Profits of Queerness
-----
About the talk
In Profits of Queerness: Media, Biomedicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2026), Todd A. Henry presents an embodied reassessment of South Korea’s tumultuous era of industrial development. Combining queer and feminist approaches with carceral studies and the medical humanities, this interdisciplinary study reveals how societal conformity to strict norms of gender, sex, and sexuality was foundational to the operation of militarized capitalism in a divided nation. Drawing on an extensive archive of understudied sources—including medical reports, sensationalistic exposés, popular films, and oral histories—the book meticulously exposes how the intersection of mass media, sexual medicine, and state policing worked to entrench rigid binaries, such as male versus female and healthy versus deviant. Henry maintains that pathologizing doctors, surveilling officers, and everyday vigilantes quietly consolidated a “mass dictatorship” driven by (re-)productive goals. These darker biopolitical realities have frequently been masked by triumphalist narratives celebrating South Korea’s miraculous postwar recovery. To counter this historical silencing, Henry develops a bottom-up methodology of “shadow reading.” By looking beneath official accounts, he traces how queer and intersex citizens subverted pejorative diagnoses and state surveillance, developing vital practices of survival and empowerment on the fringes of an illiberal society. More broadly, Profits of Queerness introduces the concept of “hetero-authoritarianism,” offering scholars a global lens to both understand and challenge similar forms of psychosomatic domination circulating across the world today.
About the speaker
Todd A. Henry is a professor of modern Korean/East Asian History at the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Program in Transnational Korean Studies. He is the author of Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (UC Press, 2014; Korean Translation, 2020) and Profits of Queerness: Media, Biomedicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980 (Hawai‘i UP, 2026), among other publications. He also edited Queer Korea (Duke UP, 2020; Korean translation, 2023) and researched/produced the 30-minute film, “Paradise” (2023; Director: Hong Minki), on the history of gay sociality in authoritarian-era South Korea. He is currently writing a companion volume to Profits of Queerness focused on the 1980s and early 1990s and is directing a feature-length documentary on André Kim (1935–2010), South Korea’s first male fashion designer and an underrecognized pioneer of today’s Korean Wave.
-----