The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia - The Courtauld Skip to content Study Visit What’s on Shop About The Courtauld is an internationally renowned centre for the teaching and research of art history and a major public gallery Join today Be part of an international community of influential art enthusiasts, thought leaders and change makers Become a Friend Become a Patron Current students Information and resources for students currently studying at The Courtauld Student info Stay in touch Newsletter sign-up Follow us www.facebook.com/TheCourtauld/ twitter.com/TheCourtauld www.instagram.com/courtauld/ www.youtube.com/user/CourtauldInstitute www.linkedin.com/school/courtauld-institute-of-art/ About Us Alumni Join and Support Schools and Colleges Libraries Research News and Blogs Short Courses Online Collections Study Visit What’s on Shop Quick links Contact Us Jobs Research Forum Virtual Tour Faculty Libraries International students Schools Suggested searches Manet Van Gogh Renoir Exhibitions Conservation Scholarships Home·Research·Research Resources·Publications·Immediations Postgraduate Journal·Immediations Online·Immediations No. 18 (2021)· The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia Andrew Cummings i Fig. 2 Dew Kim, Ttongkko-Chung (Anus Worm), 2019, Silicone casting, silicone tube, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. Parasites are typically maligned: they take without giving, weaken the individual or social body, and produce disorder. However, in Latrinxia: A New Utopia, a 2019 installation by South Korean artist Dew Kim in which future humans have been transformed into ‘anus worms’ (ttongkoch’ung), the parasite is mined for its potential, in Michel Serres’ words, to ‘generate a different order’ (1982). This article traces in Latrinxia and the homophobic slur of ttongkoch’ung the legacies of colonial capitalism and Cold War geopolitics, and the formation of rigidly sexed, gendered, and ideally healthy and impenetrable bodies implemented partly through medical interventions such as the anti-parasite initiatives of the late twentieth century. Examining the installation’s markers of cleanliness and filth, gay sexual subcultures, and shamanism, I argue that Latrinxiaoffers a queer understanding of the body as penetrable, with implications for sex, gender, desire, and the human. This constitutes one promise offered by the image of the ‘anus worm’ parasite. I conclude by situating Latrinxia in the economy of so-called global contemporary art and the growing currencies of the ‘queer’ and the ‘local’, weighing up the economic and cultural promises of queer visibility against the gains for LGBTQ+ people. Fig. 1 Dew Kim, Latrinxia: A New Utopia, 2019, 3D printed plastic, silicone tube, water pump, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. INTRODUCTION In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the neighbourhood of Itaewon in Seoul occupied a peculiar place in the eyes of the South Korean[1] state as a hotbed of impropriety, disease, and the foreign – or, as Elisabeth Schober has put it, a ‘containment zone’ for ‘unwanted cultural forces.’[2] The supposedly insalubrious ingredients of Korea’s modernity coagulate on the Usadan Road and its offshoots, home to various gay bars and sex worker clubs whose clientele was typically represented as composed of American soldiers on leave from the army base located nearby.[3] More recently – and in the last few years in particular – the presence of gay-friendly venues and the appearance of multiculturalism in a gentrifying Itaewon has been held up by the government as a yardstick for the country’s progressiveness and evidence of its ‘global’ status.[4] Independent art spaces have begun to emerge in the neighbourhood too. One such space is 5%, which is located on the Usadan Road. From September to October 2019, 5% hosted an exhibition featuring an installation of works grouped under the title Latrinxia: A New Utopia by South Korean contemporary artist Dew Kim. Kim’s recent exhibitions have revolved around the post-apocalyptic narratives written to accompany them. In Latrinxia, humans have survived ecological destruction through a shamanic fire ritual that has transported them to a new planet and transformed them into sexless beings. The installation unfolds across three spaces. What greets the visitor as they first enter the gallery space is a sculpture of a landscape made of 3D printed plastic, sitting on artificial grass, and representing the planet, called ‘Latrinxia’ (2019, Fig. 1). A form spews up from the ground like a frozen fountain; a thin stream of water is channelled along a pockmarked silicone tube, and trickles onto a silicone cast of an anus with thin, tentacle-like appendages, which Kim calls a ttongkkoch’ung or ‘anus worm’ – humanity’s parasitical new form (Fig. 2). After the water collects at the bottom of the sculpture, it is pumped back into the room behind into the second space of the installation: a lavatory, with its toilet bowl and sink populated by more anus worms (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). The third and final component of the installation is located in the gallery’s outdoor space, where we find the remnants of the shamanic ritual mentioned in the narrative of Latrinxia: a talisman inscribed with Chinese characters arranged in the shape of a human figure, skewered into the soil next to a stainless-steel flame (Fig. 5). The broader space of the neighbourhood acts as the backdrop to the exhibition and is invited into it (Fig. 6). Fig. 2 Dew Kim, Ttongkko-Chung (Anus Worm), 2019, Silicone casting, silicone tube, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. This article explores the ‘promise’ of these parasites: namely, the ways their presentation in this exhibition opens up an understanding of the body, and relations between bodies, that is more accommodating of queer desires and embodiments. Here, I mean ‘queer’ partly as an umbrella term for LGBTQ+ identities, and also as the underside of normativity, including fixed categories for identity tout court.[5] My consideration of the ‘queerness’ of Latrinxia is, as this article will shortly elaborate, also heavily indebted to José Muñoz’s understanding of queerness as the ‘not yet’, as a ‘mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.’[6] My intention in using the English terms ‘queer’ and ‘queerness’ is neither to suggest that non-normative desires and gender expressions in Korea or East Asia more broadly are direct and belated translations of those found and theorised in North America and Western Europe, nor to affirm nativist responses to the homogeneity and cultural imperialism represented by the purported globalisation of queerness, which, as Howard Chiang has argued, tend towards ‘re-Orientalization’ and a ‘quarantining’ of non-Western cultures from one another and from ‘the West’.[7] In contrast, while Kim himself has repeatedly framed his practice in terms of ‘queerness’ and refers to the thinking of Paul B. Preciado (among others), in Latrinxia queerness is anchored in histories of sex, sexuality, and gender moulded by Korea’s colonial and, later, militarised modernity, as well as regional cultural flows, in particular between Korea, Japan and Taiwan, a point that emerges in this article.[8] Kim has voiced his desire to ‘express … my queer culture’ and to ‘break away from the inertia of dichotomous cultures’.[9] Likewise, in my own use of ‘queer’ here and elsewhere, I want to attend to the ways in which understandings of queer subjectivities and theories, channelled by the uneven forces of globalisation, travel between different contexts with overlapping histories of non-normative desires, gender expressions, and practices, and are transformed and reshaped in the process.[10] This article mines Latrinxia’s queer currents, arguing that the work elaborates a queer critique of the naturalised notion of the body as a bounded and discrete entity that is rigidly gendered and sexed, as well as its attendant discourses on hygiene and toxicity, all of which emerged as hegemonic in Korea over the course of the twentieth century. I refer to this conception as the ‘modern’ body after Ed Cohen’s research on the history of biomedicine, disease, and immunology.[11] In Latrinxia, there is the suggestion that the conception of the ‘modern’ body is inadequate for capturing the body in all its complexity, porosity, and enmeshment with other bodies and lifeforms. Instead, through its engagement with parasites, the exhibition theorises the human body as queerly composed, that is, as intimately enmeshed with ‘the inanimate, deadness, lowness, nonhuman animals (rendered as insensate), the abject, [and] the object’, as Mel Y. Chen writes.[12] In its celebration of the body’s permeability, Latrinxia envisages ways of being in the world beyond stultifying understandings of desire and the human. In this way, the exhibition recalls Muñoz’s understanding of queerness as ‘something that is not quite here’, as a glimpse of ‘new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.’[13] Two primary vehicles for the work’s critique of the notion of the modern body are the anus worm and the invocation of shamanism. These markers of queerness and local cultural traditions are also precisely what makes the artwork appealing in the economy of global contemporary art according to the logic of neoliberalism – the same logic that permeates the urban space of Itaewon and fuels its gentrification. My conclusion, then, addresses a further ‘promise’ encapsulated by Latrinxia’s parasites in the context of the global networks of the display and circulation of contemporary art. Fig. 3 Dew Kim, The Creation of Adam, 2019, Digital printing on fabric, 80 x 40 cm. Right: Ttongkko-Chung (Anus Worm), 2019, Anus silicone casting, silicone tube, 3D printed plastic, LED lighting, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. Fig. 4 Dew Kim, Anus Baptizes Me, 2019, Mirror, digital printing on adhesive sheets, stainless steel, plastic, 30 x 58 x 2 cm. Below: Ttongkko-Chung (Anus Worm). Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. FOREIGN BODIES As the interpretation provided by the artist makes clear, the posthuman protagonists of Latrinxia are the ‘anus worms’, or ttongkkoch’ung.[14] Ttongkkoch’ung is a pejorative term used in South Korea usually to describe gay or effeminate men; as the artist emphasises, it is similar in meaning and severity to the English word ‘faggot’.[15] Its usage suggests one can be a ttongkkoch’ung or else contract a ttongkkoch’ung, as with macroparasites like the tapeworm or roundworm.[16] The English term calls to mind the bundles of sticks used in the Middle Ages to burn at the stake women and men found guilty of various heresies, homosexuality among them – a commonly accepted but historically disputed connection, since the homophobic connotations of the term emerged only in the twentieth century.[17] The Korean term, though, crystallises assumptions and anxieties that mark certain bodies as queer and cast those bodies as parasite-ridden, diseased, and perversions of the idealised human body, understood as rigidly gendered, sexed, and bounded. Ultraconservative framings of the ttongkkoch’ung and homosexuality which circulate online evoke sci-fi horror. In 2017, for example, one blog user invited readers to ‘learn about the social evil of ttongkkoch’ung’ and recounted, in impressive detail, the story of Hong Seok-cheon, one of South Korea’s first publicly gay celebrities who came out in the early 2000s and consequently retired from public appearances for almost a decade.[18] The user wrote that Hong ‘contracted an anus worm at the age of eleven, before infecting over three hundred more people’, spurred on by the worm’s thirst for prostate stimulation with the help of objects ‘the size of a man’s penis’. In the same blog post, the user declared with a similar confidence that homosexuality is ‘one hundred percent acquired’ and alleged that, since prostate stimulation apparently does not occur in heterosexual sex, ‘in over ninety percent of cases, infection results from sexual relations between men’. This particularly vivid account pictures the homosexual male body as infiltrated by a foreign body – the parasite – and possessed by its inhuman, voracious appetite for non-reproductive, anal sex. The obsession with the worm’s desire for stimulative penetration and the foreclosure of the penetration of the male body in heterosexual sex, coded as normal, both suggest a conception of the body, and particularly the male body, as ideally impenetrable, discrete, and sovereign. Such a conception was consolidated over the course of the twentieth century and the period of accelerated modernisation in Korea. Under the rule of the Japanese colonial government in the first half of the century, bodies came to be delineated along increasingly binary and biologically dimorphic lines: the male body became an icon of good health, associated with strength and virility, while the female body – the icon of disease and in need of remedy and reform – was cast as the privileged vehicle for biological reproduction, for the maintenance of colonial capitalism and for supplementing Japanese forces.[19] Japan’s ‘imperial subjects’ in Korea (hwangguksimin) also came to be categorised as abiding by or deviating from bodily norms aimed at maintaining colonial capitalism through reproductive heterosexuality.[20] As Park Jin-kyung observes, print media – including patent medicine advertisements and medical images – became a key means by which ideas about new knowledge regarding the body and bodily norms were disseminated by the Japanese colonial powers and in Korean nationalist circles.[21] Biomedicine became vital for the production and consolidation of bodily norms and ideals in the service of reproductive heterosexuality and colonial capitalist modernity. The model for the body on which biomedicine operates is, as Cohen has argued, fundamentally militaristic, informed by a ‘bellicose ideology’ which posits the organism as ‘a defensible interior which needs to protect itself ceaselessly from a hostile exterior’.[22] Biomedical knowledge and practices are antagonistic towards what Cohen, after Bakhtin and Rabelais, calls the ‘grotesque body’: ‘a body radically open to the world … simultaneously eating, shitting, fucking, dancing, laughing, groaning, giving birth, falling ill, and dying’ (emphasis added).[23] The military model for the body discussed by Cohen was, in the Korean context, bolstered by the dynamics of Cold War binary logic in the second half of the century, which saw the end of Japanese colonial rule, the division of the Peninsula into North and South, and growing militarisation. In the South, the key imperative of postcolonial modernisation was strengthening the military to ward off the Northern communist aggressor.[24]This required novel amalgamations of Foucauldian disciplinary power and militarised violence, an arrangement that Seungsook Moon refers to as Korea’s ‘militarised modernity’. In accordance with the cisheteropatriarchal bases of anti-communist development, the state constructed its subjects as a unified people composed of kungmin (nationals) divided along rigid gendered and heteronormative grounds. Men were interpellated as ‘providers’, employed by the military to fulfil various roles in service of industrialisation; women worked in factories, where their labour was marginalised, and were mobilised primarily as ‘reproducers’ or ‘breeders’.[25] One new and extensive system that was innovated for biopolitical governance was the family planning programme (kajok kyehoek), which entailed the passing of an anti-abortion law and the mass distribution of new birth control technologies and knowledge about contraception.[26] Another consisted of the anti-parasite initiatives (kisaengch’ung pangmyŏl), which involved the passing of a Parasitic Disease Prevention Act in 1966 and a programme for which schoolchildren were required to send stool samples twice annually until 1995.[27]In the 1960s, Korean miners dispatched to Germany were reported to have been riddled with roundworm, and in another event, a Korean child had four kilograms of roundworm removed from her bowels; photographs of the excised parasites were spectacularly displayed in newspapers.[28] Mediatised events such as these were central to the task of eliminating public apathy to parasite eradication and instilling a more widespread hostility towards parasites and infectious diseases whose annihilation became a question of national security, prosperity and propriety. These events also reinforced the notion that Korean bodies were, to echo Cohen, ‘defensible interiors’ that should remain bounded, discrete, and sovereign.[29] Parasites such as the roundworm were not the only foreign bodies against which the Korean state waged war. Authoritarian president Park Chung-hee, in power from 1963 until 1979, once lamented that the country was in the grip of ‘a monstrous, chronic disease’ aggravated by the introduction to the country of ‘American things, Western things, [and] Japanese things’.[30] During this time, images of the nation in popular screen culture began disavowing queer subjects displaying non-normative expressions of gender and desire in order to bolster the cisheteropatriarchal bases of anti-communist development.[31] Young-Gwan Kim and Sook-Ja Hahn describe the enduring perception of homosexuality as foreign, despite the various examples of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and expressions of gender that can be found throughout Korean history.[32] Associations between homosexuality, disease, and the foreign congealed in 1988 when fears about AIDS collided with South Korea’s hosting of the Olympics, the occasion for a newly democratising South Korea to reveal to the world the fruits of its modernisation efforts. Men who have sex with men, women sex workers, and American soldiers were all the targets of AIDS-related anxieties: one scholar writes that the perception of gay men during this time was as ‘AIDS-spreading aliens hiding in the dark’.[33] All, too, were the typical denizens of Itaewon, a neighbourhood which through a series of policies had become, as Schober describes, ‘a de-facto buffer zone that was to absorb potentially dangerous foreign influences, but which in the end functioned more as a fermenting container’ for these influences.[34] These same discourses inform far-right homophobia today, particularly from the Protestant Right, who have become an influential anti-LGBT (and anti-Muslim) voice in Korean politics in the last two or three decades.[35]Even as South Korea transitioned to democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the enduring legacy of heteropatriarchal values and disciplinary mechanisms from the colonial and authoritarian periods meant that ‘homosexuality had no social existence’, as activist and academic Seo Dong-jin recounted a few years later.[36] Subsequent years have been punctuated by anti-queer legislation, such as the passing of the heteronormative ‘Healthy Family Act’ in 2003 and the effective decriminalisation of discrimination on the basis of sexuality in 2007.[37] On the other hand, LGBTQ+ activists have responded with renewed vigour, organising the Queer Culture Festival and actions to raise awareness about discrimination they face.[38] Nonetheless, queer individuals and communities continue to be marginalised by cisheteropatriarchal norms justified through the politics of national division. The resident registration system, structured around dimorphic co… truncated (38,973 more characters in archive)