Description

Ibanjiha, an iconic queer contemporary artist, performer, and writer based in Seoul, South Korea, will give a lecture performance, to share their multidisciplinary works and artistic vision. The talk and Q&A will be in English, with the last 20 minutes reserved for Q&A in Korean.

About the artist:
Ibanjiha*(a.k.a. SoYoon Kim) is a multidisciplinary artist based in South Korea. Since 2004, Ibanjiha have been creating queer figures crossing gender boundaries via various media forms, including drawing, painting, 2D and VR animation. Ibanjiha is widely known with their signature original songs and performances in queer communities and beyond.

They are a bestselling author of their first essay collections Ibanjiha: a queer next door, which was published in 2021. The book has been selected for “Ten Books of the Year” by Aladdin, one of the biggest online bookstores in South Korea, and also listed for “the Thirty Best books for Teens in 2021” by Korean Publishers Association. Ibanjiha is selected for 2022 Goyang artist-in-residence program run by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea.

*Ibanjiha, a compound word created by the artist, literally means a queer (Iban) in a basement (Jiha).

Chair: Robert Diaz (Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies Institute, U of Toronto) & Hae Yeon Choo (Associate Professor, Sociology, U of Toronto)

This talk is organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto and WIND Toronto Korean Feminist Collective

Description

***This registration is for Part 2 of the Symposium only. Please register separately for Part 1.***

The symposium is organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Asian Institute’s Global Taiwan Studies Program, the Centre for South Asian Studies, the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and WIND Toronto Korean Feminist Collective

PART 2

7:30pm-8:30pm (EST): Poetry Reading by Choi Young-Mi & Conversation with the Poet (Chair: Janet Poole)

8:30pm-9:30pm (EST): After MeToo Documentary Screening and Conversation with Directors, Garam Kangyu and Somyi Yi (Chair: Michelle Cho)

The poetry reading and the poet’s remarks are in English, along with the Korean original poems. The documentary is in Korean with English subtitles, and a link to the documentary After MeToo will be shared with those who registered for this evening session to be viewed from February 21 until March 11 as part of the confirmation email. Please note that the recording, sharing, or capturing the images of the documentary is prohibited. The conversation with the directors will be in Korean with English translation.

#After MeToo (South Korea, 2021, documentary, 84 minutes)
Directors: PARK Sohyun, YI Somyi, KANGYU Garam, Soram

SYNOPSIS: How has South Korean society changed since the #MeToo movement shook up the society? Can this question even be answered, in the midst of strong backlash, persistent male alliance, and structural sexism still in place? The film explores the questions and possibilities that the #MeToo movement has left, through the daily lives and voices of women today.

PLEASE NOTE: After the registration, a link for streaming the documentary will be sent via email on February 21, as part of the zoom meeting registration confirmation, and the documentary can be viewed from February 21 to March 11, 2022, before the conversation with the directors.

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Participants’ Bios:

CHOI YOUNG-MI is a poet and novelist from the Republic of Korea, and is one of the defining figures who ignited the #MeToo movement in Korea. She is the author of poetry collections At Thirty the Party was Over (1994, 2015), Bicycling in Dreamland (1998), To The Pigs (2005, 2014), Life that has yet to Arrive (2009), Things Already Hot (2013), and What will not come again (2019) which includes the poem “Monster” and other #Metoo poems. Http://choiyoungmi.com/

GARAM KANGYU is a feminist filmmaker based in South Korea, and a co-founder of the Alternative Cultural Club, Youngheeya Nolja. She was the assistant director and film distributor for the feature documentary The Girl Princes. She was awarded the Best Korean Documentary Award for her film My Father’s House at the 3rd DMZ International Documentary Film Festival. In 2013, she collaborated with female documentary filmmakers for the feature documentary Let’s Dance. She also completed Itaewon, a feature documentary about the lives of women having lived in a U.S. military town and their experiences (2016), and Us, Day by Day on the everyday lives and activism of young feminist activists in South Korea from the 1990s and the present (2019).

SOMYI YI is a filmmaker based in South Korea, whose work centers on the power of marginalized lives and voices. She directed “100. My body and body became healthy,” as part of the documentary After MeToo (2021), which follows the lives of Park Jôngsun who later came to terms with the identity of victims of sexual violence later in life in her 40s, offering a poignant account of the power of her language. After MeToo premiered in the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival in 2021. Her earlier work, Observation and Memory (2018), an autobiographical documentary about sexual harassment from the past in the absence of evidence, received the Grand Prix (KAFA) award in 2019 at the Busan International Short Film Festival, and was featured in several South Korean and international film festivals.

MICHELLE CHO is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She’s published on Asian cinemas and Korean television, video, and pop music in such venues as Cinema Journal, the International Journal of Communication, Asian Video Cultures, and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. Her first monograph analyzes millennial South Korean genre cinemas, and her current project theorizes “vicarious media” in K-pop and its fandoms. She is co-editing a volume with Jesook Song on mediations of gender politics in contemporary South Korea. Her public-facing writing on K-pop, fandom, and media convergence can be found online at flowjournal.org, pandemicmedia.meson.press, Even Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

JANET POOLE teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of Toronto. Her exploration of Korean modernist writers’ response to Japanese fascist occupation during the Pacific War appeared as When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination of Late Colonial Korea (Columbia University Press, 2014) and was awarded the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is translator of the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun and has published a collection of his anecdotal essays (Eastern Sentiments, Columbia University Press, paperback edition, 2013) and a selection of his short stories written during the Pacific War and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic (Dust and Other Stories, Columbia University Press, 2018). Her most recent project is titled, “Going North and the History of Korean Modernism.”

Description

BOOK TALK

A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2022).

A Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States’ transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America’s devastating wars in Asia. Examining U.S. militarism’s centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive—placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.

Christine Hong is Associate Professor of Literature, chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and co-director of the new Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2019). Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and she is the co-editor of the journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Co-presented by the Centre for the Study of Korea, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto and is co-sponsored by Heung | 흥 Coalition

Description

This presentation explores the sexual/gender hierarchy that prostitution policies constituted in the national community of postcolonial South Korea. It starts with an exegesis of the reformatories designed for ‘prostitutes’ (yullak haengwija) and other ‘women deemed as needing of protection’ (yobohoyŏja) based on both documents and interviews. While these reformatories for women were built specifically to protect, socially rehabilitate, and offer education and training to prostitutes, I argue that they were a space exemplary of the state of exception or heterotopia riddled with violence and abuse. Simultaneously, these facilities were also zones that produced knowledge on prostitutes, alongside venereal disease clinics and designated red-light districts. In such arenas, women were held subject to the gaze of government surveillance and experts from diverse disciplines from medicine to social science observed, surveyed, and examined prostitutes to demystify them and control their alleged threat. I elucidate how the state institution of knowledge on prostitution and prostitution policies together contributed to the making of an idealized gender/sexual hierarchy in the nation, consisting of ‘prostitutes, ladies, and gentlemen’.

SPEAKER: JEONG-MI PARK (Associate Professor, Sociology, Chungbuk National University)

After earning her BA, MA, and PhD at Seoul National University, Jeong-Mi Park conducted research as a research professor at Hanyang University (2011-2015) and a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress (2015-2016). As a historical sociologist, she has analyzed the historical transformations of state policies, citizenship, and social movements in South Korea from a feminist perspective. Her publications include “Liberation or Purification? Prostitution, Women’s Movement and Nation Building in South Korea under U.S. Military Occupation, 1945-1948” (Sexualities, 2019, in English) and “From Blood to Culture? Family, Nationality, and the Gender Politics of Membership” (Korean Journal of Sociology, 2020, in Korean). She has completed her book manuscript tentatively entitled The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea, and this presentation is chapter 4 of the manuscript.

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This virtual event is organized by Laam Hae (Politics, York University)

This virtual event is presented by the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies. This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Korea (CSK) at University of Toronto.

This is a free event but registration is required. Upon registration, you will receive a Zoom link.

For more information: kore@yorku.ca | https://kore.info.yorku.ca/calendar/

Description

Synopsis
Seyeon is a manager at a company called ‘Human Network’ and lives with her daughter Mirae. Her company manages collecting overdue credit card bills, and recently corporate has been pressuring her due to her low numbers. June, who is a commercial high school student, wants to be a photographer but works at Seyeon’s call center for the money. Through tragic incidents, Seyeon realizes that she was the part of the system. The film comments on precarious labor conditions and hardships especially on women and the youth.

DIRECTOR | SHIN SU-WON
Shin Su-won is a film director and screenwriter. Shin wrote and directed PASSERBY #3 (2010), CIRCLE LINE (2012), PLUTO (2013), MADONNA (2015), GLASS GARDEN (2017), LIGHT FOR THE YOUTH (2019) and most recently HOMMAGE (2022). Shin is renowned for innovative cinematography, astonishingly creative narrative structure, and social messages and her films were invited and awarded in many prestigious international film festivals. In particular, in 2015, MADONNA was invited to screen in the Un Certain Regard section of the 68Cannes Film Festival.

This event is organized by Hong KAL (Visual Art and Art History, York University) and Hae Yeon Choo (Sociology, University of Toronto). This event is presented by the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University, which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies. This event is co-presented by the Centre for the Study of Korea (CSK) at University of Toronto and the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) at York University.

For more information: kore@yorku.ca | https://kore.info.yorku.ca/calendar/

Description

Event Description
In 1985, Park Hyunchae, an eminent South Korean Marxist economist contributed a controversial article to a critical journal , which led a most heated intellectual debate in Korean intellectual history for more than a decade. It is known as “social formation debate” which is about how to define characters of Korean social formation into capitalist mode of production. Park’s article argues the key characters of Korean social formation is “Neo-colonial State Monopoly Capitalism” contesting competitive discourse of the characters as “Colonial Semi-Feudal Society”. The argument generated intense discussions on the historical character of Korean society in relation to the political struggles against the military regime at that moment. In hindsight, however, it was the critical turn that Marxist intervention in the historical knowledge production effectively re-emerged after the division of Korea. Park’s article performs the critique of dependency theories, in particular the argument of Samir Amin. Dependency theory was an alibi fabricated to emphasize the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, the contradiction between capital and labor. Furthermore, Park’s theoretical view seem to oppose Amin’s dependency theory by establishing theory of the national economy (Minjok gyungje ron). In fact, Park’s theory parallels with, at the same time, converges on Amin’s theoretical and political approach when Park’s theory addresses the significance of the national popular development en route to the socialist society since the Bandung era. Based on the imagination of the encounter between the theorists, the talk invites to contemplate difficulties of Marxist theoretical practices in post-colonial capitalist societies in tandem with ‘question of the nation’.

SPEAKER | DONGJIN SEO
Professor, Department of Intermedia Art, Kaywon University of Art and Design
Professor Dongjin Seo attended Yonsei University, where he received Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate degrees in Sociology. His work critically analyzes relationships between capitalist economy and culture, and his published writings focus on contemporary visual culture and performance art. He is currently working on a book that critically examines the aesthetic shifts in visual culture during recent years. Professor Seo’s major publications include After Contemporary: Time-Experience- Image (Hyunsilbook, 2018), The Nap of Dialectics: Antagonism and Politics (Courier, 2014), The Will for Freedom, The Will for Self- Improvement (Dolbegae, 2009) and Design Melancholia (Hyunsilbook, 2009). He co-curated Solidarity Spores (Asia Culture Center, 2020), and participated as an artist in exhibitions such as Read My Lips (Hapjungjigu, 2017) and Urban Ritornello (Ilmin Museum of Art, 2017). He has also acted as a dramaturg or participant in many performances, including Name Names Naming Named (2017), Other Scenes (2017), and Big Big Big Thank You (2016).

This virtual event is presented by the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE), which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies. This virtual event is co-presented by the Centre for the Study of Korea (CSK) at University of Toronto and co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at University of Toronto.

For more information: kore@yorku.ca || https://kore.info.yorku.ca/calendar/