A monocolor illustration of a young Korean man and woman, smiling with their arms thrown over each others' shoulders. Handwriting in the top left corner reads "Love in the Big City"
Love in the Big City: Heterobaiting and Queering Relationships in Korean Media

Korean queer media and literature do not need to conform to Western definitions of queerness to be meaningful. As I write for an Anglophone queer audience, I am reminded that this dialogue is not about proving the queerness of Korean media, but about expanding the scope of queer representation to include its many forms and contexts. Perhaps, rather than queering Korean media for the West, we should allow its stories to challenge and reshape what we consider queer altogether.

A monocolor illustration of a young Korean man and woman, smiling with their arms thrown over each others' shoulders. Handwriting in the top left corner reads "Love in the Big City"
Love in the Big City: Heterobaiting and Queering Relationships in Korean Media

Korean queer media and literature do not need to conform to Western definitions of queerness to be meaningful. As I write for an Anglophone queer audience, I am reminded that this dialogue is not about proving the queerness of Korean media, but about expanding the scope of queer representation to include its many forms and contexts. Perhaps, rather than queering Korean media for the West, we should allow its stories to challenge and reshape what we consider queer altogether.

A black-and-white Victorian-era photograph of two white AMAB people dressed as women.
Misgendering the Misgendered

I first witnessed a transgender character misgendered by her own author in “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” a short story published anonymously in 1857. The text was assigned for a queer short stories course at UCLA, and while I wasn’t surprised that a transgender character was misgendered by a writer in 1857, I was surprised that a professor of queer studies in 2023 would as well.

“We Get To Celebrate A Victory”: UC-AFT’s Successful Negotiation with the UC Admin

Image courtesy of UC AFT Instagram: @uc_aft In the early hours of Nov. 17, negotiators for UC-AFT, the union that represents our lecturers, came to a successful agreement with the University of California admin. The strike that was planned for…

What Does the Recent Supreme Court Gutting of Roe v. Wade With Texas’s Abortion Law Mean for Queer Rights?

Image from C-SPAN footage The United States Supreme Court has long been the focal point of political battles and tensions. The failed appointment of Robert Bork under former President Ronald Reagan served as the spark for a common practice known…

The Contra-versial Nuances of Queerness

CW: Queerphobia, transphobia, acephobia, biphobia “Gen Z queer people are hard to figure out,” reads a now deleted tweet by Natalie Wynn, known by her online moniker, ContraPoints. “They’re like, ‘I’m an asexual slut who loves sex! You don’t have…

Bashing Back: Why Self-Defense Matters

Illustrated by Christopher Ikonomou (Xe/He) The subject of guns rarely comes up in queer spaces, and it’s no mystery why: right wingers dominate the discourse on self-defense, gun ownership, and Second Amendment rights, and their record on queer positivity has…

We Are Not Disposable: The Disabled Student Union’s Protest for Remote Access

Photo by Rowan O’Bryan “UCLA ab-le-ist!” replaces the “fight-fight-fight” in the UCLA iconic 8-clap at last Friday’s Disabled Student Union (DSU) protest for remote instruction. Many wore white in solidarity.  As we head into the second year with the coronavirus,…

What Does Prop. 24 Mean for LGBTQ Privacy?

Graphic by Nick Griffin (He/Him) “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” is a common argument against privacy rights. However, while many LGBTQ+ people may feel as though they have nothing to hide, they do have…

What the Biden Administration Has to Undo

Content warning: homophobia and transphobia. The Trump administration has spent the entirety of the past four years staging a systematic assault on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States of America. On January 20th, 2017, the very day of Donald Trump’s…