Browsing by Author "Jung, Andrew S"

While dominant narratives in queer studies often emphasize a linear progress from coming out, visibility, to pride, this thesis examines how Korean and Korean American gay men negotiate queer life through temporal rhythms shaped by silence, deferral, and affective calibration. Through 34 in-depth interviews and ethnographic research conducted in Jong-no and Itaewon in Seoul, South Korea and San Francisco in California, U.S., this thesis introduces a framework called temporal space to analyze how queer subjectivity is formed through intersecting spatial and temporal conditions. Comparing the experiences of Korean gay men and Korean American gay men, this study finds that queer life is not universally articulated through rupture or disclosure. Instead, Korean gay men often navigate familial and social expectations through recursive forms of silence shaped by Confucian ethics and institutional repression, while Korean American gay men confront racialized visibility and diaspora-specific moral frameworks within family, religion, and queer spaces. Across both groups, queerness is found not to be a static identity but a choreographed negotiation of time, space, and social relations. Therefore, this project proposes temporal space as a methodological and theoretical intervention into queer studies, critical race theory, and human geography, foregrounding temporality as central to understanding how queer life unfolds under constraint. In doing so, this thesis highlights alternative queer world-making practices that resist dominant timelines and generate meaning in conditions of ambiguity, ambivalence, and care.