Sung Un Gang (Technische Universität Berlin)

Queer Re-Figuration of Spaces: Exploring LGBTQIA+ Everyday Lives in Seoul 

Abstract

The recent conflict surrounding the use of Seoul Plaza for the annual Seoul Queer Culture Festival vividly captures the spatial conflict between queer citizens (and their allies) and their opponents. While this event and other designated queer spaces have drawn much attention in both public and scholarly debates, little has been discussed about queer residents’ everyday lives. Considering the vulnerability of queer individuals to gentrification and the long history of anti-queer politics in South Korea, it is necessary to chart how LGBTQIA+ citizens construct, appropriate, or claim everyday spaces to understand Korean society, history, and culture.

This talk shares preliminary results from the ongoing research project “Smart People: Queer Everyday Life in Digitalized Spaces” and invites the audience to consider the affordability of the concept of re-figuration. With this new concept, scholars of the Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” aim to develop a theoretical framework that can explain the entangled relationship
between spatial changes and various societies, based on case studies in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America.

Besides observations and analyses of queer everyday lives in streets, cafés, and homes, this talk also explores the challenges and possibilities of theory building. In doing so, it broadens the scope of
scholarly debates on queer lives from events to everyday experiences and suggests a critical engagement with the established mode of knowledge production.

Bio

Sung Un Gang is a researcher of media- and cultural studies. After finishing his B.A. in German Studies at Seoul National University and the M.A. in Modern German Literature at the University of Bonn, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation The Making of Modern Subjects: Public Discourses about Korean Female Spectators in the Early Twentieth Century (forthcoming 2024) at the department of theater and media studies at the University of Cologne. In 2022, he joined Collaborative Research Center 1265 “Refiguration of Spaces” as a postdoc researcher. In his project entitled “Smart People: Queer Everyday Life in Digitalized Spaces,” he adopts space sociological approaches to understand the production of spaces through Seoul’s queer inhabitants and potential spatial conflicts. He was a scholarship holder of DAAD (2009 and 2010-2012) and a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for Humanities Cologne (2015-2019). In 2018, he worked as a junior fellow at the International Center for Korean Studies of Kyujanggak Institute.

Peace, Love, and Understanding of Korean Society: The Collision of Hard and Soft Power in the Korean Immigration and Integration Program (KIIP)

Wednesday June 26, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Abstract

This presentation examines the collision of hard and soft power in South Korean language and culture programs connected with immigration; namely, the Korea Immigration and Integration Program (KIIP). Soft Power, a concept commonly deployed in international relations and popularized by political scientist Joseph Nye in the 1990s, has been taken up recently in discussions of the rise and spread of Hallyu, as K-Pop and K-dramas draw tourists, capital, and international attention to South Korea. Hard power has been characterized as soft power‘s opposite; whereas soft power inspires and attracts, hard power is coercive and can involve physical force. Amidst many other South Korean government-sponsored or government-supported Korean language programs (such as the King Sejong Institutes), KIIP represents an interesting combination of soft power attraction in the form of language and culture programming for non-nationals in South Korea, and hard power in its disciplinary capacity to prevent or enable immigration visas.

South Korea is certainly not unique in mandating a citizenship integration program for migrants, as many European countries also require that those seeking permanent residency or citizenship enroll in these programs. What is somewhat unique in the South Korean case is the relatively high numbers of marriage migrants enrolled relative to other demographics, and the dramatic increase in participants in a short period of time. This presentation looks specifically at the final stage in the program before permanent residency or naturalization, the “Understanding Korean Society” class. Through combining analysis of the curriculum, autoethnography of the classroom experience, and investigation of social media groups, I aim to situate the program in broader understandings of language politics, soft power, and citizenship in contemporary South Korea.

Bio

Bonnie Tilland is a university lecturer in Korean Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research has focused on gender and family, media, and the senses and affect in South Korea. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington, and was previously associate professor in the East Asia International College at Yonsei University Mirae campus. She is working on a book tentatively titled „Sensible Mothering: Shifting Maternal Subjectivity in South Korea.“ Her new research focuses on language politics and soft power in language promotion efforts in South Korean and Taiwanese overseas language institutes.

Intimate Sociability in Inter-Korean Encounters: North Korean Refugees, South Koreans, and the Matters of Maum and Jeong

Wednesday June 19, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Abstract

North Korean refugees living in South Korea frequently report a profound sense of longing for a human connectedness that they claim to have lived by in the North. Based on participant observational data and verbal accounts about inter-Korean encounters, I trace how peoples in the two Koreas have generally diverged in their practices of intimate sociability, centering on the conceptions of jeong (affection) and maum (mind-heart), particularly in the social scope and the degree of social intimacy therein. The divergence is behind social misfires and communication difficulties experienced by North Korean refugees, making their emotional adaptation to South Korean society a daunting task. To North Korean refugees, a “good side of living in South Korea” is that they are free of the constraints of the collectivist life; yet what they find most lacking in the South Korean life is the kind of human connectedness that North Korean collectivism entailed. From their perspective, the best of both worlds would be their kind of intimate sociability without the collectivist routines and mobilizations, let alone surveillance. I contend that intimate sociability is deeply implicated in the ideological faultline between the two Koreas, not only because they are politically (more) appropriated in North Korea for its national family-making project (One Big Loving Family), but also because they are central to personhood and belonging among the peoples across the division.

Bio

Hyang Jin Jung is professor in the Department of Anthropology at Seoul National University, South Korea and president-elect of the Society for East Asian Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. She was the founding editor of Korean Anthropology Review. Her research interests lie in the intersection among culture, self, and emotion, with US and the two Koreas as her primary anthropological sites. Her ongoing research projects involve the psychocultural underpinnings of the North Korean statehood and society and the emotional culture of the postmodern American society. Her publications include “Family as a Model for a Religious Community: An Intercultural Conversation between North Korea’s Juche and US Evangelical Christianity” (American Religion, 2022).

 A Sublime Disaster: Antifascism and its Commune Form in Sewol Square

Wed. June 5th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Abstract

This presentation scrutinizes the contemporary political milieu of South Korea through the lens of fascism and antifascism, focusing on the seven-year-long encampment protest at Kwanghwamun Plaza following the Sewŏl disaster. Recent scholarship reconceptualizes fascism as a “process” rather than a discrete event (mass movement, regime type, charismatic leadership), highlighting three key processes: the appeal to national unity grounded in claims of ancient and racialized origins, the unmediated identification with the state, and commodity fetishism. In this talk, I discern these fascist tendencies in the entrenched political polarization and the recurrent candlelight protests since the 2000s in South Korea. Drawing on my ethnographic research, I investigate how the commune form of the Sewŏl encampment challenges these tendencies with its politics akin to Deleuze’s “minoritarian politics.”

Bio

Hyun Ok Park is a professor of sociology at York University, Canada. With archival and ethnographic research, she investigates global capitalism in colonial, industrial, and financial forms, democracy, socialism, and post-socialist transition. She is the author of two books: Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005); The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015, Korean translation in 2023). She is completing a book manuscript, “A Sublime Disaster: The Sewŏl Ferry Incident and the Politics of the Living Dead.” Her research has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was the founding Director of the Korean Office for Research and Education at York University. Prof. Dr. Park serves on the editorial boards of Global Perspectives and Economy and Society.

Postcolonial Reflections on the Global Memory Formation: Holocaust, Stalinist Crime and Colonial Genocide

Wednesday April 17th, 18:00 c.t ., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Bio

Jie Hyun Lim holds the CIPSH chair of Global Easts and is the founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He has published widely on nationalism and Marxism in comparison, Polish history, transnational history and global memory. He is the principal investigator of the research projects of Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War, and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of "Entangled Memories in the Global South" at Palgrave/Macmillan and "Global Easts" at the Central European University Press. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism-Global History and Memory (Columbia Univ Press, 2024, forthcoming), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ Press, 2022), and Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgave, 2021 co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft).

Abstract

Victimhood nationalism, in my definition, is a narrative template to grant posthumously the moral superiority, historical legitimacy, and political alibis to a present nation living in a legacy of hereditary victimhood by connecting the postmemory generations to ancestral victims via collective memory In this talk, I will articulate victimhood nationalism as a global phenomenon to explain the victimhood competition in the postwar coming to terms with the past in the global memory space across Europe and East Asia In the age of global memory, the spatial turn of  globalization reconfigured the national mnemoscape dramatically into the global one With the emergence of the human rights regime as a global memory formation, nationalist discourses have shifted from heroes to victims, which intensified globally the nationalist competition over who suffered most. The dialectical interplay of global and national memories in constructing victimhood nationalism demands a critical inquiry into the dichotomy of perpetrators vs victims, collective guilt vs innocence, national vs cosmopolitan memory, historical actors vs passive objects, over contextualization vs de-contextualization, historical conformism vs presentism, etc. I will investigate the entangled memories of victimhood nationalism in the global memory space focusing on the mnemonic nexus of Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea.