Being a Woman in a Male Body: Queer Fugitivity and Feminized Labor in Authoritarian South Korea, 1965-1980

To date, Marxist and feminist critiques of authoritarian development under Park Chung Hee (1961-1979) and his succesors have focused on how heteropatriarchal control, capitalist accumulation, and Cold War militarism led to the proletarianization and sexualization of women.  While this important line of analysis has helped explain the disempowering underside of South Korean modernity, it has tended to reify, rather than question, the gendered and sexed conditions under which all South Koreans lived and labored.  To transcend these heteronormative frameworks, I adopt Stephen Dillon's concept of "queer fugitivity," highlighting the contested boundaries between maleness and femaleness as well as those of femininity and masculinity.  My focus on the under-studied experiences of male-bodied women (or wo/men) exposes the normalizing power of medical professionals, police officers, and other social gatekeepers who regulated how these marginalized actors lived as biological offspring, militarized citizens, and working-class laborers, but without offering them the medical, legal, or cultural sanction of gender confirmation.  In addition to the structural realities of their inoperable status, I examine their everyday struggles of survival, using popular and medical archives to excavate non-surgical practices of feminization and passing.  Through a discussion of the misdemeanor punishment law, I reveal the repeated process of capture and escape as a defining feature of their fugitive status in South Korea’s heteropatriarchal order.  By recalling the highly precarious position of non-confomring people, I underscore the limited possibilities and high costs of existing as non-binary in a world that, even after the onset of procedural democracy, still insists on gender and sexual dualisms as the only acceptable ways of life, labor, and citizenship.