Queering Cold War: Emotional Others and Perverted Sexualities in Early Postwar Taiwan and South Korea

Abstract

The term \"chongbuk gei” (pro-North Korea gay) emerged from anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in 2015 South Korea, which has evoked a feeling of past political terror and brought the association between sexual perversion and political subversion into question. It also leads us to reflect on the anti-communist era, when the domestic containment of the political \"other\" (i.e. communist) also authorized containment of the sexual \"other\" (i.e. homosexuality). To unpack the impact of this historical confrontation, this paper revisits the cold war ideology of political and sexual normalization by investigating the dehumanization of communist and its association with sexual perversion (ex. rape, SM, homosexuality). To this end, this paper examines media representation of communist figures and homosexuality, specifically the discussion of the novels Rival Suns (1961) and The Wounded (1966) published in early postwar Taiwan and South Korea. A considerable number of media and literary representations of communist and homosexual figures are linked to brutal murder, sexual violence and deviance, which facilitates a sentiment of hate and transforms both figures into ideological and social outlaws. Though Taiwan and South Korea had different strength of anti-communism and different attitudes toward America in early postwar era, Cold War anti-communism and humanism have mediated the division of two Chinas and Koreas, as well as the perception of the communist and homosexual as internal threat. As this paper argues, political ideology and sexual politics must be analyzed in an intersectional manner in Taiwan and South Korea for a better understanding of Cold War geopolitics and sexualities in East Asia.