"Fracturing the Space of the Real": Deriving a Korean Queer Theory from the Shamanic Feminist Poetics of Kim Hyesoon
This thesis derives a Korean queer theory from the shamanic feminist poetics of Kim Hyesoon, arguing that her theorization of Korean indigenous spirituality [musok] and the shaman song "Abandoned Princess Baridegi" constitutes a counter-epistemological framework capable of articulating queer possibility outside the ideological constraints of Western critical discourse. Drawing on the three essays of Princess Abandoned, translated by Don Mee Choi, I read Kim's work through a methodology of resignification (Judith Butler) and disidentification (José Esteban Muñoz) to argue that her agentive resignification of femininity and yin theorizes a disidentificatory performance-space [hyonbin] where queer Korean subjects enact worldmaking and destabilize hegemony. My subsequent resignification of wonhan works alongside Kim’s transformed feminine yin to restore dynamic cosmological force to concepts calcified under patriarchal and colonial ideology. This project brings together critical theory, feminist poetry, historical and ethnographical texts, and translation theory to perform a deliberate severing of queer theory from white Western teleology and its replanting within a syncretic Korean cosmological framework. I propose a model for queer-of-color theorization through which scholars of other Indigenous cultures can theorize their own ritual, affective, or cosmological practices as strategies for working within and against imperial heteropatriarchy.
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