How Pink Turned Red, speaker to discuss queer bodies in South Korea

Pink Turned Red partial poster

Once largely underground and hidden from the mainstream, queer spaces in South Korea and the Korean diaspora have in recent decades become more visible and public in their expression of non-normative sexual identity and assertion of dissident political subjectivity.

Ju Hui Judy Han
Ju Hui Judy Han

Ju Hui Judy Han, a social and cultural geographer, will focus on the preposterous figure of chongbukgei (a North Korea-sympathizing queer) as a fascinating conflation of sexual perversion and geopolitical insecurity in her talk at York on Feb. 25. “How Pink Turned Red: Queer Bodies and Postsecular Geopolitics in South Korea” will begin at 3pm at 280A York Lanes, Keele campus.

Han’s talk will draw on ongoing research on the transnational infrastructure of Korean/American Christianity and associated cultural politics of racial and sexual difference.

Han is a professor in human geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with interdisciplinary interests in religion, mobility and difference. Her teaching and research interests lie at the nexus of political economy and cultural politics through the interdisciplinary frameworks of social/cultural geography, postcolonial cultural studies, and critical race, sexuality and gender studies.

Pink Turned Red poster

Reflecting her training in feminist and interdisciplinary cultural studies with a commitment to social change, her work tends to gravitate towards cultural dynamics and political contestations in contemporary articulations of race, sexuality, gender, religion and nation.

This is the third lecture of the Heterogeneity and Korean Identity in the Twentieth-First Century Lecture Series at York University, which focuses on the works of both established senior scholars and groundbreaking junior scholars in the fields of globalization and transnational labour and class in South Korea.

The series is supported by the Korea Foundation, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Office of the Vice-President, Research & Innovation, and the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR).

For more information on the series, visit the YCAR website.