South Korean Gay Men, Internet, and Sexual Citizenship

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository FACELESS THINGS: SOUTH KOREAN GAY MEN, INTERNET, AND SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP BY SONG PAE CHO DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Nancy Abelmann, Chair Professor Matti Bunzl Associate Professor Martin F. Manalansan Associate Professor Ellen Moodie ABSTRACT This dissertation is an investigation of the two very different pathways that the Internet was offering Korean gay men, primarily in their 30s and 40s, in terms of exercising their sexual freedom and being gay at a moment of neoliberal reforms in South Korea when an increased emphasis on individual productivity and efficiency, especially through the use of information communication technologies such as the Internet, was competing with the renewed valorization of the ideology of “family as nation” or “heteronormative familism.” While the former was seen as necessary for the country to transition from a state-directed, manufacturing-based, late- developmentalist economy to a global, finance-based one, the latter was seen as necessary to reproduce the nation, particularly after the IMF Crisis, when precipitously low birth rates, declining marriage rates, and rising divorce rates have stoked widespread fears about the social and biological reproduction of the nation. One pathway, offered by Ivancity, South Korea’s most popular gay portal, seemed to be offering Korean gay men with unlimited individual freedom and consumer choice to fulfill their romantic and sexual desires. Without the broader constraints of either the family or gay community, however, such interactions deteriorate into the “chaos” of uncontrolled individual desire. The other pathway offered by gay groups on Daum, a mainstream portal, on the other hand, seemed to be providing gay men with more limited choice and constrained individual freedom in terms of pursuing their sexual and romantic desires but also with a greater sense of social and emotional stability. Yet, even as these two groups present two very different models of Internet-mediated gay sociality and sexual freedom, neither of them can provide gay men with the kind of economic security that Koreans often derive from their biological families. Indeed, with deepening neoliberal reforms, as the family becomes the primary and often the sole source ii of economic security for individuals cast adrift on the turbulent waves of capitalism, single gay men from both Ivancity and gay Daum clubs—without the perceived security of their wives and children in their old age—retreat and even retire from the gay community so that they can focus on their careers and secure their economic futures. In focusing on the so-called “first generation” of Korean gay men who are forestalling marriage to women and using the Internet to lead their gay lives, this dissertation contributes to two main bodies of literature: (queer) globalization and Internet Studies. In terms of the first, it argues that liberal individualism that underpins globalizing notions of Westernised gay identity, movement, and culture is a contradictory phenomenon in South Korea, competing with the valorization of family as nation. In terms of the second, it argues that the Internet, as a space of autonomous individualism, promises new forms of pleasure and erotics while filtering and governing them through disciplinary norms around family, nation, consumption, and body. Together, such contradictions create a hybridized gay culture in South Korea that challenges and reworks the tropes of the “closet” and “coming out” that have traditionally defined Westernised gay culture. iii To my mother iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the innumerable people who have made this dissertation, however poor, possible. They include, first and foremost, my defatigable advisor and supporter, Prof. Nancy Abelmann, who has shown me, through word and deed, what it means to advise; Prof. Martin Manalansan, who has shown me through his creativity and generosity of spirit, what it means to be a queer scholar producing queer work; Prof. Ellen Moodie, who has shown me what it means to be a scholar who is also a potential colleague; and Prof. Matti Bunzl, who stepped in and nudged my project in a new direction when I was stuck. Thank you all. Along with this stellar group of scholars whom I have had the privilege of being advised by in, oddly, one of the queerest of all places in the United States—the Midwest—I have also had the benefit of the mentorship of a number of scholars spanning the continents: Prof. Donna Jowett in my undergraduate years at Carleton University in Canada who introduced me to the field of feminist scholarship and Profs. Cho Han Hae-joang and Kim Hyun-mee at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, who took in a brash and untutored expatriate from Canada and introduced me to the explosive and expansive potential of grounded postcolonial anthropology. Through Prof. Cho, I learnt what it means to try to negotiate and compromise rather than always “confront,” while, through Prof. Kim, I learnt what it means to try to stay close to the ground, have a “field,” and try to be a responsible scholar. Thank you. Along with these scholars, I wish to thank the interlocutors—both academic and nonacademic—in my daily life who have engaged with me and my project in ways both large and small. They include Yoonjung Kang; the students in Nancy’s inimitable advisee group (you know who you are)—both past and present; Rob Cagle, Mr. Ho, and “Chandler” in Urbana- Champaign; my friends in South Korea; and the innumerable gay men and lesbians in South v Korea who have shared with me their life stories and insights, and to whom I owe the greatest gratitude. Thank you. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the support of the Korea Foundation for granting me its dissertation field research fellowship in South Korea in 2007, graduate fellowship at U. of Illinois in 2009, and its postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley in 2011. At UC Berkeley, I thank the warm hospitality of Profs. John Lie, Charis Thompson, and Daniel O’Neill, as well as the friendship of Amy Shen, Kristina Vassil, and others. Thank you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.………………………………………………………………………..............1 CHAPTER 1: The “Mass Retreat” of Gay Men into Dark Sex Rooms and Online Spaces In Post-IMF Korea ..........................................................................................54 CHAPTER 2: “Cool” Meetings and the “Cold” Internet: Condition-based Meetings in Ivancity…………………………………………………………...86 CHAPTER 3: Queer Time and Place: Gay Friendship as a “Way of Life” in Ivancity and Daum Clubs ...............................................108 CHAPTER 4: Post-IMF Anxieties: The “Luxury” of Love and the “Retreat/Retirement” of Single Gay Men ...........................................................................................................................139 CONCLUSION: Married Gay Elite and the “Rise of the Bats” ..................................................167 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................182 vii There is nothing that the human heart more irresistibly seeks than an object to which to attach itself. William Goldwin1 INTRODUCTION In December 2007, I caught a cab outside the Lotte Department Store in Myong-dong to my office-tel in Gwanghwamun.2 A short five-minute ride, we had to snake around Lotte Hotel, go past Chosun Hotel, then up two blocks before making a left turn before Cheonggye Stream to emerge in the bustling Gwanghwamun intersection where my office-tel was diagonally located. On this blustery, snowy day, however, instead of making a left on the street before Cheonggye Stream, which was blocked by construction, the cabdriver did a U-turn at Chosun Hotel, merging directly with the traffic that went around City Hall to emerge on the other side of the Gwanghwamun intersection. Jokingly, I asked the driver, “That was an illegal turn, wasn’t it?” He replied, “The man about to move into that house over yonder with the blue tiles taught me that.” It took me a second to figure out that he was referring to Lee Myung-bak about to be elected as South Korea’s 17th president and to the presidential suites of the “Blue House.” “What do you mean?” I asked the cab driver, who replied: “He taught us that what’s important is not the process but the results. We’re now living in a ‘results-oriented’ society.” During my field research, I had many conversations like this one with cab drivers.3 With cabs almost as cheap and plentiful as buses for short trips, I often took them for my short jaunts 1 Quoted in Mary Evans’ Love: An Unromantic Discussion (2003: 1). 2 I follow the Korean local system rather than the McCune-Reischauer Korean romantization system for local places. 3 All I had to do was to step out of my office-tel onto the sidewalk for two or three cabs to charge down the street like bulls looking to pick me up. Other times, they circled the streets like sharks looking for passengers. To me, these men came to represent the predatory and sometimes 1 between my office-tel in Gwanghwamun and the gay bars/businesses in Jongro—a quick 5- minute ride. During these trips, many cab drivers—often men in their 30s-50s who had lost their jobs and/or businesses after the Asian financial crisis in 1997/8—railed against the rich and powerful. One cab driver, for instance, spoke angrily about how the rich—instead of taking care of the poor—were simply grabbing more for themselves. Within the deregulated environment of post-Asian financial crisis society (aka “IMF Crisis” in South Korea), when the paternalistic late- developmentalist state had given way to a “Do It Yourself” capitalism, greed and havoc seemed to rule the land.

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