한국 근대 퀴어 서사의 계보학

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to restore the emotion and desire of queer existence within modern Korean literature which has not been fully treated by Korean literary history. By capturing the original moment when the Korean literary field was reorganized heterocentrically, this thesis focuses on proving that the heteronormativity of the Korean literary field is not natural. This thesis seeks to redefine the period from the 1910s to the early 1920s as “The Era of Queer Narrative.” The male youth of this period was represented as a pioneering spirit of the times, leading Joseon into a civilized society, as an emblem of hope pushing history constantly forward. Male youths from “The Era of Queer Narrative” confirmed their “sympathy＝love” towards each other with physical contact such as hugging and kissing, on the basis of which they constructed an Emotional-Community. However, while the Emotional-Community required a male-oriented same-sex “love”, it also forbade male youth from expressing their romantic love, namely queer emotion, to another male. Literary works from “The Era of Queer Narrative”, which demonstrate a same-sex intimacy, performed the command according to the letter, while also revealing the cracks in its façade. However, the status of literary representation of same-sex intimacy was reversed from “civilization” to “barbarism” after the mid-1920s, when discourses on homosexuality were introduced and accepted. As a result, to avoid any “misunderstanding” that they represented homosexuality, and to avoid being “misconceived” as homosexuals themselves, writers consciously endeavored to exclude depictions of same-sex intimacy. This was closely related to a longing of the intelligentsia-literati to occupy and retain their status as transmitter of knowledge and disseminator of thought. From the mid-1920s to the 1940s, after the discourse against homosexuality was introduced and established, the queer narrative was repressed, refracted and concealed in three different ways : ①reminiscence, ②a token of decadence, and ③concealment within a heterosexual narrative. Meanwhile, after the importation of the discourse against homosexuality, the number of narratives representing the desire between men decreased, while the number of narratives representing the desire between women increased. This thesis attempts to shed light on the fact that many stories about “women loving women” emerged from an Emotional-Community of “women promoting the interests of women”, which had existed since “The Era of Queer Narrative.”