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

The first presentation, “Trauma and the Monstrous-Feminine in Korean On-Screen Media,” was delivered by Charlotte Hammond (The University of Edinburgh). Hammond examined how the female body in Korean screen media functions as a site through which the trauma of Japanese colonial rule and gendered violence are represented. Focusing particularly on Gyeongseong Creature and The Silenced, she explored how women’s bodies are weaponized and rendered monstrous in narratives of wartime mobilization and horror. Through this analysis, she demonstrated how the female body serves as a medium through which both colonial and contemporary forms of trauma are articulated.

The second presentation was given by Seongwon Heo, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis, under the title “Queer Future in Worn-Out Stories: A Queer Reading of Love in the Big City.” Approaching Korean queer studies from a transnational queer perspective, Heo examined Love in the Big City to illuminate forms of queer temporality and queer intimacy in Korean society. In particular, the presentation argued that queer futures in Korea are not simply subordinated to reproductive futurism, but instead emerge within spaces that disrupt neoliberalism and heteronormative social orders.

The session provided a multilayered analysis encompassing trauma, gender, and queerness by exploring marginalized identities in Korean society through a range of cultural and theoretical frameworks. In doing so, it offered an opportunity to examine from multiple perspectives how narratives of contemporary Korean society are constructed.