Seoul National University’s Center for Contemporary Korean Studies held an international conference titled “Korea as Symptom” over two days, on August 22 and 23. As the third session of the conference, the K-Narrative Team organized a session titled “Korean Narrative Today I” in Room 240, Building 101, at Seoul National University. Chaired by Professor Yoon Kyung-hee of Seoul National University, the session featured the following two presentations.

The first presentation was delivered by Charlotte Hammond of the University of Edinburgh, titled “Trauma and the Monstrous-Feminine in Korean On-Screen Media.” The presenter analyzed how the female body in Korean screen media functions as a site of colonial trauma under Japanese imperial rule and as a mechanism of gendered violence. Focusing in particular on Gyeongseong Creature and The Silenced, the presentation explored how women’s bodies are weaponized and rendered monstrous within the contexts of wartime mobilization and the horror genre, and interpreted the ways in which the female body mediates both colonial and contemporary trauma.

The second presentation was delivered by Heo Sung-won, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis, titled “Queer Future in Worn-Out Stories: A Queer Reading of Love in the Big City.” The presenter reinterpreted Korean queer studies from a transnational queer perspective, using Love in the Big City to illuminate queer temporality and queer intimacy within Korean society. In particular, the presentation pointed out that queer futures in Korea are not simply subordinated to reproductive futurism, but are formed within a field that disrupts neoliberalism and heteronormative social order.

This session offered a multilayered analysis of trauma, gender, and queerness by exploring marginalized identities in Korean society through diverse cultural and theoretical frameworks. In doing so, it provided an opportunity to examine in greater depth how narratives of Korean society are constructed.