Todd A. Henry

"In the past 30 years, discourses on queerness and the central political issues of LGBT life that originate in the United States-- like same-sex marriage-- have been exported and used to identify the presence of queer community in other parts of the world. QUEER KOREA brings together historical, ethnographic, and literary essays that establish a queer historiography of Korea. Editor Todd Henry asserts that Western forms of queerness, and the reading practices used to identify queerness in the American academy, are insufficient to describe the range of queer life on the Korean peninsula. He argues that particular developments in Korean modernity-- including its histories of colonialism, nationalism, and authoritarianism from the turn of the century to the Cold War-- have informed the language and politics of queerness in Korea and the Korean diaspora. In addition to compiling the first volume focused on queerness in Korea, including work from the South Korean academy, this volume asserts that placing queerness at the center of Korean studies, rather than at the margins, produces new analytic possibilities for the field." -- Provided by publisher.

Queer Korea

Howard Chiang

Helen Hok-Sze Leung

Since the late twentieth century, scholars and activists have begun to take stock of the deep histories and politically engaged nature of trans* cultures across the diverse societies of "Asia." Much of this groundbreaking work has cautioned against immediate assumptions about the universality of transgender experiences, while heeding the significant influence of colonial histories, cultural imperialism, Cold War dynamics, economic integration, and migration practices in shaping local categories of queerness, discourses of rights, as well as the political, social, and medical management of gender variance and non-normative sexualities. This growing body of work on Asia joins trans* scholarship and activism across the world that has similarly sought to de-universalize and de-colonize the category of "trans."

Trans-In-Asia, Asia-in-Trans

Assimilating Seoul, the first book-length study written in English about Seoul during the colonial period, challenges conventional nationalist paradigms by revealing the intersection of Korean and Japanese history in this important capital. Through microhistories of Shinto festivals, industrial expositions, and sanitation campaigns, Todd A. Henry offers a transnational account that treats the city’s public spaces as "contact zones," showing how residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic subjects of the Japanese empire. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, this ethnographic history investigates modalities of Japanese rule as experienced from below. Although the colonial state set ambitious goals for the integration of Koreans, Japanese settler elites and lower-class expatriates shaped the speed and direction of assimilation by bending government initiatives to their own interests and identities. Meanwhile, Korean men and women of different classes and generations rearticulated the terms and degree of their incorporation into a multiethnic polity. Assimilating Seoul captures these fascinating responses to an empire that used the lure of empowerment to disguise the reality of alienation.

Todd A. Henry

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