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Korea
Organized Panel Session
In 2012, Gallery Ryugaheon in Seoul exhibited a photography series by Yi Hanku in conjunction with the publication of his photobook Kunyong (Military Use). The photographs, presented twenty years after Yi’s mandatory service in the Korean Army, showcase life in the barracks of the Army battalion where he served. Yi’s photographs of the young, in-training bodies betray the visual tropes of militarized masculinity: (bare) bodies constantly press together within the cramped space of the barracks; nudity fails to fulfill the common fantasy of military-trained physical perfection; gentle touches linger between resting bodies. Yet, the aberrance central to these depictions of military bodies was elided in the critical discussion about the exhibition. I argue that such photographs by Yi Hanku (as well as by Yi Yonghun) call upon the problematics of bodies in military photography not by “revealing” or signifying queer bodies, but by activating queer methods. Rather than locate the iconography of queer identities in the photographs, this paper considers the queer methodology of optics—what Gayatri Gopinath calls the “queer optic”—in visualizing South Korean conscription and military life. This shifts the focus from singling out homoerotic bodies as the “content” of such images to examining what the photographs propose against the conscription state; the “queer” of queer optics indicates a rupture in the practice of gazing at these photographed bodies within the nationalistic, patriarchal, masculine praxis of Cold War ideology. As such, the “queering” in Yi’s work offers a way to rethink the histories of Korean photography.
Jung Joon Lee
Rhode Island School of Design