Mark R Plaice

This paper takes a spatial approach to the question of social inclusion for LGBQT people in South Koran popular culture. The last two decades have seen the emergence of a more open gay scene in Seoul, the growth of queer community activities such as the LGBQT Film Festival and Seoul Pride, and increasing—albeit often ambivalent—visibility for queer characters in South Korean media. While the acceptance of LGBQT lifestyles are increasingly accepted by the Korean public, especially in younger demographics, public queer cultural events and political debate of LGBQT rights often faces vehement opposition from conservative and Christian groups. Moreover, the emergence of queer identities in South Korea should be understood as subject to the complex antinomies of Korea’s 'compressed modernity’. Contemporary Korean queer identities are constructed through a nexus of earlier Korean queer community habitus, globalised queer cultures, localising practices, and the circulation of western and other Asian queer people, images, and ideas. Korean queer identities also negotiate gradients of privacy and publicness, and inclusion and exclusion across social environments shaped by competing traditional and emerging ideologies of familism, the importance of affiliation networks in contemporary Korean society, and the individualism of neoliberal culture. At the same time, the digital communications and dating practices through which individual/group relations are mediated in queer communities often have socially atomising effects, and the range of queer community meeting places is limited by the commercialised production of space in neoliberal Seoul. How, then, do Korean queers position or imagine themselves within the urban fabric of the city?

This paper maps the spaces of queer life in Seoul constructed in Korean queer films. It suggests that two spatial tropes predominate the spatial imaginary of Korean queer film: Queer heterotopia and tactics of temporary spatial appropriation. Michael Foucault theorises heterotopias as other spaces that stand outside the regime of norms of disciplinary society. Queer places, such as gay bars and clubs and gay ‘room salons’, function as ‘transgression heterotopia’s in which gender and sexuality evade the discipline of heteronormative society. Foucault separates space into that of norms and ‘other places’. Michel De Certeau theorises that even within the power structures of normative space, the ‘powerless’ can deploy their own tactics of spatial usage, albeit always through temporary appropriations. Such tactics are also common in Korean queer films. They are deployed in deserted buildings, waste ground, remote rural spaces, cars parked under bridges on the banks of the Han River, and in quiet public toilets at night. Indeed, the ‘dark night’ becomes a chronotope of and metaphor for a covert queer subjectivity. Yet, with its heterotopias and spatial tactics, Korean queer film obscures the spatialities of (what Gillies Deleuze terms) ‘control societies’ that function so differently from the spatialised prohibitions of disciplinary society. The paper concludes by asking how Korean queer film addresses the experience of the queer neoliberal subject in contemporary Seoul.

This paper departs from recent work on South Korean film noir, which has focused on films from the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Kim 2015), critiqued western classifications of Korean noir (Martin 2015), and positioned Korean noir’s extreme violence as a reaction to Hollywood film noir (Teo 2014). The paper addresses contemporary Korean ‘neoliberal noirs’ to explore the way crime film responds when its conspiracies manifest in real life political scandals. On 9th December 2016, South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached for corruption. Her administration also sought to control cultural production through an extensive blacklist of oppositional cultural figures. This paper examines crime films produced in the wake of these scandals: A Violent Prosecutor (2016), Asura: City of Madness (2016), The King (2017), The Prison (2017), The Merciless (2017), Fifth Column (2018), and the TV drama, Bad Guys, Vile City (2016). Drawing on Rick Altman’s model of genre (1999), the paper traces the social contradictions at stake in the neoliberal noir. It argues that these films are significant because they position public officials as neoliberal subjects enmeshed within conflicts between state law, traditional values (such as gangland loyalty), and corrupt neoliberal individualism. While Joelle Collier suggests (2007) that East Asian gangster noirs critique traditions of Confucian patriarchy, this paper argues that recent Korean neoliberal noirs address corruptions of the network modalities of Korean modernity. It suggests that in depicting political and corporate corruption directly, rather than through noiresque allegory, these films serve the social function of mediating a socio-political reality already rent by scandal. The paper concludes that the figure of the prosecutor/investigator protagonist is pivotal to the neoliberal noir in three ways: His investigatory skills are required to negotiate the murky conspiracies that underlie superficial reality, and while his alienation critiques the fragmentation of the state apparatus, his status as agent of the law facilitates ideological resolution in the restoration of justice predicated on state law.

An autistic youth, a North Korea refugee, a vampire, a girl’s high school dropout who fights like a gangster, and a discredited professional: Why are South Korean hospital TV dramas so focused on the figure of the outsider and the Other? In addressing this question, I present an analysis of Good Doctor (KBS, 2013), Doctor Stranger (SBS, 2014), and Doctor Romantic (SBS, 2016), with additional references to Doctors (SBS, 2016), Blood (KBS, 2015), and Life (JTBC & Netflix, 2018). I take a genre studies approach in an attempt to understand medical/hospital drama as distinct sub-genre of Korean TV drama. Tracing the social contradictions and ideological functions of the dramas, I establish the Korean medical drama as a morality play that negotiates the antinomies at the heart of South Korean modernity. The figure of outsider doctor draws on a hybrid modern/popular Confucian value system to stand firm against the maelstrom of neoliberal financialization in the medical sector, and transforms corrupt corporate systems to bring about both justice and harmonious social integration.

This paper explores the significance of the re-emergence of rural settings in Korean gangster films (KGF) after 2001. Gangster films are often defined by their gritty urban milieu, yet many KGF are set in rural or small-town spaces. Many early 1990s KGF are structured by a binary opposition between urban-colonial-modernity and rural-Korean-tradition. In later 1990s KGF, the range of spatial settings condenses on a dystopian Seoul-based gangland and rural spaces disappear. Why, then, did rural space re-emerge in post-2001 KGF? What social and ideological functions do rural settings and communities play in these films? This paper presents an analysis of over thirty KFG with rural settings. It demonstrates that the rural is constructed through an array of rural-urban oppositions and contradictions between differing perspectives on rural tradition. The rural serves as a site of erased origins, yet a repository of tradition. Rural life is repudiated, rather than pastoralized, yet is connected to urban audiences through tropes of nostalgia, childhood memory, and intergenerational communication. While rural tradition is erased by modernisation, it is dialectically re-incorporated back into Korean modernity. This paper concludes that post-2001 KGF relocate earlier KGF oppositions between tradition and modernity from the city into rural space. The complex ideological re-constructions of rural tradition in KGF admit the antimonies of both rural life and urban modernity. At the same time, a progressive nostalgia for rural traditions of community is manifest in both critique and potential amelioration of the alienation of modernity. In short, this paper concludes that the function of rural-set KGF is to negotiate the dilemma of being simultaneously Korean and modern.

For Jacques Rancière the ‘politics of aesthetics’ resides in what is made visible, and what is hidden. This paper explores the values and ideas that the government of South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, attempted to silence and remove from public visibility. It presents a critical thematic analysis of films and documentaries some of the 49 film directors placed on the government’s black list. These include Chang Joon-Hwan (1987 2017), Choi Seung-ho (Spy Nation 2016, Criminal Conspiracy 2017), Woo-seok Yang (The Attorney 2013), Chung Ji Young (National Security 2012, Unbowed 2011), Park Hoon-jung (New World 2013), and Lee Chang-Dong (Secret Sunshine 2007). The paper reveals a nexus of atheist, queer, and left wing values that were to be removed form visibility, and sheds light on the contours of the political criticism and allegory feared by the Park regime.  Ultimately, the paper raises questions about the perceived political power of commercial feature films and the ways governments may attempt to control cultural messages even in democratic societies.

Gangster films are largely conceived as an urban genre set in the mean streets of metropolitan ganglands. A significant proportion of South Korean gangster films depart from this spatial convention, however, setting their central family or romance plots in the domestic space of the apartment. This paper addresses the question of why we find gangsters in domestic space in South Korean cinema and examines what the domestic setting ‘does’ to the gangster film. The Show Must Go On (2008), is discussed in detail to exemplify the ways questions of masculinity, gendered family role performance, and class anxieties are problematized and combine to produce a focus on the family and domestic space. What emerges in this spatial shift is a new subgenre, the ‘family drama gangster film’. This form combines elements of the traditional gangster narrative with those of the family melodrama, producing tension between the conflicting obligations of the gangster towards gang and family. The paper concludes that the family drama gangster film emerged as a response to a conjunction of socio-economic and film industry factors, and became a vehicle through which conflict between competing ideologies of Korean familism are negotiated, mostly resolving in favour of affective familism.

I produced this poster along with the other members of my team listed above. It was part of the assessment for the Rethinking Learning & Teaching through Diversity elective module on the KCL Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practise in Higher Education. The poster was presented in class, and was also presented at the 2015 King’s Learning Institute Excellence in Teaching Conference.
This poster overviews the theoretical and regulatory frameworks for inclusive teaching for SpLD students, and outlines key best practice recommendations against which inclusive teaching at KCL is benchmarked. Approaches to inclusive teaching for students with Specific Learning Disabilities (SpLD’s) have changed significantly. The focus is now shifting away from individual students towards the learning environment as the site of intervention for inclusive teaching, while the Neuro-Diversity model questions the SpLD paradigm by recognizing all mental capacities and modes of learning as part of the normal spectrum of human neuro-diversity. At the same time, since the 2006 Amendment to the Disabilities Discrimination Act universities have been required to take a pro-active approach to removing barriers to equal participation for students with SpLD’s. This is reflected in policies at KCL, which is moving towards a fully inclusive teaching approach. In light of these changes, this poster aims to evaluate inclusive teaching practices at KCL against current best practice.

A recent review of best practice for inclusive teaching at university highlighted the importance of backwards design, multiple means of representation, inclusive teaching & learner supports, inclusive assessment, and instructor approachability & empathy. In this poster we compare these guidelines with our experience of under/postgraduate teaching within three departments at KCL. We found that inclusive teaching practices are applied inconsistently across departments at KCL. This might be due to a lack of awareness, time/support and central guidance. Aligning KCL inclusion policy for SpLD students and inclusive teaching approaches at KCL, we suggest improving the implementation of inclusive teaching, with the ultimate aim of obviating the necessity of ‘reasonable adjustments’ in our teaching practice by providing a universally inclusive learning environment for all students.

Co Authors: Mark Plaice, Xiao Fang, Steven Kiddle & Claudia Kathe