John Cho

I am a second year graduate student in cultural anthropology. I completed my undergraduate degree in journalism at Carleton University in Canada and my master’s degree in the Graduate Program in Culture and Gender at Yonsei University in South Korea. My master’s thesis, The Body Politics of Korean Gay Men in Gay Consumer Spaces (2003), examined how South Korean gay men resignified the meaning of their desires, from one of “pathology” and “pollution” to “desire” and “pleasure” through embodied practices of drinking, dancing, and having sex within the numerous gay consumer spaces of gay bars, gay bathhouses, and gay dance-clubs, that had sprung up in South Korea after 1995. My dissertation research will investigate how Korean gay men combine the Internet (with features such as email, “IM” (Instant Messaging), webcam-based chatting, and video streaming), with forms of mobile technology such as beepers, cellular phones, and digital cameras to create what Chris Berry has termed “queer mobile cultures” within South Korea. The term refers to consumer- and image-oriented urban gay cultures in East Asia, increasingly integrated into global circuits and imaginaries of queer desire, that, nonetheless, are distinct from Westernized notions of “gay identity” and “gay community.”

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