Seoul Journal of Korean Studies

Originless Fantasy is a 600-page opus written by fourteen authors who interrogate feminist cultural practices at a moment when feminism has become a contentious buzzword in South Korea. Based on a series of public lectures given in 2018, this edited volume is a timely response to the resurgence of public interest in feminism, which started as a reaction to a chain of events including the #MeToo Movement. The contributing pieces vary in terms of their topics, depths, disciplines, and methods. At first glance this volume will strike readers as somewhat unwieldy, but they will realize that the expansiveness is an intended effect pursued by the authors to collectively demonstrate against the practice of taxonomizing diverse works of feminist praxis.

This move becomes a "fantasy" for radical transformation in cultural practices: The contributors imagine the fantasy of feminist praxis as nonnormative practices, which exceed formulaic oppositional binarism, e.g. masculinity vs. femininity, authenticity vs. appropriation, cisgender vs. transgender, heterosexual vs. non-heterosexual (8–9). This act critiques the reduction of [End Page 581] feminism to a "mechanical reversal" of an existing gendered arrangement of identities and cultural practices (9). The title starts to make sense here: if feminist scholarship maintains essentialist binary oppositions, it ultimately fails to explain nonnormative practices and desires as anything other than derivatives of the originary. The edited volume thus insists that we imagine slippages as a productive possibility that troubles oppositional binarism.

The preface is followed by robust discussions of case studies in fourteen chapters. While chapters are roughly sequenced in chronological order in four segments, they are curated in a way that deflects from a "unified vision" (12) cohering to a singular feminist cultural history.

Section One explores the sexual politics of deviant bodies in colonial and pre-1980s Cold War Korea. Pak Cha Min Jung [Pak Cha Minjeong]¹ examines 1930s writings and discusses homicide cases involving women's same-sex relations, which shaped clinical pathology on women's deviance. Lee Hwajin [Yi Hwajin] explores ethnic crossdressing of Korean women in kimono in filmic representations. Their colonial mimicry conforms to the empire's demands and simultaneously troubles the ethnic distinction. Siren eun young jung [Jeong Eunyeong] interrogates the act of archiving yeoseonggukgeuk or women-only performance. Jung proposes sensorium as a way to understand the traces of queer subjects in yeoseonggukgeuk, problematizing the visual imperatives as the only form of archiving the performance form. Lastly, Kim Daehyun [Kim Daehyeon] examines the "diva" performers on the 1960s Walkerhill Hotel stage, including ciswomen and gender nonconforming talents. Their feminized performances furnished them with visibility even as they fought the statesanctioned commodification of women's bodies.

Section Two enters the 1980s, when young women's pop-cultural consumption began to destabilize cultural normalcy and authenticity. Hahn Chaeyoon [Han Chaeyun] writes a unique contribution based on her own 1980s archival materials and experiences as a "fangirl." Han investigates the fans of singers Lee Sun-hee [Yi Seonhui] and Lee Sang-eun [Yi Sangeun], who fashioned themselves as tomboys. Expanding her discussion to include Amber of girl group f(x), Hahn offers an alternative genealogy of tomboy singers and [End Page 582] their fans as the agents who "queer" heteronormative cultural practices. Oh Hyejin [O Hyejin] recuperates the acts of reading Harlequin Romances and women's magazines in the 1980s. Oh concludes that women's reading culture was an experiment that allowed women readers to articulate sexual and intellectual desires, blurring the borders between literature and pop culture. Heo Yoon [Heo Yun] focuses on the popular romance comics series Blue and its 1990s women fandom. Heo reads possibilities of subversive metanarratives from Blue, which transgresses a heteronormative romance scenario through its subplots of homosociality, same-sex desires, and...