Dissertation: "Precarious Lives: Korean Gay Men and the Internet in Neoliberal and Neo-familial South Korea"

Certified Fall 2009

My dissertation engages with the Unit’s 2010 theme of “bios” by examining the contradictory effects of South Korea’s neofamilism and neoliberalism on Korean gay men. While declining birth rates have provoked anxiety about the future of the nation and revalorized the family as the foundational unit of the nation (resulting in what I term “neofamilism”), extensive economic reforms have earned the country the approval of global organizations like the International Monetary Fund but left the lives of its citizens increasingly precarious. Based on twenty-four months of ethnographic field research in Seoul, South Korea, I argue that Korean gay men stand at the crossroads of these contradictory changes. As single men without their own families, Korean gay men often have more time and money to spend on themselves. Without the emotional bond or financial security of their own families, however, they often have to keep developing themselves bodily, financially, and educationally in order to attract partners and remain employed. This seeming contradiction of both having more money for themselves and lacking security—especially in their old age, in not having their own families—thus raises the question of “Where does security—social, emotional, and financial—come from during the era of biopolitics and extensive neoliberal restructuring?”