UC Irvine

In South Korea, heteronormative notions about a desirable middle-class life-course—offinancial stability, marriage, and childrearing––are being tested. Economic shifts following the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis have made it difficult, if not impossible, for many young people to participate in these processes. As large numbers of those in their 20s and 30s are experiencing underemployment and depend on immediate kin for shelter and finance, economic instability is contributing to precipitous declines in marriage and childbirth rates. As young people, regardless of their gender or sexuality, delay heteronormative markers of adulthood indefinitely, such instability is creating new ways for LGBTQ+ folk in their 20s and 30s to pass as “normal” in everyday life—especially to relatives, friends, co-workers, and employers. In the absence of basic legal protections, however, creating collective queer publics and politics is perilous, as exposure can bring about individualized social and economic discrimination. Existent theories of “precarity” describe how social and economic insecurity is leading to the disruption of anticipated futures and preventing young people from reaching the goalposts of heterosexual adulthood. Theorizations of “queer time” conversely cast the disruption of heteronormative life-processes as anti-normative and liberatory. Yet, my research suggests that this “queer” situation of precarity creates certain social and political possibilities for LGBTQ+ Koreans, even as it complicates their existing vulnerabilities. Building on 20 months of ethnographic research (2018-2021) with 4 activist groups and over 50 LGBTQ+ people in their 20s and 30s, this dissertation examines how queer Koreans craft sociality, politics, and futures within Korea’s post-millennial economic, social, and demographic transformations.