A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

Gitzen, Timothy

doi:10.1111/muan.12263

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…The very infrastructural brutalism of the interrogation rooms in particular, to invoke Michael Truscello (2020, 2)-infrastructure that "isolates, toxifies, dispossesses, and immobilizes"-animates their continued relevance and patrons' acts of remembrance. As I detail elsewhere (Gitzen 2023), this transformation happens in other spaces in Korea, from former colonial buildings to repurposed military bunkers, each beckoning forth a past and inviting an imagining of a future arbitrated in the present. In comparison, military bunkers, another form of security infrastructure, represent a past that "is not over but remains the condition of possibility within which the present must be apprehended" (Beck 2011, 82).…”

Section: Epilogue Security's Undoingmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Doing so, Kwon argues, "allows us to cut across the impasses of imperial and nationalist binary rhetoric to redefine intimacy as an unstable play of affects informed by desire, longing, and affection-all of which coexisted with the betterknown violence and coercion undergirding empire" (ibid.). The interplay between intimacy and violence of the Japanese empire emerges in reverberations in Korean history and ruinations in its physical and psychic landscape (Stoler 2013), from colonial buildings turned museums (Gitzen 2023) to the actual violence of forced intimacy with comfort women (Soh 2008). 27 Yet the security state itself-including laws like the NSL, the military's anti-sodomy clause, and the Korean military system-is an intimate reverberation and ruin of Japanese colonialism that hinges on violence.…”

Section: National Security and The North Korean Othermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses

Gitzen

2023

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The decades-long fear of South Korean national destruction has routinized national security and the sense of threat. In present day South Korea, national security includes not only war and the military, but national unity, public health, and the family. As a result, queer Koreans have become a target as their bodies are thought to harbor deadly viruses and are thus seen as carriers of diseases. The prevailing narrative already sees being queer as a threat to traditional family and marriage. By claiming that queer Koreans disrupt military readiness and unit cohesion, that threat is extended to the entire population. Queer Koreans are enveloped by the banality of security, treated as threats, while also being overlooked as part of the nation. What does it mean to be perceived as a national threat simply based on who you would like to sleep with? In their desire to be seen as citizens who support the safety and security of the nation, queer Koreans placate a patriarchal and national authority that is responsible for their continued marginalization. At the same time, they are also creating spaces to protect themselves from the security measures and technologies directed against them. Taking readers from police stations and the galleries of the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Banal Security explores how queer Koreans participate in their own securitization, demonstrates how security weaves through daily life in ways that oppress queer Koreans, and highlights the work of queer activists to address that oppression. In doing so, queer Koreans challenge not only the contours of national security in South Korea, but global entanglements of security.

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Section: Epilogue Security's Undoingmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: National Security and The North Korean Othermentioning

confidence: 99%