John Cho
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology currently in the process of completing my field research (with Korea Foundation funding) and writing my dissertation. My project examines the constitution of a “market imaginary” among Korean gay men. By “market imaginary,” I mean the abstracted process through which Korean gay men increasingly come to identify themselves as both sexual consumers and sexual commodities, especially in the Internet. Since the mid-1990s, with the coming out of the first gay activists and the gay and lesbian movement, the idea of “gay community” has developed in critical tension with the idea of the “gay consumer market.” With the IMF Crisis, however, the market expanded while the community contracted, meaning that the idea of gay freedom came to mean less the political freedom to be “out” than the economic freedom to consume in a hidden gay niche market. Moreover, the community has undergone a critical shift with technology becoming a key factor in organizing gay men’s social relations, particularly through the Internet. For instance, in gay chat rooms, the Korean gay men use IDs, such as “176, 25, 76,” to describe themselves. The “176” refers to height (in centimeters), “25” to age, and “76” to weight (in kilograms). Using such figures, they package themselves for mutual sexual consumption. I argue that such constitution of personhood, which paradoxically “individualizes” the person as a body, even as it renders him “anonymous” as an individual, constitutes a particular “education of desire” that Korean gay men are experiencing at a historical moment, in which the older form of manufacturing industry is giving way to an information economy, and homosexuality, itself, becomes constituted as a market. I expect this dissertation to reexamine dichotomized views such as political economy and culture, production and consumption, and the self and other, and shed light on the process of sexual and gender subject formation under neoliberalism in South Korea and East Asia.