The Queer Threat: National Security, Sexuality, and Activism In South Korea

Abstract

This dissertation is about the recent neoliberal, bottom-up practices of “national security” in South Korea, where citizens interpret their daily lives through the language and discourse of national security and contribute to the production of threats. I demonstrate how national security threats also emerge from within the nation-state, often in the margins and treated as national others. The experiences of gender and sexual minorities represent the complexities of these margins, national othering, and internal threats. Focusing on what I call the queer threat, I argue that the relationship between the nation and security is changing to account for emerging margins and Others in the nation. This change results not only in shifting practices and discourses of national security, but ultimately marks modes of governance that take aim at the queer threat. Specifically, the Korean state and anti-LGBT protesters bring gender and sexual minorities into unexpected relations with “threat figures,” including North Korea, Muslims, and viruses. The amalgamation of such threat figures produces unintended relations of national security, themselves queer productions, that come to form new matricies of social relations and meanings that disrupt enforcement of national security law. I argue the queer threat is dangerous because it is a threat to the nation and a threat to the institution, logics, and practices of national security.