including the growing authority of the executive branch and the National Intelligence Service, but also increased demonstrations and political activism. Parks presidency and the tensions, frustrations, and uneasiness it created for progressives and my interlocutors color my ethnography and this book.

More importantly, the years of her presidency were formative in both the development of the national security assemblage and the mobilization of that assemblage to target queer people and bodies. It would be easy to assume, given Park’s impeachment and the defeat of the Liberty Korea Party in the National Assembly in both 2016 and 2020, that things will “get better” for queer people, but that implies that conservatives and anti-LGBT protesters alone are to blame. They may

Preface xix certainly incite a great deal of homophobia, but part of my argument is that when the treatment of queer folks is tied to national security, these queer folks are enmeshed into a living memory of fear and uncertainty around peninsular destruction and material existence. Those feelings and memories of fear infiltrate the daily lives of all Koreans in a myriad of ways and have become banal. Such banality is palpable in the ethnographic encounters, stories, and experiences that weave through this book, often trading the sensational for the mundane to accentuate the ordinariness of national security.

Introduction

(B)anal Security

Panic has descended onto South Koreas landscape. Fear permeates Korean laws, policies, and social discourse over conscripted male soldiers having sex with each other to the extent that military courts have sentenced soldiers as recent as 2017 to prison time for having consensual sex with other male soldiers in the privacy of their own homes. One army captain, days before his set discharge date from mandatory military service—a requirement for all able-bodied South Korean men—was arrested on these exact charges on May 24, 2017. This case ignited a firestorm of queer and anti-militarization activism that claimed that this army captain was part of a much larger blacklisting of male soldiers for their sexual practices (Park 2017; Choe 2017). The Military Human Rights Center, in particular, provided evidence to the press of a broader conspiracy to coerce soldiers to track, out, and arrest queer male soldiers, supposedly orchestrated by Army Chief of Staff Chang Chun-gyu. The center even provided screenshot evidence of Jackd, a gay dating application, featuring soldiers attempting to out other soldiers on the application (Park 2017). The pretense of the military’s denial is set against laws that punish same-sex sex for soldiers. Article 6 of Section 92 of the Military Penal Code, instituted in 1962, outlaws anal sex and other “indecent sexual acts,’ and under this clause the unnamed army captain was arrested and convicted with jail time. While there have been past cases of soldiers charged under the anti-sodomy law, this was the first reported incident of the military proactively seeking out suspected queer soldiers. This is a form of queer entrapment, whereby the military coerces known queer soldiers to trick other queer soldiers into outing themselves to then be prosecuted. The law itself is horrendous, queer and human rights activists contend, but the flagrant use of military authority and coercion to prosecute under this law sets a dangerous and violent precedent. This amid the fact that these entrapment practices are being carried out on young men required by law to serve, many of whom are between the ages of 18 and 24.

The experience of mandatory military service is more than an 18-month experience; it is a lifetime-making, gender-making, and society-crafting endeavor. Not only are all boys oriented toward their service from a young age but men consistently refer to their military service for the rest of their lives. Perhaps more materially, men are required to serve in the military reserves until their 40s, participating in yearly reserve training. Yet queer Koreans are in a far more vulnerable position as they face both the legal requirement of their service and the legal outlawing of their sexualities. This is what they have to look forward to, what they have to experience, what they remember. And this is all set against a social context where employers, schools, businesses, and even hospitals can openly discriminate against queer people, where few come out for fear of not just stigmatization but a collapse of their social, professional, and personal lives. Their bodies, their health, their lives, all at stake.

The army’s attempt to root out queer soldiers mirrors South Korean authoritarian practices of the 1950s to the 1980s that sought to uncover suspected communists and North Korean sympathizers in the country, a project motivated by the ongoing North-South conflict. These practices often targeted political dissidents and protesters denouncing the authoritarian military regimes of the time, leading to imprisonment, torture, and even death. Decades later, the same logic was being applied to queer soldiers. They, part of the very organization fighting the North Korean threat, were refashioned as now posing a similar disruption to national security.

Judges, politicians, the military, and politically and socially conservative Koreans have all claimed that the clause is necessary for the stability of the military and defense of the country. They often cite the continued threat of North Korea—mandatory military conscription still exists primarily because North and South Korea are still technically at war—and the presence of queer soldiers would disrupt unit cohesion and leave the military vulnerable to a North Korean attack.’

Queer soldiers must be expelled because North Korea is knocking at the door.

In recent years, scholars have demonstrated how often post-9/11 (September 11, 2001) national and global security logics operate through fear, doubt, and vulnerability. National security logics commonly generate fear and vulnerability by targeting certain marginalized bodies. In the United States, Muslims and Latin and South American immigrants bear the current brunt of national security anxieties. In China, it is the predominately Muslim Uyghurs. In South Korea, it is, surprisingly, queer Koreans. What does it mean to be perceived as a national threat simply based on who you would like or not like to sleep with? These days, national security in South Korea indexes not only war and the military but the family, public health, and national unity. Being queer supposedly threatens the traditional heterosexual family and marriage. Queer bodies harbor deadly viruses. And, from this perspective, the queer battle for rights is a form of terrorism threatening the purity of the Korean nation and culture. Each of the above claims asserts that queer bodies threaten the nation in a different way. But, in South Korea, the solutions to these threats all end up looking the same: queer folks become targets of a routinized national security.

Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses interrogates the connections between queerness and national security in South Korea on two fronts. The first is to explicate how and why Korean institutions and citizens mobilize the threat of peninsular destruction—fears over not only North Korea but viral epidemics, declining birth rates, and national unity—to interpret and treat queer folks as disruptions and threats to security. The second is to explore the important work of queer activists as they navigate security-laden discrimination alongside the biopolitical imperative to partake in securitization. Both fronts intertwine, for the social justice imperative that lies at the heart of this book emerges in heuristically disentangling security and sexuality—to demystify the seemingly totalizing logic and presence of security— while attending to the ways queer activists, conceptually, position their work as the antidote to the radical desociality immanent to their security-driven discrimination and oppression.