Queen's Labyrinth: Single Life and Passion of Fascism

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel addresses the issue of women’s power in its trans-sexual and trans-gendered complexity in contemporary South Korea. The nation at the turn of 2013 and 2014 was fascinated and enraptured by three queens, namely Yuna Kim (Olympic gold medalist figure skater), Elsa (a protagonist of Disney’s animated film Frozen), and President Park Geun-hye. We regard this fascination as a politico-cultural labyrinth, in which South Koreans get lost and have to find the way out. In this bewitching labyrinth, they are not only enchanted with the girls fighting alone against the enemy, but also with a creepy monster (like that of Pan’s Labyrinth, a metaphoric figure of fascism) that is also hidden somewhere. Examining this South Korean infatuation with the girls who fight alone for a victory in the labyrinth, we contemplate the passion and complex anxiety for feminine charisma or the feminization of charisma.
Kwon Myung-a problematizes the double-edged female leadership in South Korea by paralleling the girl in Pan’s Labyrinth with President Park as a trans-sexual or trans-gendered figure from her own father, the dictatorial former president, Park Chung Hee. Lee Yun-Jong analyzes the tremendous success of Disney’s Frozen in South Korea by linking the diegetic issues of the “queen’s sovereignty,” “monstrosity,” and “witch-hunt” to the nation’s politico-cultural topography. Oh Hye-jin discusses the ambivalent “singularity” of female single writers whose unmarried status paradoxically obstructs them to write in South Korean society. Heo Yun re-illuminates the homosocial fandom of female kukuk immensely popular in the fifties in relation to transgenderization, transvestitism, and transnationalism in South Korea.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Yun-Jong Lee, Sungkyunkwan University

Chair

• Myoung-A Kwon, Dong-A University

Individual Presentations

• Queen's Labyrinth: Complication of 'the Feminine Vale' and the Fascism - Myoung-A Kwon, Dong-A University

• Between Queenship and Sovereignty: South Korean Box-office Fervor for Frozen - Yun-Jong Lee, Sungkyunkwan University

• 'Mad Women' Locked in the Attic Again: Gender Hierarchy of Alternative Public Scope and the Writing of Young Korean Female Researchers - Hye-Jin Oh, Sungkyunkwan University

• The Queer Co-existence of Female Homosociality and ‘Trans’ - Yun Heo, Ehwa Womans University

Discussant

• Myoung-A Kwon, Dong-A University