Queerly Legal and Legally Queer: The Political Capacity of Law in South Korean Queer Activism

Abstract

South Korean queer movements have increasingly played out as legal campaigns in the past decade. In sharp contrast to its early years from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, law has emerged for activists as the most potent means of politics. This dissertation examines a persistent conflict in contemporary queer politics in SK: the contested but tightly fused desires for both institutional protection and fluid emancipation coexist amongst activists and the broader queer population in Korea. It draws on extensive data collected through thirty-three months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 and 2021. Primary research methods include archival research of activist publications, bills, and court decisions; participant observation of queer cultural events, organizational meetings, street protests, conferences, and court hearings; and interviews with human rights activists and lawyers. Although the “legal turn” is a relatively new phenomenon in Korean queer movements, this study engages with a very old anthropological question: what is the relevance of law to social order? How does law relate to ideologies, practices, and locally legitimate evidence of social order? My findings indicate that law has a significant influence on the ways in which members of the queer communities, and the broader Korean citizenry, conceptualize social order, particularly given the growing reliance on legal language to address political economic debates in Korea and beyond. Legal idioms were first introduced to Korean queer activists not as a celebrated innovation, but rather as a necessary evil in the context of fighting against state oppression. However, the changing praxis of legal advocacy has extended its significance beyond solely “practical” functions. Queer activists and lawyers increasingly train themselves to use law as their primary toolset, encouraging them to find political problems that would allow them to use it. This bottleneck process is mediated through the writing of the movement’s history, legal language socialization, and professionalization. However, legalistic engagements inevitably betray some activists’ more radical imagination of queer utopia, where “order—especially “social order” (sahoe chilsŏ) as it has been traditionally mobilized—would be a contradiction in terms. Therefore, this dissertation is less about whether the law can bring liberation than how people cope with this profoundly anthropological question.