Sex on the Run and Modern Korean Novels - A post-colonial study on the homosexual motifs of novels in the 1910s and 1920s -

This study set out to investigate the ways the subject perceived modern times and his or her post-colonial perceptions through homosexuality embodied in novels from the 1910s and 1920s. Post-colonial reading is a process of taking away our subjecthood from the standpoint of the subject as we became colonial others inside. The separated sexual subject is not actually separated but takes separation itself as the essence of the subject, trying to exist as the sexual subject of separation, who establishes him or herself as the subject in the patterns of separated sex and thus perceives others, making resistance against the distorted modern times in the form of subversion and appropriation. In the 1910s and 1920s, homosexuality remained in the area of purity until it gradually fell into the grips of power and became the other by increasingly supervision, punishment, and suppression. The discourse about homosexuality those days saw it as something negative that should be watched out and defined it as a primitive act based on the rational logic of medicine and science. In that process, basic human desire innate in sex as a violation or homosexuality erupted, threatening the modern order and causing disruption for rebellion. The homosexuality embodied in works pursued health and purity rather than pathological symptoms. The writers disclosed abominable and corrupted aspects of human through heterosexuality and pulled chaste love out of homosexuality. As the colonial situations turned worse, purity for homosexuality became greater. Such patterns of homosexuality were the allegorical devices for the writers to reflect the times. They were expressed in camaraderie, friendship, and sibling love, which presented the colonial situations in the way of subversion in their suppressed forms and criticized the colonial reality through the forms of love on the run. Is It Love? and Yun Gwang-Ho display desire for and resistance against Japanese imperialism through the mixed subjecthoods through homosexuality. Tears of Sympathy, You with a Shallow Mind, and To My Young Friend reveal the hypocrisy of the substance of love as homosexuality is hidden with a metaphorical device of friendship and heterosexuality is cut and practiced by an institutional device. They show the points where the modern order breaks down and the expression of pure physical love between the same sex individuals. No Love presents homosexuality in the form of sisterly love and instills hidden fellowship, demonstrating the diversity of desire that resists by bursting out suppression. Homosexuality's power of subversion lies in that the problematic consciousness of modern enlightenment is reproduced through women that are the lower-level subjects. The perceptions of post-modernity are closely related to the subject perceptions of our modernity. Thus they are the resutis of a theoretical effort to overcome colonial modernity and, at the same time, claim validity as the methodological device to see the real aspects of our modern times right