Professors Jennifer Chun (UCLA, Asian American Studies) Judy Han (UCLA, Gender Studies) will discuss their latest books, Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest and Queer Throughlines: Spaces of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora. Against Abandonment. Against Abandonment is an ethnographic study of the widespread culture of protest in South Korea that examines both its significant achievements and inherent precarity. And Queer Throughlines offers a rare account of the transnational Koran LGBTQ+ activist movement since the 1990s with a specific focus on its intersections with various other social movements. Queer Throughlines (University of Michigan Press, 2025) draws on years of direct participation, interviews, and ethnography to examine the transpacific spaces of Korean LGBTQ+ activism. This talk focuses on Chapter 1, “Against Homophobia in the Diaspora,” to analyze the contemporaneous emergence of political homophobia and queer visibility in California during the 1990s and 2000s. By examining the 1999 case of a virulently anti-LGBTQ+ petition campaign driven by Korean Christian conservatives, and the subsequent mobilization of an ad hoc coalition of LGBTQ+ activists and allies who sought to counter it, the talk deploys the conceptual framework of “throughlines” — a methodological approach to tracing the connective threads, political affinities, and discursive proximities that shape queer activism across disparate geographies. By recovering this transpacific history, I argue that queer activism and political homophobia emerged not merely in opposition, but in tandem, as both sides utilized the diaspora to refine their rhetorical strategies and mobilize their respective communities.

The event is co-sponsored by the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, East Asian Studies Center, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.