UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation explores the politics of contemporary queer placemaking through the lens of men’s same-sex cruising practices. I locate these practices specifically inside the Korean spa, ethnic businesses that are increasingly used as clandestine venues for men’s same-sex sexual activity. If cruising is a historically situated practice born out of the criminalization of gay men’s sexual subjectivities, I am interested in the reasons that men today continue to risk cruising in public space given the plethora of means with which to meet one another in the modern age. In reimagining Korean spas as spaces for sexual adventure, I find that some cruisers desire and eroticize those same structures of surveillance and discretion that characterize a more punitive past. For many of the men in this study, developing ways of turning an otherwise heteronormative institution into a queer sexual landscape demonstrates transgression and subversion in the face of contemporary assimilatory queer politics. My dissertation thus examines the consequences of a simultaneous push towards queer radicalization and pull for LGBTQ normalization as a particularly affecting dynamic for the meanings of same-sex seeking men’s sexual practices.

While exhuming radical queer eroticism, Korean spa cruisers simultaneously (re)construct limiting structures of inequality that valorize some at the expense of others. Through the co-constitutive discourses of “respectability” and “creepiness”, I demonstrate the adaptability of hegemonic power as reconceptualized in ways that encourage its persistence thus reinscribing dominant ideologies between public/private, normal/abnormal, and respectful/creepy. My work here highlights the accomplishment of “queering space” as messy, uneven, and even contradictory. I position the Korean spa as an exemplary case study to examine these contradictions, demonstrating how interlocking systems of power can be simultaneously challenged and fortified. Ultimately, I suggest a hopeful reading of these spaces, practices, and men who use cruising as a means through which to explore sexual identity, experiment with desire, and cultivate community in abjection.To accomplish this argument, I use interview data with 41 men who have some experience engaging in same-sex cruising in Korean spas along with an archived collection of about ~14,000 comments posted to an online forum designed to facilitate discussion of cruising in these spaces. In addition to these primary data, I have archived a collection of articles from the LA Times dating from 1987-2021 discussing the use and rising popularity of K-spas for the general public as well as individual reviews of these businesses on Yelp. Finally, as someone who’s on own queer identity was formed through their journeys in these spaces, I deploy autoethnographic reflections and how my insider/outsider positionality has made critical allowances and restrictions for the contours of this project.