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Narrative Structure of Korean Gay Romance Genre - Caring Intimacy between Male Youths and the Creation of New Male Gender as Gay

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2022, 28(3), pp.95-137
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2022.28.3.003
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : September 26, 2022
  • Accepted : October 11, 2022
  • Published : October 30, 2022

KEONHYUNG KIM 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article derives a common narrative structure in recent Korean gay romance movies and analyzes it as a device that creates a relationship of intimacy formed through care between men. This is also a question of the spectrum of homosexual reproduction texts that have been mainly regarded as heterosexual women’s culture because they were created and enjoyed through closed media dominated by female readers and audiences. It is pointed out that the conventional notion that BL (Boy’s Love) is primarily reserved for sexuality of heterosexual women, so it has gender political significance but cannot contain queerness, in fact, may be a progressive and elitist perspective that induces homosexual normative representation and limits queer to antisocial radicality. Passing through previous studies that the performance of queer reading is more important than queer’s exhaustive reenactment, this article attempts to interpret the political interpretation of gay romance popular films while proposing the spectrum of “BL-Gay Romance.” This article analyzes gay romance movies as a growth novel of young men who oppose the patriarchal family system forcing male gender for class reproduction. I argue that it acts as a mechanism to break down the premise of male growth that it should become an independent individual by inducing an epic pattern that repeats the situation of care and cohabitation, including nursing. Compulsory cohabitation and care, as an opportunity to crack the relationship between competitive and hierarchical existing male-sex societies, makes them mutually equal economic and mutually dependent emotional subjects. In addition, care builds eroticism by detaching physical contact between men from competition. As a result, characters realize that intimacy is accumulated and that the interdependent caring relationship may be an alternative male image different from the familial male of the parents’ generation. Therefore, the two main characters complete the love narrative by breaking away from the masculinity of competition and independence and reaching the gay masculinity of care and solidarity. This article predicts that such gay romance will be a resource for the cultural politics of intimacy and care between men, which distance themselves from the class reproduction of the established family system and the violence of male genders.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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