Instability in Stability: Queer “Adults” and Paradoxes of Precarity in South Korea

 

This talk explored how demographic shifts, economic transformations and changing conceptions of heterosexual adulthood relate to queer life in South Korea. Specifically, Wolff examined how queer Koreans in their 20s and 30s navigate the conflict between achieving a feeling of economic stability and a sense of queer selfhood. As economic instability and labor insecurity became normalized following the Asian Financial Crisis, corporate and civil servant jobs also became coveted for the sense of stability (anjeong-gam) they seemed to promise. With marriage and fertility rates at all-time lows due to factors like financial precarity and high-parenting costs, many idealize “stability” as a pathway back to these disrupted processes of “adulthood.” However, queer Koreans have historically experienced precarity on the basis of heteronormative conditions for achieving and maintaining economic stability.

 

Wolff''s research found that as queer college graduates labored towards “stable” careers, they were paradoxically beset by affective forms of instability, as queer embodiment and political participation threatened workplace discrimination and even dismissal. While academic theories of “precarity” often describe how the loss of economic stability leads to disrupted social reproduction and evacuated futures, this talk seeks to complicate the concept and its temporal associations. By elucidating how dynamics of heteronormativity have shaped notions of precarity,Wolff argued that instability and stability must be understood as emergent processes articulated through dynamics of kinship, class, gender, sexuality, and social difference.

 

 

Alex Wolff (they/she) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto. Their research examines intersections of economics, gender, and sexuality through a focus on queer sociality and activism in South Korea. Building upon preliminary fieldwork (2017-19) and a year of ethnographic research in Korea (2020-21), they are currently writing a book manuscript that explores how class, economics of kinship, and structural marginalization relate to the ways LGBTQ+ Koreans build publics, politics, and their futures. Their work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, and the Center for Critical Korean Studies. They received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, in 2023.

 

Chair: Jesook Song is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, university of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Mediating Gender, her co-edited volume with Michelle Cho, is scheduled to come out in the University of Michigan Press in early 2024.