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My Queer Korea: Identity, Space, and the 1998 Seoul Queer Film & Video Festival

Alternative Love Film Festival | Interview with Chris Berry | Seoul Queer Film and Video Festival by Chris Berry

Seoul Queer Film and Video Festival
by Chris Berry

1. When I was invited to speak at a forum during the 1998 Seoul Queer Film and Video Festival (SQFVF), I decided to keep a journal. A travelogue - a trace of what happens where and when that in its writing and publication simultaneously carves out another place and mobilises more connections - seemed appropriate. For I had come to feel that in East Asian societies I am familiar with, just as important as deciding whether to assume a gay/lesbian/queer (g/l/q) sense of self is whether, where and when other people will permit a social identity matching that self-perception. For example, there are no laws against g/l/q sexual acts in South Korea, but the representation of such acts is against the censorship regulations, and the 1997 SQFVF was banned. If the 1998 event went ahead, as I moved through it I wanted to keep my eyes open for the strategies enabling it to open up queer space in Korean society.

7pm, Friday 6 November 1998-Tullamarine Airport, Melbourne

1. Sitting at the gate for my connecting flight to Sydney, and then it's off to Seoul to be queer. Or should that be 'a queer'? Like Judith Butler's 'anxiety and discomfort' at going 'off to Yale to be a lesbian,' something about being on display in Seoul as 'queer,' 'gay' or whatever has rattled me, although maybe not the same thing as worried Butler.[2] What does it mean to be 'queer' (kkui-o) in South Korea? A core group of academics and activists have read all the English-language literature on the subject. Some have proposed Korean terms such as iban, which combat both the foreignness and medicalisation of dong-song-ae, the direct translation of 'homosexual,' by combining some of the connotations of queer with local resonances and implications. But outside these cognoscenti, does the distinction between essential gay (ge-i) and lesbian (le-su-bi-an) on one hand and social constructionist queer on the other mean a lot in Korea?[3] There is no long-term history of gay and lesbian liberation movements in Korea to place queer against. Activists came out in the media for the first time only a few years ago. Sitting amidst the crowds coming and going at Tullamarine, I also wonder if the distinction means much outside the academic and activist community in Melbourne.

2. However, these more existential questions are not at the front of my mind right now. Tonight is the opening night of the festival. I'm missing it because the IMF (glossed by one Korean friend as 'I am f***ed') Crisis has reduced flights to Korea from as many as three a night to only four a week. I'm wondering if the festival will actually open this time. Last year, we arrived at the theatre to find a notice pasted to the door by local government forbidding screenings on pain of hefty fines and long jail sentences. I was teaching for a semester at the Korean National University of Arts (KNUA). From previous visits, I already knew the festival director, Seo Dongjin, who was one of Korea's first gay activists.[4] And I knew that he, the staff and the unpaid volunteers had put in hundreds of hours in their broom cupboard of an office. They had also run up debts waiting for box office revenue to pay them off. In these circumstances, the last-minute banning seemed particularly calculating and vicious.

Fig. 1. Seo Dongjin (right, with microphone) and the staff of the 1998 SQFVF.

3. I gather from e-mail exchanges with Dongjin that none of the laws affecting last year's event have changed fundamentally. So, there is every possibility it will happen again. There are no laws against g/l/q sexual acts in South Korea, where it seems sexuality is seen as a private matter outside public discourse. However, the same logic makes the representation of homosexuality in film against the censorship law. I hear the clause covering this lists homosexuality with bestiality, paedophilia, and even cannibalism. Dongjin has told me that in the wake of protests following last year's ban and also Wong Karwai's youth cult film Happy Together, the Public Performance Ethics Committee (the censorship board) has decided to forbid only 'excessive homosexuality.' However, nobody knows what that means. Maybe the festival will put it to the test?

4. In addition to censorship, festivals have to get permission to hold a public event from local authorities. Unable to get the censors to even consider their program, in 1997 SQFVF chose to hold their first festival on Yonsei University campus in Soedaemun district. Precedent indicated events held at tertiary institutions were exempt from censorship. Maybe, but the local authorities were another matter. This time, a different venue in a different gu (administrative district) of the city has been arranged. But it remains to be seen if it will go smoothly.

5. That g/l/q culture has been burgeoning in metropolitan and middle-class parts of East and Southeast Asia has been noted by various commentators.[5] But absence of legal proscription as a symptom not of tolerance but of enforced social invisibility is also common in many societies in the region. The banning of SQFVF is only one example of that. I have heard about similar experiences from the organisers of the more discreetly named Alternative Love Film Festival in Bangkok, from whom I am carrying a press release and an interview to Seoul. In these circumstances, it seems the whole debate about performative versus essential concepts of identity is complicated by the question of where you can be g/l/q. Butler is careful in all her writings to resist any idea of performativity as implying voluntarism. Most writers about performativity also resist any confusion with performance. But maybe the metaphor of performance is useful for understanding that the practice of performativity is a social act, requiring a space and license by social powers. These issues are uppermost in my mind as I begin this journal. Rather than abstracted, and philosophical questions of being, doing and doing as being, it is the social geography of g/l/q visibility that I want to attend to here.

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