The Poetics of the U.S. Empire in South Korean Queer Politics

(By Yookyeong Im, guest author)

Rainbow and BLM Banners Hung on the U.S. Embassy in South Korea…and Removed

Content advisory: mentions of anti-Black violence and police brutality, quotations of anti-queer slogans

On June 1, 2020, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea hung a large rainbow flag on its building to celebrate LGBT Pride Month. The flag was supposed to stay throughout June. However, it was removed after only two weeks. 

The rainbow flag was not the only flag removed from the façade of the embassy building that day. Embassy staff also removed a large Black Lives Matter banner which had been displayed since June 13. According to media reports, the U.S. State Department might have requested the removals because of restrictions that prohibited local U.S. embassies to fly a rainbow flag on their flagpoles in Germany, Israel, Belarus, and many other countries. The State Department explained the reason for its request to remove the BLM banner by asserting that “Black Lives Matter is a non-profit organization” and “the US government does not […] promote any specific organization.”

(Image: An LGBT rainbow flag and Black Lives Matter banner hang from the front of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. An American flag is flying from the embassy’s flagpole in the foreground.)

I remember the first time I saw a rainbow banner draped on the U.S. embassy building in Gwanghwamun at the heart of South Korea’s capital, Seoul, in 2017. According to an interview with an embassy official, the embassy wanted to “show solidarity with Korean queer activists and communities.” Korean queer activists responded positively to the rainbow flag’s display at a powerful government agency building in the country’s most politically visible place. U.S. ambassadors and other embassy representatives started attending Seoul Queer Cultural Festival (SQCF) in 2014, and since 2015 had offered congratulatory remarks alongside other ambassadors from Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and a few European countries at the SQCF’s opening and closing ceremonies. It was a gesture of solidarity and a method of so-called “human rights diplomacy,” defined as efforts by government officials to engage publicly and privately with their foreign counterparts for the specific purpose of promoting human rights (Myrick and Weinstein 2021; O’Flaherty et al. 2011).

Some activists and community members welcomed the U.S. embassy’s participation in Korean queer politics as they thought it would send the South Korean government a pressing signal that LGBTQ+ rights are part of the “global standard” (read: global north standard). As a postcolonial developmentalist state, the South Korean state has tenaciously striven to meet this “global standard” throughout its post-liberation history after World War II. However, some other activists, particularly those who aligned themselves with leftist politics, expressed ambivalent feelings about the spotlights given to the support of those foreign embassies. They were particularly troubled by special attention granted to the American embassy. 

The U.S. is a complicated figure in Korean politics. I was intrigued when I learned, for instance, that some South Korean queer activists were sponsored to join empowerment training for LGBTQ+ activists a few years ago. The State Department organized these trainings and invited activists from countries known to have weak protection of LGBTQ+ rights. Participants visited different U.S. cities to meet American activists and government staff working for LGBTQ+ populations. 

The ambivalent feelings and internal contentions about U.S. diplomacy have long existed within Korean queer movements, but they were not publicly visible until 2020. In part, this is because the American Embassy’s sponsorship was not noticeable in South Korea’s post-democratization progressive civil society scene. Although the U.S. government had a special visa program for human rights activists from which some progressive activists had benefited, the U.S. embassy’s involvement in the grassroots Korean human rights activism scene was not straightforward until the mid-2010s. 

To some extent, such a quiet presence derived from the troubled relationship between Korean progressive politics and the United States as an empire. The 1980s dissident movements in South Korea largely had three factions—with numerous sub-factions under each—including National Liberation (NL), People’s Democracy (PD), and International Socialism (IS). The U.S. embassy did not necessarily have a good relationship with any of them. 

The tensions were driven by the American involvement in the inter-Korea separation after World War II and the subsequent U.S. compliance with the authoritarian military regimes in South Korea from the 1960s to the 1980s. Activist discord with the U.S. government culminated in the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. After witnessing how the American government dismissed the Korean democracy movements’ request for help and continued its cooperation with military juntas, dissident movements unanimously condemned the U.S. empire as a hindrance to the true liberation of the people (minjung) in Korea.  

The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 brought global attention to the status of Black lives, especially to the police brutality that disproportionately targeted Black people in the U.S. South Korean human rights activists also stood in solidarity against state-sponsored racism in the U.S. and elsewhere, mourning the death of George Floyd and other Black lives taken under similar circumstances. 

On June 1, one week after George Floyd’s death, the U.S. Embassy in Korea hung a rainbow flag as usual. This felt wrong to many queer activists in Korea. Even those who had welcomed the embassy’s rainbow banner in the past found it appalling. Korean queer activists suspected that the embassy, representing the U.S. government, was using the rainbow flag as a means of pinkwashing and saving the face of the state while neglecting its accountability for racism and classism within the U.S. (Rainbow Action 2020).

Pinkwashing is a term that originated in early-2010s queer anti-occupation activism against the Israeli state’s violations of Palestinian human rights. Since then, the term’s usage has expanded to refer more broadly to any deliberate strategy to conceal social and economic injustices behind an image of cosmopolitan and liberal modernity associated with certain types of LGBTQ life. Historically, Korean activists varied in their critical stance towards pinkwashing in U.S. public diplomacy, and this internal variance made it difficult for them to speak in unison in relation to the embassy’s participation in Korean queer movements. This time, however, the embassy’s rainbow flag was met by unexpected backlash from Korean queer activist communities, who issued a strong, unanimous public statement in opposition to it. On June 13, the embassy hung a large Black Lives Matter banner on its building only to remove it two days later. 

Flying a flag or draping a banner depends on context, which is constituted in part through the relationships between flags and other signs. For example, when an American flag is flying alongside a rainbow flag in the absence of a BLM banner at a time not so far from a public, global awakening to the urgency of anti-racism, the particular alignment of different signs shifted the meaning of the rainbow flag away from resistance. For Korean queer activists and their colleagues, the rainbow flag at the U.S. embassy in 2020 signified pinkwashing and homonationalist cooptation—that is, the protection of life was granted by invoking of a nexus of limited forms of queer respectability linked to white and capitalist American national belonging (Puar 2007).

The Poetics of Flags in Anti-Queer Protests

(Image: An elderly man wearing signs with anti-gay slogans. May 31, 2019. Seoul City Plaza. Photo by the author.)

As show in in the photo above, one of the classic phrases used by anti-queer protesters in Korea is “tongsŏng sŏnggwan'gyerŭl hamyŏn chashinŭl mangch'igo, kajŏngŭl mangch'igo, kamunŭl mangch'igo, kukkarŭl mangch'igo, illyurŭl mangch'inda!” [동성성관계를 하면 자신을 망치고, 가정을 망치고, 가문을 망치고, 국가를 망치고, 인류를 망친다; Homosexual intercourse ruins yourself, ruins family, ruins extended family, ruins the state, and ruins the humanity].” It reveals classic poetics. 

As the linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson (1960) has argued, poetics involves both selection and combination. Selection is built “on the base of equivalence,” while combination brings selections together to complete poetics. The sequential arrangement or alignment of equivalent linguistic elements generates meaning (Jakobson 1978). In the example above, a poetic structure is created by the repetition of “ruins” in combination with the words that follow. This parallelism creates a dynamic meaning of scalar expansion, in which the list of things that homosexuality “ruins” escalates from “yourself” to “humanity,” an effect that is achieved not through any one term in itself, but through the collection of terms overall.

In Korea, the Christian right has increasingly centered their political momentum on anti-queer campaigns. To them, the American embassy’s stance on LGBTQ+ rights was like a slap to the back of the head. They began protesting queer parades (and all the legal agendas for LGBTQ+ inclusion and anti-discrimination) in earnest in 2014. Since then, they have used very expressive political styles like praying out loud, chanting, aggressively singing hymns, and even performing Korean traditional “fan dances”* and short ballet repertoires.** Some of them waved South Korean national flags and American national flags together. From speech to still and moving images, Conservative Evangelical Christians’ anti-queer signification gets increasingly condensed as their messages get closer to the most compressed form—South Korean and American flags. But why the American flag? 

The American flag became a contested emblem in South Korea at the unique intersection of queer politics and left/right binaries. When an American flag is held in the right hand of an anti-queer protester whose left hand is holding a South Korean national flag, the combination of two flags poetically completes its meaning. For Evangelical Christian rights who wave South Korean flags, American flags, and cross banners together at political rallies, the side-by-side arrangement of the American flag (or the U.S. embassy building) and rainbow flag signifies the fall of Christian America. 

For these far-right protesters and many conservatives, the U.S.-South Korea alliance has been a pillar of the country’s impressive development history and national security concerning North Korea. The Cold War has never ceased in some people’s imaginaries, nor was it really “cold” to begin with. The legacy (and present) of the Cold War simplified the terms available for conceptualizing Korean politics, which entailed more erasures in service of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019). The uncritical use of binary oppositions reduces complex realities to dichotomous extremes in analyzing South Korean politics. Yet the problematic binaries still function as ideological bottlenecks whether we like it or not. Categorization as a process involves multiple axes of comparison that are overdetermined in one sense but underdetermined in another.

What is the meaning of the left-right political binary in this context? In South Korea, the primary criteria that distinguish the two sides from each other in the left-right ideological spectrum include one’s position on the following: North Korea, the National Security Law, class politics (like labor and welfare policies), and the attitude or sentiment towards the United States and its military presence in South Korea. The conservatives are known to believe in an essential adversarial relationship between the two Koreas while subscribing to anti-Communism; to be in favor of keeping the National Security Act that criminalizes any activities to “spread the idea of Communism and to admire North Korean regime”; to be (highly) supportive of liberal capitalism while being antagonistic towards labor movements and the collective actions of trade unions; and to be pro-U.S. and its military presence in South Korea. On the contrary, the progressives are usually imagined or labeled as “pro-North Korea,” “Communist” (or just having slight to heavy socialist orientations), opponents of the National Security Act, and empathetic to labor rights movements.

The left/right binary framework is a historical sediment. Its construction is contingent on specific historical episodes and interactional dynamics. It is never easy or straightforward to draw a clear line between “posu” (conservative) and “chinbo” (progressive). Despite this difficulty, the labels do not cease to appear as analytic categories in academic and popular political discourses. Indexes usually associated with one side can quickly become iconic representations of the “progressive” or “conservative” category, as if indexes somehow display a social group’s foundational quality. People use these categories daily, but what they signify in individual utterances remains open-ended, vague, or assumed.

Talking/Silencing Politics by Holding Flags

The American flag in South Korean queer politics is an icon whose meaning is underdetermined. So is the rainbow flag, depending on where it is displayed. When draped on the U.S. embassy building, it tainted the privileged status of the American flag as an emblem of the South Korean Christian Right in queer politics. When the rainbow flag was flying in the same space before the death of George Floyd, it did not come across as insulting to many Korean queer activists. However, the same group of activists who had shown little aversion to the embassy’s flag politics was deeply appalled when it was displayed in the wake of the ongoing struggle for Black lives in the U.S. 

In this context, the poetics of flags relies heavily on the physical proximity between different flags. A flag is already an emblem that embodies the nation’s ideals and ideologies (Marvin and Ingle 1999). A flag can also be an ideologically dense icon reflecting the histories of violence and the present endorsement, as in the case of Confederate flags (Henderson and Louis, Jr. 2017). As political anthropologist Oriol Pi-Sunyer (1995, 44) illuminated, “what flags are (or are not) displayed, how they are displayed, and even which particular variant of a flag is used, also encodes cultural and political statements.” Sometimes even the size of the flag can be a primary index of political affects and anxiety, as illustrated by the anthropologist Rebecca Bryant (2021, 71–73).

A flag is not only a representation but an instrument of evaluating and asserting political statements, like the case of reclaimed patriotism materialized by a U.S. flag with an anti-racist message written on it, as the linguistic anthropologist Jennifer Delfino has shown (2021, 247–248). In the contestation over the implication of U.S. empire in South Korea, the meanings of both rainbow and American flags are complete only in the poetic arrangement with other flags and other signs. 

Some academics argued that modernity has been decomposed and that conventional development discourses are withering away (Ferguson 2005, 176). However, the homonationalist politics playing out on a global scale challenge such statements. In many parts of Asia, developmental assistance—including technical assistance such as education and financial assistance—is still a prominent force affecting “developing countries” and those in an ambiguous position, like South Korea. When a country no longer needs financial assistance, the “advanced countries” keep feeding it with political and cultural ideals instead. Liberalism—with its many layers—is one of the representative examples in today’s political economy. 

The ways that societies invent, advance, accept, and resist liberalism vary. However, the developmental temporality can still remain. In countries like South Korea, development is as much about attaining the contemporaneity in relation with “advanced countries” as it is about achieving specific goals of economic and political ideals. It is in this context that membership in the powerfully imagined “international community” and its affinity with the (again, presupposed) American ideals of liberal democracy get endorsed by both queer activism at large and conservative rightists in South Korea. This is also precisely why both groups are troubled by the same flags for different reasons.

Outro

The multiple semiotic characteristics of the flag render it a complicated instrument of differentiation and identification. Its value as a symbol is deepened by its iconicity. Its indexical value is materialized only by poetic alignments in relation to other signs. In June 2022, Wendy Sherman, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, met a few Korean queer activists during her visit to Seoul. After the meeting, they hung a rainbow flag alongside an American flag at the embassy’s flagpole. It was two years after the queer activists accused the U.S. embassy of pinkwashing and ignoring the calls for anti-racism and defense of Black lives. There were unofficial, ex-post debates among activists over their meeting and the public ritual involving flags, but not anything comparable with the public statement they issued two years prior. Maybe the flags silenced politics as much as they talked.

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Yookyeong Im is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist specializing in the intersection of law, activism, and queer feminist politics. She also has professional experience in translation and interpretation (Korean <-> English) on various social justice issues and international human rights law.

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Notes

* In fact, this dance style and prototypical choreography as a group dance were invented and first performed in the late 1960s. 

** Ironically, the performing team—consisting of girls and young women—danced to the tunes of Tchaikovsky whose biographies generally confirmed his homosexuality. Yet here, instead of homosexuality, Tchaikovsky’s music and ballet moves indexed purity to the anti-queer Christian Right.

Note on transliteration: I use the McCune-Reischauer romanization system except in cases of proper nouns for which nonstandard romanizations are already in use.