Introduction
South Korea is often lauded as a capitalist success story ("The Miracle on the Han" ): within around 60 years, South Korea's GDP per capita went from merely $100 in 1961 to over $30,000 in the present day.[1] This growth was mainly due to strong-arm developmentalism and industrialization implemented by the dictatorships of Park Chung-hee, Chun Do-hwan, and Roh Tae-woo post-liberation. The unrelenting leap towards modernity under these presidents also re-spatialized and transformed the city of Seoul into a hyper-modern cosmopolitan metropolis. However, veiled in this linear development narrative of Seoul is the colonial legacy, mass displacement of the local, urban precarity, and marginalization — ultimately, the stories of Seoulites who occupy the margins of Korean society and whose stories do not necessarily complement the, in Soja’s terms, "second space" disciplining order of South Korean governmentality are lost in this top-down reading of development. One such marginalized community that was and continues to be at odds with the South Korean development story is the LGBTQ+ community. In this article, I attempt to explore the search for place in urban Seoul within the context of the queer community, considering hidden spatial practices and the "third space" or "lived space" of everyday Seoulites as a site of resistance against the heteronormative hegemony.
[1] The World Bank South Korea GDP Per Capita
Developmentalism in Seoul: No Space for Queer Bodies?
Post liberation, South Korea faced the grave issues of national division and the shadow of Japanese colonial rule. South Korea's deep-seated anxieties to catch up to other countries in the social Darwinian world order and overcome its dark past placed human rights in a secondary position compared to the government's ambitions to transform the economy into an export powerhouse with Seoul as an economic hub. As scholars have noted, the result of this compressed and draconian implementation of modernity has resulted in uneven developmental policies that favored the cosmopolitan elite over different localities.[2]
[2] Chang, 17
For example, during the era of Seoul's "Bulldozer Mayor" Kim Hyun-ok and "National Architect" Kim Sugun, uneven industrialization and housing projects were pursued at a particularly jarring pace. By the 1970s, the apartment complex's rise became a marker of Seoul's transformation from a space previously ordered around Confucian hierarchy and geomancy to a space ordered around utopian visions of egalitarian and rationalized space conducive to economic growth.[3] As Gezeleau notes, the apartment complex directly supported the construction industry and indirectly bolstered the economy by allowing a mass inflow of people to the city of Seoul to support surging labor demands.[4] However, this top-down, second space ordering of the city into marked grids of apartment complexes was a metaphor for the greater militarism and totalizing governmentality present within Park's regime.
[3] Lee, 93
[4] Gelézeau, 307
In his meditation on working-class housing estates, Foucault explains the very grid patterns articulated by perpendicular lines were disciplinary mechanisms that localized [heteronormative] families (one to a house) and individuals (one to a room).[5] These families and individuals were then normalized into "modern" society, and a host of regulatory mechanisms followed to mold the greater population into the apartment complexes: labor, savings, renting, and purchases.[6] Thus, the complete re-ordering of living space into "modern" apartment complexes was symbolic of the rationalization project pursued by dictatorships that sought to mobilize the Korean people into the making of a capitalist economy. Despite democratization in 1993 and the election of liberal presidents, it is hardly surprising that the legacies of such an intense and dominating relationship between the government and its people, which offered no tolerance for deviations of any kind, still survive today: as frustrated youth lament, living in South Korea is "Hell Choson." Queer subjectivities undoubtedly face tremendous normalizing pressure to fit into capitalist Seoul from their families, the government, and broader Korean society, leaving little room to navigate their marginal identities.
[5] Foucault, 251
[6] Foucault, 251
The Search for Queer Space: Itaewon and Futurity
The compressed manner in which modernity was introduced in Korea led to the concomitant practice of traditional and modern values: the pre-modern, Confucian concept of filial piety, for example, is one traditional value that maintained itself in Korean society. Thus, gay men are expected to not only have children and marry to carry on the family's lineage but also live with their parents.[7] Many scholars have also noted the unending waves of militarism within the Korean peninsula before, during, and after Japanese colonialism. The cult of modern Korean masculinity, which is related to the anxieties over the history of the "Comfort Women" issue, is only amplified by mandatory military conscription. Faced with such a constrained definition of masculinity and the intensity of capitalist development as described above, gay Korean men must balance their duties to the family and their country with freedom of expression and sexually deviant behavior, often living two lives.[8]
[7] Hamilton, 93
[8] Hamilton, 93
However, one neighborhood in Seoul where queer subjectivities can find some freedom from their private interiors is Itaewon, Yongsan-gu. After the opening of Seoul in 1882, foreign powers began competing for space within Seoul's walls, a place previously spatially oriented exclusively under the purview of royal authority and Confucianism.[9] The quest to maintain homogeneity and order within Seoul's walls led to multiple attempts of relocating foreign communities to Yongsan and ultimately led to the development of foreign designated areas.
[9] Lee, 93
Fast forward to the present, Yongsan and Itaewon continue to be sites of foreign bodies and futurity. In Sallie Yea's essay on kijich'on (areas surrounding U.S. military bases such as Yongsan/Itaewon), Yea describes kijich'on as "Other" spaces, or in Foucault's words, heterotopias, that are both sites of marginality within the Korean nation-state and sites of transgression and possibility.[10] As McGuire notes, the construction of Itaewon as a multicultural and sexual hub began after the Korean War because of its proximity to the U.S. Army base.[11] In Soja's terms, the proliferation of hedonistic queer brothels, "red light" areas, saunas, clubs, and bars ("third spaces") in the area are ostentatiously at odds with previous administrations' visions for the city of Seoul as pure, disciplined, and self-sacrificial to the state ("second spaces") as symbolized by the apartment complexes mentioned above, yet entirely in line with the futurities of many mega-cities.
[10] Yea, 187
[11] Hamilton, 94
Capitalism created new obedient national subjectivities who were, just as Seoul, encouraged to modernize and transform themselves into a competent workforce for the country. In connection with Bennett's study of the "Exhibitionary Complex," the frenzied pace of development also created oppressive spaces of “seeing and being seen” in a society obsessed with capitalistic success. For example, the Burger King in Chilsu and Mansu depicts a space that is ordered around modern subjectivities adept with english and Western culture. In order to escape the disciplining ordering of looking and being seen in the public sphere, marginal subjectivities turned away from the infinite outdoors and burrowed deeper into the city to find their own semi-private, semi-public spaces as described by Kwangsoo Kim's article on "bang" (room) culture.[12] Prime examples of such heterotopic sites that promote togetherness while concomitantly venturing away from the surveillance state include the comic book room (manhwa-bang) depicted in My Rosy Life and the arcades (kunsaeng) depicted in Chilsu and Mansu.
[12] Kim, 15
I would argue that one such space for the queer community is the dark saunas in Itaewon, where gay men can escape Korean society's intense lookism and scrutiny while anonymously exploring their sexualities.[13] Thus, drawing on the theme of burrowing deeper into the city, Korean queer subjectivities can find brief respite from the totalizing private sphere of Confucian family relations by entering these dark spots where there is a clear delineation of the private life and anonymous pseudo-public life. As McGuire concludes, for Koreans, “the public rather than the private can be spaces of radical freedom”:[14] it is these semi-public "third spaces" that provide the possibility to be spatiotemporally transported to imagined Western futurities where queer identities can be explored without the hindrance of the private sphere or the looking and being seen aspect of public everyday life. The success of these queer spaces and other types of "bang" cultures depends on the complete blocking of external social connections.[15]
Despite burgeoning liberal spaces in Itaewon, as Hamilton explains, Itaewon is a space of experimentation within the confines of laws and regulations,[16] pushing the boundaries of what is socially acceptable in Korea and lawfully acceptable. In Michel De Certeau's study of the practice of resistance in everyday life, Certeau argues that the "other" in society use "guerilla tactics" given their constraints to reclaim space, momentarily, as a form of resistance. Through this lens, queer Seoulites experimenting with global and transnational identities, which are afforded by Seoul's growing capitalist interactions with other cosmopolitan centers, can be seen as tactics of using institutional policy (of globalization and cosmopolitan development) against the institution itself, pushing back against the long-held narrative that "gays do not exist in Korea."
[13] Hamilton, 99
[15] McGuire, 8
[16] Hamilton, 101
According to David Harvey, the new neoliberal project is gentrification through surplus capital reinvestment into construction. Seoul's government is no exception with ambitious plans to redevelop the Yongsan Army Barracks into the Yongsan Dreamhub. However, what I would like to touch on, in accordance with Certeau's theory of everyday life and tactics, is the gay-induced gentrification of Itaewon, which is studied at great depth by McGuire. What he describes as "gaytrification" in Itaewon can be seen as a way for the queer community to provide capitalist benefit to Seoul, aligning the creation of space for queer bodies to interact with the greater neoliberal development project of cosmopolitan cities. Thus, the gaytrification of the area itself can be seen as a tactic of working within the system by negotiating capitalist productivity with queer identities, proving that queer bodies can be of productive value in the new neoliberal project of gentrification and cosmopolitanism.
The Search for Place Online: Queer Cyberspaces
Another realm that offers similar respite from the totalizing ordering of developmental Seoul for queer subjectivities is cyberspace. As Pettid lists in his study of gay cyberspaces, there are e-books and journals such as Gay munhak (Gay literature), chat sites, bulletin boards, and self-help websites.[17] In addition, I would also add the burgeoning genre of B.L. (boys love) webtoons to the mix as other spaces where commentators can interact and find representation in online stories. As I mentioned above, "bang" culture represents an escape from the totalizing ordering of South Korean governmentality by burrowing deeper into the city into spaces that foster togetherness outside the government's scope of surveillance. However, there is a new type of "bang" emerging: virtual "bangs." Virtual cyberspaces that utilize digital communicability, such as mukbang (food vlogs), to foster live togetherness without losing complete anonymity of the participating subjects are becoming increasingly popular in hectic Seoul as the boundaries between work and play become increasingly blurred.
[17] Pettid, 182
The queer community has also fully embraced these unconventional online heterotopic "bangs," particularly given the closure of many of the physical queer spaces with the COVID-19 pandemic. I would like to expand on a new transnational queer cyberspace: the growing iterations of queer Korean vlogs. Similar to the semi-private, semi-public physical spaces discussed above, anonymity and publicity are not mutually exclusive within these spaces as vloggers use masks or blurring filters to hide their identities (popular channels include JOONYOUNG, Joon-gu & Dong-gu #2, and 얼이와빵이 ALLBBANG). Thus, these queer vloggers can invite other marginalized subjectivities within Korean society to relax and rant about their qualms on "Hell Choson," live, without leaving room for personal attacks from family or anti-LGBTQ+ protestors. Through the lens of Certeau's discussion on tactics versus strategies, these vloggers can be viewed as resisting against the heteronormative hegemony by seizing opportunities in online spaces to detail their private queer couple lives that by the standards of the Korean government should not exist in Korean society while maintaining full anonymity.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: COVID-19 and the Search for Queer Seoul
Unfortunately, physical queer spaces in Seoul have become spaces of intense scrutiny and contempt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Outbreaks originating from clubs in Itaewon's Homo Hill area have been linked to the queer community, fomenting negative stigma towards the LGBTQ+ community. Meanwhile, patrons who are afraid of the government's strict contact tracing policies and being inadvertently outed to their families and workplaces have reduced their participation in the area,[18] solidifying my earlier observation that these "Other" spaces rely heavily on being able to separate contact with the outside world. As many as 1,600 diners in the area have gone out of business during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the public's association of Itaewon with promiscuity and homosexuality.[19] The future of many underground, hidden queer clubs, saunas, and bars in Itaewon is uncertain, but the search for place for queer Korean subjectivities will inevitably continue — be it online or in person.
[18] Borowiec, Steven. “South Korea's Nightclub Outbreak Shines Unwelcome Light on LGBTQ Community.” Time, May 14, 2020. https://time.com/5836699/south-korea-coronavirus-lgbtq-itaewon/.
[19] “As Many as 1,600 Diners, Bars Go out of Business in Seoul This Month.” Pulse, March 23, 2020. https://pulsenews.co.kr/.
The search for place is initiated when there is no place for an individual in normative society to begin with. For those who occupy the margins of Korean society and whose existence is precarious, places of expression will continue to be hidden and separated from greater society in the context of a “deep” city that is both socially and physically layered.[20] So long as queer subjectivities are subject to the heteronormative normalizing pressures of Confucian-Christian tradition and not entirely accepted by society, cyberspaces such as live couple vlogs and hidden physical spaces such as gay saunas will be pivotal sites of everyday resistance and temporary liberation from the disciplining regimes of capitalist, hyper-modern Seoul. One can only hope that with Seoul's frenzied rush to become more integrated into the global cosmopolitan sphere and the subsequent global trends of anti-homophobia, its current shunning of queer subjectivities will become increasing untenable (Amnesty International has chided South Korean news outlets that continue to spread homophobia during the pandemic)[21] as Seoul attempts to appear equally as palatable as other liberal metropolises.
[20] Pai, 108
[21] Borowiec, Steven. “South Korea's Nightclub Outbreak Shines Unwelcome Light on LGBTQ Community.” Time, May 14, 2020. https://time.com/5836699/south-korea-coronavirus-lgbtq-itaewon/.
by Thomas Sze (East Asian Studies, Brown '22)
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