Queer Lives as Cautionary Tales: Female Same-Sex Weddings in the Hetero-Patriarchal Imagination of Authoritarian South Korea

This presentation examines the role that newspaper weeklies (chuganji) played in establishing the normative boundaries of cultural citizenship in Cold War South Korea.

Professor Todd Henry of UCSD will speak on Thursday, Nov. 16, 4-6pm, on "Queer Lives as Cautionary Tales: Female Same-Sex Weddings in the Hetero-Patriarchal Imagination of Authoritarian South Korea”. Part of larger book project, this presentation examines the role that newspaper weeklies (chuganji) played in establishing the normative boundaries of cultural citizenship in Cold War South Korea. A particular focus is on the ideological work that textual and visual representations of female homoeroticism did in entertaining a variety of audiences as part of "mass dictatorship,” while simultaneously imbuing them with the developmentalist ideologies of hetero-patriarchy and ethnonationalism. The presentation also considers the subversive practices of "shadowreading" women as well as the contradictory function of the mass media in facilitating gynocentric communities and other queer life paths under an illiberalregime of capitalist accumulation. This event is co-sponsored by the USC Department of History, Korean Humanities Group, The One Archives and American Studies & Ethnicity and the East Asian Studies Center.