Queer Korean cinema, national others, and making of queer space in Stateless Things (2011)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the spatial politics and aesthetics of queer Korean cinema through a close reading of Stateless Things (Jultak dongsi, Kim Kyung-mook, 2011). The focus of this article is twofold. Firstly, it explores the way in which the film experiments with both narrative and formalistic elements in critiquing South Korean national logic of progress and their ethnocentrism. Secondly, it delineates the queer use of space in the film. Through a careful examination of the film, this article argues that the virtue of queer Korean cinema lies in its ardent effort to reinstate the history of socially marginalized people on screen and to disclose the aspects of queer lives that cannot be subsumed under the heteronormative logic of progress.