Dilemma and legal advocacy in South Korean queer activism

Abstract:

The South Korean LGBTQ+ movement has increasingly used legislative and litigatory means since the late 2000s. Various legal agendas and cases emerged as a key element of activism. Such a trend contrasts with how it put more energy into forming community spaces, support groups, cultural representation and awareness raising in earlier years of the movement. Many queer activists and the interested public are perceiving the law as a primary tool for remedying social discrimination based on heterosexism and gender binarism. More recently, anti-LGBTQ right-wing groups have also adopted legal soundbites as opposed to religious rhetoric. Their discourses revolve around proposed legal changes. My long-term ethnographic research explores how queer activists in Korea face and cope with dilemmas and tension between queering the status quo and institutionalizing queerness in their advocacy. Those dilemmas constitute the very ways in which queer activists engage with the law. As the juridification of politics is intensifying in many local and global social movements, the case of South Korean queer politics has much to offer in understanding the relationship between legal change and broader social justice.

Speaker’s bio:
Yookyeong Im is a Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. She examines how legal frames intersect with gender and sexuality in social discrimination and political aspiration in South Korea. At present, she is working on a book manuscript that explores the increasing centrality of legal advocacy in the nation’s queer politics and its implication on shaping queer political imaginations. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, among others. Dr Im obtained her degree in Anthropology with a secondary field in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University in 2023. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Indiana University Bloomington, prior to taking up her position in Sheffield