Queer Governmentality in Times of Crisis: A Genealogical Study of Sexuality Governance in South Korea

• In Event: Sociology of LGBTQ+ Rights in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The governance of sexual minority rights in South Korea has been shaped by sustained contestation across distinct conjunctures of crisis. This paper examines how these crises have reconfigured the tension between expanding recognition for sexual minorities and the intensification of anti-LGBTQ+ backlash. To trace how this tension has been historically constituted, this paper employs critical discourse analysis of media reporting, activist materials, and institutional statements on sexual minorities. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, expanding medicalized discourses pathologized homosexuality as a public health risk. Sexual minorities were thereby stigmatized as an immoral difference threatening population security and deprived of political voice even after the democratization movement. Following the 1997 International Monetary Fund crisis and the consolidation of neoliberal rationalities, homosexuality came to be recognized as a legitimate form of sexuality through cultural and rights-based institutional discourse. Yet such recognition was conditional and did not translate into political inclusion. Since the mid-2010s, amid intensified anti-LGBTQ+ mobilization, sexual minorities have been positioned as objects of protection, as claims of liberation are framed within the politics of security. Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to governmentality, this paper conceptualizes these transformations as distinct representations of governmental rationalities in which pathologization, conditional recognition, and protection operate as interconnected techniques of regulating sexual difference. Throughout these shifts, sexual minorities have been recognized less as political actors than as managed populations within a biopolitical field in which sexual difference is constructed as governable. This paper contributes to broader debates on LGBTQ+ politics and governance by demonstrating that the promotion of sexual minority rights operates not as a site of emancipation but as a dispositif through which liberal and neoliberal governmental rationalities regulate sexual difference in a non-Western context.

Author

• Xueying Lan, Yonsei University