Emerging in part from my Academy of Korean Studies funded project exploring the intersections of K-pop fandom and LGBTQ+ experience, I am excited to announce that I will be giving a presentation on August 30th at the upcoming symposium “Belonging in South and North Korean Popular Culture,” joint-hosted by Hamburg University and Goethe University Frankfurt!

My presentation forms part of the first panel on the intersections of gender and identity in Korean pop culture and is titled “Unpacking LGBTQ+ Belonging in South Korean Society: The Case of the “Boys Love” Web Series Semantic Error (2022).” My talk is one of a handful of presentations that will be exploring queer popular culture in South Korea at this workshop, and forms part of my broader exploration of BL as a transformative genre across Asia.

Here is the abstract:

Recent years have seen Boys Love (hereafter, BL) television series become a significant form of popular culture across East and Southeast Asia. First emerging in Japan and spreading to South Korea in the form of comics in the late 1980s, BL represents a genre of media focused on the romantic relationships between handsome young men that has become popular among young women and some queer men. Since the broadcast of the web series Where Your Eyes Linger (Neo-eui shiseon-i meomeuneun geos-e) in 2020, BL has become a significant phenomenon in contemporary South Korean popular culture. Indeed, the BL web series Semantic Error (Shimaentik Ereo) received particular critical and popular acclaim, with its K-pop idol stars Park Jaechan and Park Seoham notably utilizing their platforms to intervene into contemporary debates over LGBTQ+ rights and misogyny. This presentation takes the BL series Semantic Error as a case study to explore debates over LGBTQ+ belonging in South Korea. I contrast the success of Semantic Error and its embeddedness within K-pop fandom culture with rising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and misogyny on behalf of conservative sectors of South Korean society to expose the current limits of queer representation via BL. While my analysis of the series itself and the prominent pro-LGBTQ+ positions of its stars establishes Semantic Error as replete with queer representational politics that position LGBTQ+ individuals as belonging to society at large, I argue that these politics are currently frustrated by the capitalist imperatives which underpin BL production. I conclude, however, by adopting a reparative analytical approach that argues for the role BL may play in “culture jamming” anti-LGBTQ rhetoric which circulates in South Korea. To do so, I contrast the development of these series in South Korea with the Thai context where BL has recently become a significant tool for LGBTQ+ activism.

My talk will be at 9:45am CEST (UTC+2). Attendance is free, and you can join via Zoom, but registration via this link is essential.

You can download the full workshop program here.