<역병에서 살아남는 법>과 퀴어 정치학

고강일 인천대학교 인문학연구소 2022 인문학연구 Vol.37 No.-

이 에세이는 데이빗 프랑스 감독의 오스카 노미네이트 기록 영화인 <역병에서 살아남는 법>(2012)을 분석하면서 작품의 퀴어 정치학을 고찰한다. 에세이 전반부에서는 1980-90 년대 미국의 에이즈 대유행당시, LGBT 공동체내부의 주요 담론들이었던 정체성의 정치학과 동성애규범성을 숙고하면서, 이 서사들이 동성애혐오와 인종화되고 젠더화된 경제적불평등에 의해 악화된 에이즈 위기에 대처하는데 실패한 이유를 규명한다. 또한 퀴어 정치학이 대안 담론으로 부상하고 액트 업이 퀴어 정치학의 실천으로서 조직되는 양상을 고찰한다. 에세이 후반부에서는 <역병에서 살아남는 법>을 분석하면서 작품이 뉴욕에서의액트 업의 급진적인 정치적 행위를 어떻게 담아내고 있는지를 살펴본다. 또한 이 글은 이단체가 당대 주류 언론과 정치인들이 주도했던 규범적인 성 정치학과 결별하는 양상도 살펴본다. 본고는 액트 업이 20세기 후반 미국에 팽배했던 섹슈얼리티와 관련된 규범적인문화와 법률적 관습들에 도전했다는 점에서 퀴어 정치학을 체현하고 있다고 결론짓는다.

원더우먼의 계보, 젠더 정치학, 그리고 영화 〈원더우먼〉

고강일 동국대학교 영어권문화연구소 2022 영어권문화연구 Vol.15 No.2

Surveying a genealogy of Wonder Woman since her first appearance in 1941, this essay explores its gender politics and discusses how Patty Jenkins's Wonder Woman (2017) examines different ideas and discourses about the female superhero's stories. Created as feminist character by psychologist and lawyer William Moulton Marston, she has served as discursive space for arguments over women's rights and the boundaries of gender. The first half of this essay charts the way in which Wonder Woman's portrayals vary within the contexts of changing feminist movements, cultural shifts in gender norms, and political ideology. I consider how the character of Wonder Woman has challenged gender boundaries by performing a determined and formidable warrior. This paper also addresses how it has conformed to traditional articulations of gender as an attractive, heterosexual, and white woman at the same time. In the second half of this paper, I analyze Jenkins's Wonder Woman, the first live-action solo movie about the Amazonian princess, and discuss the way in which the film mirrors and reflects on the history of Wonder Woman since its first introduction. This paper reads the film as a cultural commentary on Trumpism, and examines its gender politics. In doing so, this paper concludes that the cinematic text enacts a conservative cultural politics in which “compulsory heterosexuality” is aligned with “compulsory able-bodiedness” resulting in heteronormative disablism.

듀보이스와 흑인 남성성의 문제

고강일 영남대학교 인문과학연구소 2022 人文硏究 Vol.- No.100

이 논문은 W. E. B. 듀보이스의 흑인의 영혼 이 인종주의를비판하는데 있어, 미국 흑인 남성의 인종간의 이성애적 욕망을 어떻게 고찰하는지를 살펴본다. 자신의 저서에서 듀보이스는 백인여성에 대한 흑인 남성의 성적 욕망이 인종화되는 현상에 의해 흑인남성이 “검둥이”와 “미국인”이라는 분열적 주체 사이에서 존재론적 위기를 경험한다고 지적한다. 흑인의 영혼 은 젠더화된 인종담론이 백인 여성 주체와 관련된 흑인 남성 주체를 병리학적으로성애화하는 양상을 검토한다. 듀보이스의 책이 그 같은 흑인 남성성의 위기를 어떻게 조명하고 있는지를 숙고하면서, 이 글은 그가인종간의 이성애적 욕망의 ‘정상화’를 인종적 정의의 토대로 제시하고 있다고 시사한다. 결론부에서는 인종주의에 대한 듀보이스의남성우월주의적 비평이 인종주의와 성차별주의의 공모관계를 간과한다고 주장한다.

에이즈 정치학과 <달라스 바이어스 클럽>

고강일 문학과영상학회 2017 문학과영상 Vol.18 No.1

This essay examines the 2013 biographical drama film Dallas Buyers Club, which represents the story of Ron Woodroof, an AIDS patient diagnosed in 1985 when the disease was not understood and labeled as “gay cancer.” The first half of this essay addresses the historical context surrounding the AIDS crisis of the 1980-90s in the United States and argues that economic injustice legitimized by homophobia had actually encouraged the spread of HIV/AIDS. My essay explores how Dallas Buyers Club portrays the disastrous social landscape under the AIDS crisis in which HIV/AIDS victims were stigmatized as sexual deviants and dying as a result of mainstream society's criminal neglect. Also by analyzing the protagonist Ron Woodroof's transformation from unwitting homophobe victim of AIDS to radical health care activist, my essay contends that Dallas Buyers Club illustrates the ways in which AIDS victims and activists struggle to protect their civil rights amid the AIDS epidemic. This essay concludes that the film offers a queer alliance between Woodroof and the transgender character Rayon as the fundamental way to resist heterosexist capitalist liberal discourse, which had exacerbated the AIDS crisis.

The Mulatto and Tabooed Desires: Reading James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

고강일 미국소설학회 2016 미국소설 Vol.23 No.3

This essay interrogates the dominant discourse of a mixed-race man's sexuality under Jim Crow and its counter-discourse by exploring James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Recent scholarship on the novel presents Johnson's text as a somewhat conservative text in which the protagonist's alleged deviation from normative racial identity and heterosexuality prefigures his tragic fate. Scholars such as Siobhan B. Somerville and Phillip Brian Harper contend that Johnson's portrayal of his mulatto protagonist as a homosexual subject conforms to the logic of dominant white discourse in which homosexual and interracial sexuality are tabooed and stigmatized. Against those critical assessments of Johnson's novel as a male version of the tragic mulatta narrative, my essay argues that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges the cultural politics of racial segregation that racializes and sexualizes a light skinned black male subject. In doing so, I examine Johnson's rhetorical strategy through which, I suggest, his narrative actually troubles the racist fantasy that pathologizes the protagonist's biracial origins and sexuality. Specifically, I explore Johnson's appropriation and strategic deployment of racist stereotypes associated with a mixed-race man, arguing that Johnson's use of racist discourses criticizes rather than reifies the conservative politics that critics generally identify in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

현대 미국에서의 흑백 인종간의 혼합과 (반)담론들

고강일 한국중앙영어영문학회 2020 영어영문학연구 Vol.62 No.2

This essay surveys the history of racial mixing and its (counter) discourses in modern America. The creation of American modernity was a highly racialized project. Since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, white mainstream society’s efforts to build and maintain a “modern” America determined by race were diverse, tenacious, and pernicious. The legal, extralegal and discursive devices that white supremacists invoked in order to police racial boundaries are easily enumerated: lynching, the miscegenation taboo, anti-miscegenation laws, anti-immigration laws, the one-drop rule, and so on. Exploring the combined sexualization and racialization of African American people in American modern history, this essay first considers the “miscegenation taboo” as a major ideological vehicle in establishing and enhancing the white male privilege. I also examine its counter discourse advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois and address his masculinist bias. No writer has explored the complicity of racism and American modernity as clearly as Du Bois. Focusing on the short story, “Of the Coming of John,” Du Bois’s first “martyr tale,” this essay interrogates his desire for male privilege embedded in the story’s anti-racist politics. In doing so, my essay concludes that both “miscegenation taboo” and its counter discourse enact traditional gender hierarchy.

대도시규범성, 퀴어 생태학, 그리고 『재미난 집』

고강일 미국소설학회 2022 미국소설 Vol.29 No.2

This essay addresses Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home and its critique of metronormativity, a dominant narrative within which rural queers move to a urban place of tolerance after enduring a long period of homophobic repression. The discourse of hegemonic lesbian and gay urbanism normalizes a big city as the final destination to which rural-identified queers must assimilate. By employing the frame of queer ecology, this paper submits that Fun Home critiques a homonormative impulse embedded in the metronormative discourse. The first half of this essay charts the way in which U.S. capitalism has provided material condition for the making of gay and lesbian identities. I also consider how queer politics of protest and equality has shifted to a de-politicized and commodified urban gay subculture in the post-Stonewall period. In the second half of this paper, I analyze Fun Home in a way that focuses on how the graphic memoir interrogates historical context and ideologies of metronormativity. Paying special attention to the book’s portrayal of Beech Creek, the small hometown of Bechel’s father in central Pennsylvania, this paper argues that Fun Home performs an intersectional queer ecological politics, one that links homophobia, metrocentric bias, homonormativity, and environmental commodification. In doing so, this paper concludes that Bechdel’s text provides a complicated and nuanced understanding of metronormativity and queer ecology.

"소년은 울지 않는다"에 나타난 젠더와 섹슈얼리티

고강일 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2019 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.27 No.2

This essay examines the 1999 biographical drama film Boys Don’t Cry, which represents the story of Brandon Teena, a transman, who was brutally killed by transphobic violence in 1993 in Nebraska. The first half of this essay queries the idea of masculinity as performance by exploring the film’s portrayal of the transsexual protagonist's transgressive gender presentation. Paying attention to how the cinematic text presents Brandon’s masculine performance, my essay analyzes the film as a queer text in which an alternative masculinity is presented against hegemonic masculinity. I also address the film’s indictment of transphobia shared by heteronormative men and women. In the second of the essay, I investigate the film’s queer dogma, which dismisses the transsexual subject’s desire and identity as symptoms of homophobic homosexuality. By looking closely at the last part of the film in which Brandon is unambiguously represented as a lesbian, this essay discusses marginalization of transsexuality in queer studies. In doing so, I refer to Jay Prosser’s critique of Judith Butler’s notions of transgender and transsexual, and examine how Boys Don’t Cry re-inscribes such queer dogma. This essay concludes that the film is an ambivalent text oscillating between an expression of subversive queerness and repressive transphobia.

유럽의 근대성에 대한 성찰

고강일 한국사회복지학회 2023 한국사회복지학 Vol.75 No.3

<에린 브로코비치>에 나타난 환경 정의와 젠더 정치학

고강일 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2023 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.31 No.3

his essay examines the 2000 biographical dram film Erin Brockovich, which represents the story of Erin Brockovich, an American environmental activist who was crucial in building a case against Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) over groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California in 1993. Employing the notion of environmental justice, this paper explores how Erin Brockovich demonstrates that inequalities of class place poor people at environmental risk and addresses the film’s gender politics. This essay first interrogates the way in which Erin Brockovich suggests that people lacking resources become the main casualties of slow environmental violence. I consider how Erin, the titular character, played by Julia Roberts, mobilizes victims of PG&E’s water crisis and its political implications in terms of reproductive justice. This essay examines the movie’s problematic gender politics as well. Focusing on the film’s portrayal of Erin’s sexualized body and her performance of motherhood, I examine its heteronormative understanding of femininity and motherhood. This paper also considers how Erin Brockovich connects social justice issues with environmental issues. Building on Noel Sturgeon’s term, “environmental reproductive justice,” this paper concludes that the film explores the intersection between reproductive and environmental justice.