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Teenage Lesbian Narratives as Mise-en-Abyme - Queer Affect in 2000s Korean Cinema

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.583~622
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.2.016
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : May 10, 2026
  • Accepted : June 15, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

HyeYoung CHO 1

1경희대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the recurring teenage lesbian narratives in 2000s Korean commercial cinema, beginning with Memento Mori (Min Kyu-dong and Kim Tae-yong, 1999), not merely as a matter of representation alone but as formal and affective devices that organize and disrupt narrative structure. To this end, the concept of mise-en-abyme is extended beyond textual self-reflexivity to designate the operation of a latent narrative stratum, and is reconceptualized through Sara Ahmed's theory of affect as an event that reorients the body and the senses. In 2000s Korean commercial cinema, teenage same-sex female relationships rarely unfold in the present; they persist instead as past events, lost relationships, repressed secrets, or belatedly disclosed truths. Rather than reading this displacement solely as a limitation, this paper interprets it as a mise-en-abyme structure that disturbs heteronormative and linear narrative orders from within. In Memento Mori, the exchange diary functions as a medium that inserts a past queer relationship into the present, situating the viewer in a queer position through what the paper terms a queer pedagogy. In Lovers' Concerto (Lee Han, 2002), a lesbian recollection actively penetrates the heterosexual narrative, producing a queer temporality and a melancholic affect. In Tell Me Something (Jang Yoon-hyun, 1999), the very method of the killings takes the form of mise-en-abyme, splitting the audience into divergent regimes of vision and exposing the epistemic conditions that enforce ideals of victimhood. In The Scarlet Letter (Byun Hyuk, 2004), the moment of disclosure retroactively collapses the heterosexual narrative and the narcissistic male subject altogether. In doing so, this paper illuminates the formal and affective possibilities through which sealed queer pasts leak into the present, unsettling the closure of heteronormative narratives.

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