Writing

Journal of Asian Studies

New writing: “Out of Place in Time: Queer Discontents and Sigisangjo” (2022)

This article in The Journal of Asian Studies discusses queer and transgender voices that took part in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 but became sidelined during the special election that followed. Drawing from theories of queer temporality and feminist critiques of homogenous time, I argue that idioms of postponement (najunge) and prematurity (sigisangjo) have significantly shaped liberal political discourses regarding the timing and timeliness of social change and minority politics in South Korea.… more →

Book cover image of Digital Lives in the Global City (2020)

New writing: “High-Altitude Protests and Necropolitical Digits” (2020)

This was one of the quickest writings I’ve done, conceived and drafted almost entirely on one night in 2015. It’s a short, creative piece, packed with dates and other kinds of digits that have become a key part of my research on protest cultures. I wanted to tie these numerical digits to the idea of “digital lives,” making sense of protests that persist over time and hang precariously on the verge of death.

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New publication: “Shifting Geographies of Proximity” in Ethnographies of U.S. Empire

“Politically and theologically conservative Korean Protestantism — which constitutes the dominant mainstream and political leadership of Korean Christianity, and is especially prominent among immigrant Korean Americans in the United States — is inextricable from its Cold War collusion with religious and geopolitical-economic reaches of the American empire. This discussion of history — not as a bygone past but as an enduring present — gestures toward my contention that Korean evangelicals are producing Islamophobia as a geopolitical-religious and world orientation project. By aligning Korea with the “Free World” even as Korea reaches out to the developing world, world evangelical missions not only consolidate and reinforce existing affinities and alliances, but also engage in an ongoing calibration of distance and proximity in relation to the empire.”… more →

“Queer Korean Studies” presentation at AAS 2016

I was cleaning up some files and thought I’d share this here. It’s from the “Spring Forward, Fall Back?: Progress and Challenges in Korean Gender Studies” panel organized by Hyaeweol Choi (Australian National University) at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) meeting in Seattle nearly a year ago on April 2, 2016. I presented some comments (and stories) about queer politics.… more →