“Remembering Queer Korea,” the first event of its kind, combines scholarship, film, and art in an attempt to critically reflect upon the place of non-normative sexuality and gender variance in the peninsula’s history and culture. To be sure, these topics have become an increasingly important part of South Korean society since the 1990s, as evidenced by the upsurge of human rights organizations, representations in film and on television, and in practices of queer consumption. However, the antecedents of these contemporary phenomena tend to remain hidden under an impenetrable veneer of imagined, if not real, conservatism. Given the transnational nature of academic work and cultural production, this oversight has also extended to the world outside the peninsula’s borders, where intellectual and artistic work continues to marginalize allegedly “backward” societies like the two Koreas.

The screening of independent films, the artistic exhibition of all-female stage performances, and the documentation and analysis of textual and visual sources spanning the twentieth century thus function as important reminders about the existence and even centrality of queer forms of life in constituting, contesting, and reinforcing such forms of power as nationalism, hetero-patriarchy, socialism, and capitalism. “Remember Queer Korea” in these ways also reveals how the peninsula might serve as a critical site to think about imperialism, militarism, diaspora, and neo-liberalism – in short, the cross-border processes that have made issues like same-sex marriage so visible.