Merose Hwang’s chapter in Todd A. Henry’s Queer Korea analyzes the ongoing battle for cultural representation in occupied Korea, just after the 1919 revolution, in the context of shamanic rituals. These popular performances acted as sites of gender and sexual fluidity, questioning heteronormative practice. Subsequently, both colonial and nationalist intellectuals attempted to subvert, regulate, and co-opt these practices, distorting historical understandings and erasing their queerness in the process. Queerness, Hwang concludes, allowed shamanic ritual spaces to question Japanese authoritarianism in Korean culture by ‘dragging’ colonialism.
Merose Hwang presents shamanistic ritual as an archive of queer community, erased by nationalist and colonial ethnohistoriographical memory. Her analysis of these rituals as ‘colonial drag’ provides historians with a way to ‘queer’ the Korean historical landscape, bypassing the ethnonationalist and eurocentric limitations of Korean studies and queer studies.
In order to reveal silences created in the historical narrative. Hwang utilized queer forms of analysis. The frameworks provided by José Esteban Muñoz and Petrus Liu, that being the ideas of postcoloniality, the mandate of queer futurity, and neoliberal queer theory, allow Hwang to elucidate the queer nature of ritual specialist performance in colonial Korea. Using this framework, she reveals that shamanistic performers seemingly spiritually assimilated with colonial rule, but were actually mimicking and mocking imperial attempts at cultural modernization.
Colonial forces used bureaucratic and intellectual institutions, such as the establishment of anthropological schools and commissioning of ethnographic studies of Korean history through the lens of shamanistic ritual, to subvert Korean cultural identity as backwards. Representations of shamanistic practice in media and popular memory shaped the lives of the shamanists, as queerness in ritual practice and social life was punished by the authoritarian regime. Colonial media portrayed shamanists as non-normative, hypersexualized, and perverse.1 Shamans were criminalized as morally inept.2 Thus, shamanism was used as a scapegoat for national demise and a roadblock to modernization.3
Nationalist resistance focused on the indigenous nature of shamanistic ritual practices as to draw Korean cultural origins away from Japan, inwards towards Siberia and China, co-opting shamanism as a form of resistance but simultaneously erasing its queerness.4 Despite problematically depicting shamans, nationalist thinkers offered a formula for decolonizing, utilizing queerness on the continent as an origin myth for Korean culture.
Shamanism was not simply used for colonial or nationalist reasons, but for the purpose of mocking the empire.5 Hwang argues that ritualists paid homage to imperial spiritual imagery as a form of mockery.6 Regulations on indigenous decentralized religious practice turned performances into a form of ‘colonial drag’, maliciously complying and satirizing Japanese rule in Korea in a distinctly queer way. Ritual experts disguised themselves as devotees of imposed Shinto deities to scrutinize state driven patriarchy and imperial policing of culture.7
In colonial and nationalist cases, anthropology and ethnohistory were used to paint a particular view of Korean culture, silencing the queerness of shamanistic practice along the way. Hwang’s recognition of the anti-modern, queer practices of shamans as a form of resistance has carved a path for historians operating between the fields of Korean studies and queer studies. Korean studies tends to maintain heteronormative, nationalist assumptions, and queer studies tend to privilege the western perspective.8 Hwang bridges this gap in her analysis of Korean culture, effectively ‘queering’ the landscape. She displays the fact that queerness is not imported but native to Korean life, and integral to the preservation of Korean culture.
- Merose Hwang, ‘Ritual Specialists in Colonial Drag Shamanic Interventions in 1920s Korea’, in Todd A. Henry (ed.), Queer Korea (Durham, 2020), p. 56. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 58. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 62. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 64. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 69. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 70. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- So-Rim Lee, ‘Review of Queer Korea (Durham, 2020), by Todd A. Henry,’ Journal of Korean Studies 26, no. 1 (2021), p. 155. [↩]