In this event, Yookyeong Im talks about the history of queer legal advocacy in South Korea. She proposes to rethink a common question, “Is it legal to [have an intimate relationship with a person of same gender/have gay marriage/change your legal gender/be nonbinary/etc.]?” It is to critically ponder the relationship between law and pride. As a way to propose this critique, she explores 1) the history of legal advocacy in the South Korean queer activism and 2) history-reading and history-writing within the community. Law’s significance in defining how one can be proud and queer has never been static, not to mention that pride is not confined to a single mode of visibility.

Yookyeong Im is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology with the secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is currently writing a dissertation on how South Korean queer activists cope with the troubling relationship between their legalistic engagements and radical imagination for queer liberation, based on long-term engaged ethnography. 

Register here:  https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkd-6tpz0sE9PtXinsl9veHsa_CAUMkQHa