Dr. Todd Henry (2:34)

Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here at first.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (2:39)

Please introduce a bit about yourself to the audience, although some of them may have known you from another episode of yours.

Dr. Todd Henry (2:47)

Yes, so I'm trained as a historian. I received my PhD at UCLA in Japanese and Korean history and my early work, as you mentioned, was on the colonial period in the first half of the 20th century and I've since moved on to the post colonial era, the era of south and North Korea. So I'm looking at the cross border processes that link South Korea, North Korea and Japan and the US in the creation of hot war militarisms, the trans Pacific practice of medical science, and the lived experience of capitalism. And I'm also, as a historian of gender, sex and sexuality, trying to both enhance the field of Asian studies through new kinds of analyses like Queer Perspectives, and also to expand Western approaches to queerness, transgender issues as well as intersexuality through a sustained focus on Asian forms of embodiment. So both the combination of historical work and work in gender and sexuality and medical humanities.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (4:01)

That sounds interesting. So when we get back to the book in the book was published in 2020 and then you framed Queer Career as an effort to establish queer Career as an academic field. What intellectual or social gaps did you most want the book to fill at the time?

Dr. Todd Henry (4:26)

Yeah, so when I began the project, it was actually maybe 20 years earlier from when the book was published, and it was based on some of my own experiences and those of my South Korean peers around the turn of the century. So late 1990s, early 2000s. From the first time that I had a chance to live in South Korea in the late 90s, I often heard that the country had no gay and lesbian people, which at first I thought was quite curious. But it went against some of my own experiences of participating in an LGBT organization at Seoul National University. And for a short time I was also working as a bartender in a gay bar in Itaewon. So I was meeting gay and lesbian people every week in fact. So it struck me as quite odd that people made the statement that Korea had no gays. So in a sense, that was a provocation for me to think about why questions of queerness were silenced or erased. At that time, the LGBT movement was just beginning to get off the ground and was mostly focused on the present and the future. There were many issues that were being addressed. Questions about media representations, the treatment of gay people in the military, access to Internet sources that were being censored. So in getting to know some of the people who were involved in those issues, I thought that as a historian, what I could do was to go back into the pre1990s era to try to create some new stories that hadn't been told before in Korean studies. So we have lots of stories about big name politicians or even lesser known activists, but to know about people who were gender and sexual minorities, that was quite Rare. So I wanted to try to be able to tell those stories and then also to think about how queerness is not just a study of minorities, but as an analytical framework, can also help us to re evaluate some of the bigger stories that we had heard about in, in my field, whether that was about colonialism or nationalist movements or the development of capitalism. So I wanted to figure out a way to see how queerness fit within the broader picture of the 20th century History of Korea. And as I also at that time was reading works in Asian queer studies, mostly about Japan and China and East Asia, but also Thailand, Indonesia, in other places, I was quite inspired by their own kinds of critiques that questioned the kind of frameworks that were being used in studies that address the US or Europe, but what we would call the west. And to think about how those theories are really grounded in very specific experiences that didn't necessarily fit the case, let's say, of Korea. So I thought that Korea, being a deeply transnational place that has experienced waves of foreign occupations, long histories of diasporic mobility, transnational connections, otherwise that Korea could be a really interesting sort of laboratory through which to think about how the models that we have for queer studies that are based in the west might allow us to think in new ways. So, you know, it was really just an attempt to kind of create a provocation. I'm not the only one who studied, you know, created an academic field. There are people who've been working in South Korea for many, many decades, writing and doing very important work. So I wanted to highlight both their contributions and then using my own position at a university in the US to try to jumpstart some of those really interesting debates and questions.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (9:10)

Yes, that's why in the book we can see that many scholars have contributed to, to the book. As an editor, as the editor, what was your vision for the kinds of work that you wanted to collect? And how did you decide on the mix of historical analysis, cultural criticism, and contemporary fieldwork?

Dr. Todd Henry (9:33)

Yeah, so at that time, at least in the US, outside of Korea, even in Europe, there weren't really that many scholars working on these topics. And most of the people who are working on them were dealing with the period after South Korea's transition to democracy, so the 1990s forward. So as I mentioned, I was, I'm trained as a historian, and I thought what I could do is to provide more of a historical background to the issues of the post 1980s. So at that time I sought out the few scholars whose works dealt with queerness, some of them were not in gender and sexuality studies per se, but I tried to encourage them to make their work more legible in a queer studies framework. So, actually, the idea for the book came, began around 2013. At that time, I was taking my sabbatical in South Korea at Hanyang University, and I had the privilege of putting on a conference that was about LGBT filmmaking as history, because, as I mentioned earlier, the first and most important works in queer Korean studies field were not done by Americans and not done by people in the US but done by folks in South Korea. And I had always been interested in filmmaking and studying films and watching films, and I had been so inspired by some of the early LGBT films from the 1990s, some of which looked back on the past and tried to tell interesting stories that academics themselves weren't really interested in or weren't really working on. So that conference really focused on how filmmakers were, in a sense, historians. So that's how the project began. And then when I returned to my home university at UCSD in 2014, I tried to expand that original conference. We held an international symposium here at ucsd, put on an art exhibit, and held a film retrospective where we showed some of those early Korean films that were talking about queer historical topics. So, as you can see, the. The. The history of the book itself was transnational in scope. It began in South Korea and involved and included filmmakers and critics of films. So I really wanted to make an interdisciplinary project that would be able to consider things as wide ranging as literature and art film. So that's really how, you know, I took my own strength in historical training, but then tried to include other pieces and other voices that would touch on issues of cultural criticism, as well as people who are doing both archival work historically and those who are doing fieldwork, participant observation, and other kinds of approaches coming out of anthropology and other fields of study.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (13:13)

That's why the book can be seen. We can see the book is divided into a historical part one and the contemporary part two. From what you explained earlier just now, could you walk us through that structural choice? Were you aiming to suggest a narrative of emergence or complicate a linear story of silence to visibility?

Dr. Todd Henry (13:41)

Right. So, you know, as historians, we tend to think of chronology and time periods. So that was kind of a very simplistic decision to make it sort of chronological in that way. And because there really hadn't been many studies published about historical issues, I actually at first thought of breaking the book into three different parts. One about the colonial period, one about the postcolonial or authoritarian Period up until the late 1980s, and then one section at the end that focused on contemporary issues. But as I was putting the book together, I realized that in fact, the colonial and postcolonial periods are rarely put together in that way. I mean, we use the words colonial and postcolonial. But I thought it would be interesting to try to put the two periods together and think about continuities between the early half of the 20th century and the later half of the 20th century under the kind of long term notion of authoritarianism. So whether the Japanese colonial government was the authoritarian power or South Korean government itself in the post colonial period was the authoritarian power, I thought that it would be worth trying to think of those two periods as one long whole. And really the break coming in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the context of democratization, various forms of liberalizations, the emergence of the Internet, South Korea's increasing globalization. I think the late 80s and early 90s were a really important break. And we can see that as well in the differences in the kind of texts and sources that are available. So for the pre1990s period, it's quite difficult to find sources that you could say are self authored. So if we look for example, at American history or Japanese history or European history, by the 60s or 70s, we'll often find commercial publications by gay and lesbian groups, perhaps pulp fiction, memoirs and autobiographies. But for the case of Korea, both South and north, that was quite difficult. As far as I know, there were no commercial publications for fear of, you know, being outed, being subjected to harm, being censored. So what we have before the 1990s are really perspectives from outsiders looking in onto queer communities. So whether those are journalists or doctors or mainstream filmmakers who might be using queerness to make money and do other things. So I really thought that in fact, the late 1980s and early 1990s were an important turning point at the same time, and I think I agree with your suggestion that, you know, on the one hand, queerness I tried to show was really always a part of Korean society and culture, of course, in different ways, depending on the regime in power. As I mentioned, Japan versus a Korean regime, the peninsula's relationship to outside forces and powers, the nature of media and how media was distributed, disseminated and consumed, and as I mentioned, the willingness of people to self author their own accounts. So yes, I mean, there's a big transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I also don't think this is an easy story of pure silence into visibility. So, you know, when I was first starting my own historical projects, people, you know, based on that kind of urban myth that there are no gay people in Korea, scholars would literally say to me, well, because we don't have any gay people, or we have few gay people, there's no sources or texts that you could even find in the pre 1990s period. So, like, the idea that there was total silence. But if you look at the popular culture of the period, I looked at print media, Kim Jong Gang looked at sort of B films, we can find many representations of queer people as part of mainstream popular culture. So the pre1990s period wasn't really a story of silence. It was a kind of crafting of how queerness was going to fit within Korean society. And then, of course, after the 1990s, we might assume, okay, well, authoritarianism is over. Koreans have democracy. The Internet is available, so we're gonna see, like, major visibility. And of course, there are important shifts between the late 80s and early 1990s in terms of visibility. We have, as I mentioned, the emergence of LGBT groups. I was a part of those. We have more mainstream films talking about queerness. And yet, if we look at how visible queer issues are, how many people have come out since the late 1980s? Not that coming out is the only way to be visible, but it is one way, I think we find, that visibility doesn't exactly capture what the book is really trying to get at. Instead, I think it might be better to think of a constant struggle of following queerness or analyzing queerness or being queer in ways that do not injure or harm those people who are involved. So even today, I think few Koreans are willing to be fully out in the sense of being subject to public scrutiny. And in fact, many people would prefer to remain under the radar of trying to live a queer life, but not making your identity the subject of public scrutiny. So I think those dynamics cut across part one and part two of the book. So, yeah, I think your observation about trying to challenge a narrative of emergence or complicate a kind of linear story or a story that being out and proud is the only way to be queer, those things we should call into question.

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Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (22:49)

That's why I think that next question actually was also my pure observation. Like in part one female saying sex love features strongly, while in part two male homosexuality is more central, but there's also trans sexuality mentioned as well. Was this intentional or does it reflect what you said before, the kind of sources and scholarships available?

Dr. Todd Henry (23:21)

Yeah, I think it had more to do with the scholars who were working on various topics at the time. I had early on tried to find a piece on the history of Namsek, so that would be like translated as male colors. I think in the Chinese tradition and Japanese tradition they used the same characters to describe the phenomena of male male homoeroticism during the pre modern period and this was familiar to me from the Joseon dynasty. So I had been trying to find somebody who either was a Joseon dynasty specialist who could write about Namsa, or a scholar who might be willing to look at how debates of pre modern Korean history were rethought or reformulated after Korea entered its own period of Modernity and its relationship with colonialism. But I couldn't find anybody to write that. And to me, that was a kind of indication again of how, you know, we needed a kind of some kind of book or some kind of study or some kind of work that would encourage people to think about, okay, I'm a Joseon dynasty specialist and, you know, I studied literati. And so if the Joseon dynasty is, you know, based in Neo Confucianism and so much has been written about literati, then what about the sexuality of literati and what about homoeroticism of literati? Or the same thing could be asked about women. So it was quite difficult to really find scholars who are working in also who could write pieces in English, because the book was originally written in English. So I think that was more of a kind of unintentional consequence. But it does raise some interesting questions because in my own research, I found that female female homoeroticism was quite widely represented in the 60s and 70s and really was, you could even say, like the face of same sex marriage. So, you know, women at the time, some women were finding ways to go to wedding halls or go to Buddhist temples and have a religious figure officiate a wedding ceremony. Not that they were legally married, but somehow they were going out of their way to dignify or to stabilize their relationship in the eyes of their families or their local communities. And if I think about the post 1980s, you know, the more contemporary period, it seems to me that the face of same sex marriage has actually changed from female female to male male couples. So the most well known wedding which I opened the book with, is by a gay film director and his partner. So I had been thinking of for some time about the same question is why, for example, at one period are women or female homoeroticism the sort of face of queerness in Korea primarily? And then at a later moment, women's stories tend to disappear or go into the background. So that's a really interesting question you raised, actually.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (26:54)

I think in your own chapter, which and part one of the book, you talk about these issues and because you talk about female homoeroticism and its relationship with how it related to political powers and things like that. So in your own chapter, how can you, because you mentioned you don't want to say for other contributors, but for your own chapter you can talk about how did the political function of these narratives of female homoeroticism help the state define the ideal citizen? Because you're using lots of films and media resources in Your own chapter?

Dr. Todd Henry (27:46)

Yeah, that was interesting for me to think about. Typically, as I mentioned, we think of know, authoritarianism as this kind of very dark period and lots of repression. And of course, I wouldn't deny that those issues took place. But it was also a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization. So people coming from the countryside and moving to big cities like Seoul and you know, working either in the formal sector in light industries, spinning and weaving, food processing. South Korea was a big exporter of human hair in the form of wigs before it moved into more heavy kinds of industrialization. So I wanted to, in my piece, try to situate queerness emerging in that context of rapid industrialization. Urbanization, of course, an ongoing hot war with North Korea and, and militarism. So questions of gender and sexuality must be a piece of that part. And we have interesting scholarship, for example, on female factory workers who because of their gender, were assigned and expected to do certain kind of roles, whether in the home or outside of the home, of course, military service for men. So, you know, in addition to those kind of economic and political and defense issues, you know, there's also an emerging entertainment industry. If all those people are coming to the city and working, they have to be comforted, they have to be given some kind of compensation for, I mean, to use a kind of Marxist framework, the exploitation of their labor power, there has to be some kind of compensation for that, lest the people who are working hard might gather together and protest either their labor exploitation in factory unions or they might protest the government itself. So I saw the media as kind of playing a really important role in, on the one hand, telling stories that would fit mainstream state narratives supporting the kind of male dominated, militaristic industrial state. And yet at the same time, media companies were seeking to make profits. They were part of the same kind of capitalistic framework of the state itself. And the media companies really didn't shy away from queer topics or other kinds of abject topics. So when I started to look through the weeklies, I found lots of stories about, you could call them, I guess, abject topics. So mixed race couples, queer people, some kind of unusual practices that you can imagine if you're working long hours during the week and even into the weekend, that this was a kind of outlet for you to, to both have a release, but then also have some kind of relationship where you are seeing and viewing other kinds of people like you. So my approach to thinking about the these media products was think about who was primarily being targeted. Mostly working class men. And then if they're reading these salacious stories about women, they're being kind of offered a kind of sexualized form of entertainment that, you know, also appeared in other media, like in moving images for the time. So I found this kind of really uneasy relationship between, on the one hand, a kind of homophobic or queer phobic message that the media was telling. But at the same time, those reports were really, for the first time, visualizing queer issues, queer topics, queer neighborhoods, hangouts. So in a really kind of ironic way, at the same time that they were offering ideological lessons and sort of, you know, functioning as a supporter of official state ideology, they were at the same time undercutting that by allowing those people who might be interested in those topics for their own purposes a chance to imagine other people like them talking about certain neighborhoods or places where they could go to meet other people. So it served the media serve both the political function of ensuring that women would not partner with one another and would eventually marry men and bear children. This is why so many of the stories about female. Female relationships are tragedies and end in violence. So on the one hand, yes, that helps to create some kind of idealized citizen, but as a kind of subtext, there's lots of other sort of elements that, you know, might have inspired others to follow the dangerous paths that were being narrated in the same publication. So that's how I tried to think about it.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (33:20)

I think that we can learn a lot from these stories from part one, but actually, the book appeared just before COVID 19, and in the audience, if they heard of the Itaewon Club outbreak, then they might know how LGBTQ community became a target in these events. So. Which is quite harmful still. So how have events since the Taewon Club outbreak reshaped the landscape you documented in 2020?

Dr. Todd Henry (34:05)

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, Covid, of course, you know, drew attention to many kinds of social problems. And I think, yeah, studying diseases are really interesting, and public health outbreaks are very interesting to track because they really reveal the kinds of social tensions that are already in operation in society, but then are brought into the foreground because of some kind of natural disaster or emergency. So I think Covid, as you mentioned, really drew attention, new attention to the kind of, again, I'll use the word under the radar nature of queerness that I tried to highlight in the introduction. So rather than, you know, being following visibility politics or being out and proud, I think under the radar is more of a kind of mainstream way in which a lot of queer people in South Korea pursue their lives. So I think that this being subjected to contact tracing based on a certain club you went to, and if that club is known as a gay club, I think that really proved my point about how even basic livelihood can be difficult under a procedural democratic state. We have both before and after the crowd crush incident, you know, increasing tensions between a pretty large now LGBT movement and the allies that support them, and then a very conservative, often fundamentalist Christian backlash. So I think those tensions have only risen in recent years. And whether it's queer people or whether it's questions of women and feminism, I think those have also really, in a sense, entered mainstream politics more as a kind of boogeyman issue rather than one that is going to be taken up by elected governments. So we're going to have to see what happens in the post Yoon, post martial law, new Lee Jae Myung government. There's been, for example, an anti discrimination law that been that has been proposed for several decades now. But I don't think we're any closer now than we were in recent history for that to pass. And queer politics aren't really, I would say, a popular issue in terms of electoral politics these days. The few minor parties like the Justice Party, which had had a platform for queer issues and was, you know, had taken up, for example, the anti discrimination law. They've now been voted out of office. So there really isn't a strong constituency in the national assembly to push those issues. So I think that, you know, things that have happened in recent years would follow some of those patterns that I described just a minute ago.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (37:26)

Yeah, good and bad, I think, for a democratic government. But I think it's good that you put together the collection together, even though it's more than five years ago. But what were the biggest challenge at the time in putting the collection together? Is it sources or translation? Because there was one chapter actually so needs to be translated into English. Or institutional or cultural resistance.

Dr. Todd Henry (38:01)

Yeah, I mean, I suppose, you know, in general, I think finding a publisher for an edited volume is increasingly challenging in our day and age. I think when I was a graduate student, I recall reading more edited volumes, and it seems to me that publishers, at least in the US are less interested in edited volumes, especially edited volumes that are really long in length. So I published the book with Duke University Press, and they really challenged me to, you know, to make a case. So if we're gonna. If we're gonna publish an edited volume, it can't just be. Well, you had another conference on such and such a topic. I think they really wanted me to sort of make a case for why this topic and these set of essays and issues would be important. And so that's one of the reasons why I wrote a fairly extended introduction to try to map out some of the issues, of course, sources I mentioned earlier, that was really a problem because of the lack of self authored texts before the 1990s and other kinds of things laterally, you know, kind of feeling discouraged. So, you know, in my old own field of history, when I told my colleagues that I was studying these weekly publications, you might call them tabloids, you know, I got a lot of kind of strange faces and expressions like, how can you study something that's so rumorous and scandalous? And the publications themselves, you know, were very quickly consumed and thrown away. So you really can't find any of most of these publications university libraries will not have. So there is a problem of finding sources. And then, of course, yeah, translation was a challenge because there were so many different kinds of essays in the volume. So we were very lucky to have a team of translators in Korea who came from various different fields and were able to work closely with each author to render the English essays into Korean. And I suppose there's still some considerable gaps between the kind of work that is done in a place like the US versus the kind of work that is or can be done in Korea. There's very different stakes in terms of what it means to write about these issues and present them in one place or the other. It's still extremely difficult in Korea for graduate students to be advised by faculty who are willing to read their work and be able to comment on their work. And then there's also the challenge that if you publish a dissertation on this kind of topic, that in a field like history or in a field like sociology, it might be extremely difficult to find a job. So the material prospects of working on the topics and then having no promise of being able to continue on with what you spent your life dedicated to, that's a real problem. So I hope that in some way the book can offer some lateral resources for Koreans in Korea. This is South Korea, to say nothing of North Korea. For them to be able to follow their passions to write about these topics and be increasingly accepted rather than rejected for their choices.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (41:50)

Yes, that's for sure. But good news, because I noticed that another book called Queer Career got published recently as well. I think someone else has done an interview on that. So that's the final question now. So where do you see the most urgent and exciting Direction for research in queer career studies. I think you mentioned it a little bit just now. If there were the career 2.0 a decade from now, what themes would you hope included?

Dr. Todd Henry (42:25)

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a much bigger field now than when I started. So again, the book was published in 2020. The conference was taking place in the early 2010s. It was more based in the early 2000s. So now we have a lot more writing on both queer topics and people in the field using queer analytics. Even if they're not writing about queer populations, they're reading different kinds of studies. One of the issues that I also wanted to include in the volume but was not able to do, not able to do was to include the diaspora, because of course, there's huge Korean diasporic populations, not only in the US but in Japan and in China. And in many places there's a adoptee, ethnic Koreans, who are internationally adopted. Early on, when I was active in the LGBT scene In the early 2000s, I had some friends who were adopted to places in Europe and eventually identified as queer and were making some really interesting art and political statements about what it meant to be Korean and queer, but not from the perspective of those people living in South Korea themselves. So I think those are some of the kind of key issues that I think need to be included. We also have some new work on North Korea that I didn't really have access to at the time. Voices, particularly of those who fled North Korea and came to the South. There's been a novel written by someone who grew up in North Korea, came to South Korea, realized he was gay. I think he eventually married a Korean American gay man and now lives in the United States. So those kinds of diasporic inter Korean adoptee issues, I think those would pro. Would need to be in a Korea 2.0. And then there's some other interesting issues that weren't addressed in the book as well. The degree to which questions about intersex persons and intersex conditions, the degree to which those help us to understand questions of queerness, or whether those need to be written about separately. And then I'd suppose the dynamics within the current community. So it is true that the queer communities in South Korea have proliferated, and there's many more opportunities for people to meet one another and to consume and to go out. And yet the community in the sort of larger context, I think, is also increasingly fragmented based on, you know, are you gay or lesbian, are you trans, are you this or that. So those kinds of Labels. And then also in terms of intergenerational questions, at least in the gay scene, the community is very divided, separated by age groups. So for people in their 20s or 30s to interact with people in their 40s and their 50s to interact with people in their 60s and 70s, I think those kinds of dialogues across different generations. I think a study that connects people who are born in the 50s and 60s versus people who are born in the 70s and 80s versus people who are born in-90s and the 2000s, I think those kinds of issues also could help diversify this growing field.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (46:18)

Yeah, there's also something quite important that I forgot to mention was the queer analytics that mentioned. But if you read the book, then you know it's a good solution to look at the career studies rather than is a new way of doing queer studies suggested from the book, I think. But that's good. And thank you, Dr. Todd Henry, for today. We've taken up a lot of your time. Would you mind telling us a bit about what is next for you regarding your own research?

Dr. Todd Henry (47:01)

Yeah, so some of the work that was published in Queer Korea, I've since expanded that into a book manuscript. So the University of Hawaii Press will publish my own monograph by July of next year, 2026. And the title of that is called Prophets of Queerness, Media, Biomedicine and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea. So some of the issues around intersex, both male and female, homosexuality, gender, non conformity, a lot of those questions are addressed in that book. And right now I'm working on a follow up study that looks at the 1980s and 1990s. So really the end of the authoritarian period, which in my field has largely been narrated through the Minjung movement, the mass movement that led to the overthrow of dictatorship and the onset of democracy. So I'm trying to revisit the 1980s to both try to globalize that era a bit more, looking at questions of sex tourism, looking at the emergence of the HIV AIDS issue during the 1980s, and also looking at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. So all of these issues have a very deeply transnational dimension to them. So my next study will try to focus on how those global issues came to bear on the overfall of dictatorship, the onset of democracy, and some of the unresolved issues of democratization, including the place of LGBT people, the place of HIV positive people, those who worked overseas for a long time and returned to Korea. So those are some of the topics that my next study I think will address.

Bing (Podcast Host, New Books in Station Studies) (49:07)

I think that all sounds really interesting and I hope the book will come out soon. And I also hope to invite you to the show again if possible. But thank you for being on the show today. I had a great time talking to you. I learned a lot in the field and I hope you take care. Now we must say goodbye to our audience. Goodbye.