Profits of queerness media, biomedicine, and citizenship in authoritarian South Korea, 1950-1980 Todd A. Henry

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Henry, Todd A., 1972- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sexual minorities--Social aspects--Korea (South).

Sexual minorities.

Sexual minority culture--Korea (South).

Sexual minority culture.

Gender nonconformity--Korea (South).

Gender nonconformity.

Sex role--Korea (South).

Sex role.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Other Title:

Media, biomedicine, and citizenship in authoritarian South Korea, 1950-1980

Place of Publication:

University of Hawai'i, 2026.

Honolulu University of Hawaiʻi Press [2026]

Summary:

"This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study reassesses South Korea's tumultuous era of authoritarian development (1950-1980) through previously obscured yet illuminating histories of queerness-defined as gender variance, atypical anatomies, and same-sex sexuality, among other nonnormative expressions. Instead of primarily viewing these histories through minoritarian or liberal lenses, Todd A. Henry adopts universalizing and provincializing approaches to examine how societal conformity to dimorphic expectations of gender, sex, and sexuality was foundational to the operation of militarized capitalism in this postcolonial and still-divided nation, thus revealing how biopolitical assessments of citizenship produced rigid boundaries and hierarchized valuations of human life. As such, he urges researchers of Korean Studies to pursue more fully embodied methodologies, also encouraging practitioners of LGBTI Studies to include "Hot War" and non-Western cultures in their Euro-American-centric theorizing. Drawing on a broad range of understudied sources-including scientific case reports, journalistic exposés, question-and-answer columns, newspaper cartoons, popular films, and oral histories-Profits of Queerness meticulously documents how the commanding but contested intersection of mass media, sexual medicine, and everyday policing reestablished such categorical distinctions as "men" versus "women" and "healthy" versus "deviant," among other binaries. In particular, Henry argues that sensationalizing reporters, pathologizing doctors, surveilling officers, and everyday vigilantes consolidated a "mass dictatorship" characterized by androcentric, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist goals-aims regularly concealed by triumphalist narratives of the country's "miraculous" recovery from the Korean War (1950-1953) and its industrialized "take-off" under the developmental dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979). To highlight the agency of queer and intersex persons silenced in these accounts, he deploys the bottom-up notion of "shadow reading," tracing how marginalized actors transformed pejorative depictions, diagnoses, and rulings into empowering practices on the fringes of an illiberal polity. Ultimately, Henry shows how a contradictory mixture of "queerphobia" and "queerphilia" intersected as a core dynamic of South Korean "hetero-authoritarianism." More broadly, he posits these critical concepts as necessary to both understand and challenge new and ongoing forms of psychosomatic domination (re)emerging across the world today"-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Introduction

Arrested Development: "Male-Dressed Women" and Their Female Associates

Untamable Subjects: "Female-Dressed Men" as Queer Fugitives and Laughable Women

Exposing Bodies, Defining Anatomies: "(Inter-)Sex Changes" and the Gendered, Social Pain of Surgical Interventions

Diagnosing "Gender/Sexual Deviance": Han Tong-se and the Psychiatry of Heteropatriarchal Nationalism

The Weekly as Transnational Media and the Local Development of Same-Sex Subcultures

Female Taxi Drivers and Male Hair/Fashion Designers as "Eccentric" Service Workers

The Uneven Biomedicalization of Intersex Citizens and Their Everyday Struggles

The "Cultural Inoperability" of Social Women and Transfeminine Street Life

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description based on print version record

Other Format:

Online version Henry, Todd A. Profits of queerness

ISBN:

9798880703494

OCLC:

1610693561

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license