Itaewon's 'Others:' Stories of Navigating Authority and Marginalization

I first came to Seoul with the goal of broadly understanding how the United States - where I grew up and was educated for most of my life - affected the development of South Korea, my homeland. I wanted to investigate how the most socially marginalized minority groups were affected by the double-degree overlay of authority in the US-ROK alliance in a country that is homogenous in more ways than one. I initially focused on the presence of permanent US military bases and their militaristic, authoritative nature from the post-War era into the politically polarized present, as the very origin of American interference into Korean affairs was a militaristic one. I first started with Itaewon, a geographical and cultural center of Seoul where a huge American military base was located before its recent move to a more suburban area outside the city. 

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Itaewon has become a symbol of ‘cultural liberation’ in Korea, where Islamic shrines, Ethiopian restaurants, and gay clubs coexist. Before this cosmopolitan consumerist image of Itaewon - which, I learned, is a carefully manufactured one, top-down - the area was like any other war-torn, American base-supporting town in 1950s Korea, where ‘military comfort women’ served American soldiers in exchange for American goods and dollars. (The term “military comfort women” originates from the Japanese colonial era when women were forced into sexual labor for soldiers; similar meaning is attributed to the women that performed sex work during American military occupation post-liberation). Here, I found a curious past-present connection; the spaces those women once resided and formed communities in were now occupied by an increasingly visible yet inherently invisible sector of society – the LGBTQ population on the ‘queer side’ of Itaewon. The two groups shared vocabulary, culture, and space despite temporal distance, but were simultaneously of vastly different stories; their stories highlighted the common ground in resisting oppression of marginalized communities despite their inherently different battles.  Their stories also emphasized how no one organization or militaristic presence is the sole arbitrator of suppression and violence, somewhat contrary to my mistaken initial assumptions (the Korean government co-opted with American forces when they called the women ‘dollar-earners’ and the gay clubs ‘special tourism districts,’ when economically beneficial, after all). Amongst it all, there was a significant theme that stood out from these stories - the importance of ‘queerness’ in resisting. 

The position of the queer community situated in the crossfire of American and South Korean authority, and all there is in between, was clear to me since the start of my fieldwork in and outside Itaewon. The Seoul Pride

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 Festival happened soon after my arrival in downtown Seoul after the government denied use of the City Hall, where it had historically taken place. As usual, a significant anti-Pride crowd gathered in the periphery, with protesters wearing Hanbok (Korean traditional clothes) and drumming Jangu (Korean drums), holding Christian banners, waving Korean and American flags. In a country that’s perpetually in a state of war, both outwardly against the North and inwardly against its ‘spies,’ the discourse of ‘national security and safety’ encompasses not just the anti-government/‘communist’ political dissidents, but all minorities that seem to object to traditional, hegemonic state-led order. In this case, queers were socially positioned as part of an anti-state force that extends to spies, communists, feminists, Muslims, and even the Chinese Communist Party, all targets of "purification.” However, despite the ever-present hate, the festival - and everyday life - went on.

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This outright rejection and resistance of social obstruction to queerness was what stood out to me as something worth digging deeper into. One seminar I went to had a lecture on the ‘queer’ nature of the U.S. military comfort women and their rejection of heteronormative, sexualized militarism. This led me to wonder how the queer individuals themselves come to view their unrelenting presence throughout the very turbulent history of Korea against sexual minorities, especially in the liminal space that is Itaewon; the systems of oppression and violence enacted upon the bodies of queer individuals of Itaewon were vast, ranging from forced militarism to pride parade blockages, and so were their forms of resisting. Thus, my project had taken a specific mold from the more general inquiry, and my realization of the broad nature of violent authority beyond the US-ROK binary allowed me to fully immerse myself in the continuously dynamic nature of resistance in the most marginalized spaces of Korea. For instance, conscription is an everyday fact for men in Korea as every able-bodied man must serve his mandatory military duty at some point in his youth. However, this year-and-a-half period becomes a ground for social volatility for gay men (i.e. 2017 gay dating app exposing case, 2021 suicide of a trans soldier). This liminal state of localized state-led violence against all gay men is satirized - as well as fetishized by artist ‘Jun’ in his Itaewon exhibition ‘Strong Power’ (2025), exemplifying the introspective and creative extent to which queer resistance can take place. 

Thus, I interviewed a wide array of queer individuals that have lived and/or worked in Itaewon. One talked about the government-led expulsion of drag queens to Japan during the AIDS scare, while another talked about working in AIDS prevention organizing as a form of resistance against conscription. I have also been attending seminars on queer resistance and visiting archives and exhibitions of the silenced histories of Itaewon. While the findings are as vast as the stories and archives themselves, one thing that underlined my research was the inevitable omnipresence of queerness — not merely as a socialized identity, but as a form of collective resistance of the present and an act of remembering the past.