Seongjo Jeong

Previous research on the factors influencing coming out (CO) for sexual and gender minorities has predominantly focused on specific relationships, such as with parents or friends, neglecting the complex relational and situational aspects of CO. Using latent class analysis (LCA), this study categorizes the patterns of CO among young sexual and gender minorities and investigates the characteristics of each group by examining eight CO relationships and nine situational identity disclosure variables. The findings suggest that CO is not merely an individual choice but intricately correlates with various social relationships and socio-psychological factors. Based on data from the “2021 Social Needs of LGBTQIA+ Young Adults in South Korea,” the results of the LCA and multiple logistic regression are as follows: First, CO patterns consist of three latent classes: open closet (20.1%), discreet closet (60.1%), and repressive closet (19.8%). Across all social relationships, including in the workplace, there were no high levels of disclosure, confirming the prevalence of the closet for LGBTQ people in South Korean society. Second, despite its low level of CO, the discreet closet type experiences less pressure to conceal its identity in public spaces, highlighting the importance of understanding CO from multifaceted perspectives. This group tends to perceive CO not as a collective or political issue but as a personal matter. Lastly, while the open and repressive closet types had similar perceptions of LGBTQ identity importance, community, and discrimination, they had conflicting perceptions and practices regarding coming out. This result suggests that even within the LGBTQ community, there may be marginalized identity groups more excluded when coming out, illustrating the closet's dilemma, where LGBTQ community participation trades off with exclusion from mainstream society.

This paper aims to analyze the discrimination experiences of sexual and gender minority young adults in Korean society and provide a basis for legal and institutional interventions. The analysis uses raw data from the “2021 Social Needs of LGBTQIA+ Young Adults in South Korea.” The study includes sexual and gender minorities between the ages of 19 and 34 residing in South Korea. It comprehensively analyzes their identities, experiences of discrimination, employment and work experiences, health status, and social needs related to law and policy. The results show that sexual and gender minority young adults become more diverse in sexual orientation and gender identity distribution than in the past, highlighting the need to recognize diversity within the sexual and gender minority group. In addition, they continue to experience discrimination in various areas, such as education and employment and often face precarious working conditions within legal and institutional gaps to prevent and remedy discrimination. Overall, the health status of sexual and gender minority young adults tends to be negative, with transgender people in particular facing poor health and adverse working conditions. The paper discusses legal and institutional improvements, including enacting inclusive anti-discrimination legislation.

About 10 years have passed since human subjects research in the humanities and social sciences became the object of systematic management by the Institutional Review Board(IRB). The negative experiences and dissatisfaction of the HSS(humanities and social studies) researchers with the IRB also continue to pile up over the past decade. This study aims to examine in detail the aspects of the conflict between the HSS researchers and the IRB. To this end, we conducted an extensive literature review, and attempted to identify conflict factors between the IRB and HSS researchers through an online survey(152 persons) and focus group interviews(27 persons). As a result of the study, it was confirmed that a lot of HSS researchers experienced conflicts with the IRB throughout the overall research process. IRB's excessive principledness and formalism appeared to be the main cause of conflict. Although HSS researchers inevitably complied with IRB deliberation, they recognized that it was opaque, lacked validity, discouraged creative research, and had little effect in promoting research ethics. HSS researchers generally agreed on the necessity of IRB, but suggested improvement opinions based on critical awareness arising from various conflict situations with IRB. This study argues that the IRB review system should be improved so that IRBs can contribute to the improvement of research ethics without restricting the autonomy and creativity of HSS research, and public debate on autonomous research ethics should be activated within academia.

This study identifies issues from IRB reviews of research on vulnerable subjects in the humanities and social sciences. To this end, the IRB review experiences of 27 researchers who studied vulnerable subjects were investigated through focus group interviews. Results showed that researchers were experiencing conflicts with IRBs from two main aspects. First, excessive deliberation standards are applied when dealing with vulnerable subjects. Second, an IRB's request for formalized informed consent was recognized as a problem. A gap in the awareness of research ethics and vulnerability between the IRB and the researchers was identified as the cause of recurring conflict. Researchers generally evaluated the risks of humanities and social studies research as low, compared to the IRBs, and recognized the definition of a vulnerable subject in a context-dependent manner, which was different from the subject-specific definition held by IRBs. Such a conflict is problematic because it leads to institutional reproduction of the vulnerability of vulnerable subjects, restricting research on vulnerable groups and intervening with social prejudice against vulnerable groups in the review process.

This paper argues that the sexual minority ‘problem’ in South Korean society raises fundamental questions about the rationality, democracy, and definition of citizenship embedded in South Korea’s biopolitical responses to COVID-19 through the case of the Itaewon ‘gay club’ mass infection in May 2020. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korea’s quarantine and isolation strategy was praised as an ideal model for infectious disease control that is transparent, open, and democratic. As a result, democratic citizenship became reconciled with the voluntary engagement in anti-virus solidarity. However, the Itaewon ‘gay club’ outbreak and the avoidance of COVID-19 tests among sexual minorities revealed that South Korea’s democratic disease control system could not operate properly in the face of pre-existing, systemic discrimination. Recognizing the seriousness of this situation, the government established an extraordinary governance in collaboration with LGBTQ rights groups to address the obstacles faced by the quarantine measures. Yet, this one-of-a-kind event merely defined the sexual minorities’ citizenship in terms of infectious disease control, and the questions regarding relationship between sexuality and citizenship continue to remain unanswered.

We explores the meaning of queer safe space by focusing on how LGBTQ youth who are excluded from school discover, experience, and attempt to build a new safe space outside of school. In South Korean society, LGBTQ youth routinely experience hate speech, discrimination, and violence at classroom. They also repeatedly experience hateful reaction from the resources they have access to, such as teachers, counseling programs, and out-of-school youth support systems, and come to the conclusion that they can not trust or rely on the school. Whereas the LGBTQ community outside the school can function as a safe space that provides a sense of belonging and social networks to LGBTQ youth. Accordingly, this study conducts in-depth interview with 25 LGBTQ youth and analyzes their experiences at schools, online and offline LGBTQ communities. Specifically, we analyze how LGBTQ youth experience discrimination and exclusion at school, how they discover various safe spaces outside of school and how these spaces are signified, and what kind of practice they continue to build alternative safe spaces. In conclusion, we reveal that queer safe space is closely related to community building from the perspective of exclusion and belonging, and ultimately argue that overall public areas, including schools, should be reexamined from the perspective of queer safe spaces.

Previous studies on the coming out and the mental health of sexual minorities have often overlooked experiences in non-Western societies and the various patterns of coming out within the immediate families. Using the most recent and comprehensive data on 2,381 LGB youths in South Korea, this study examined whether different patterns of coming out to family members are related to different levels of depression and whether these relationships differ between men (gay and bisexual man) and women (lesbian and bisexual woman). Contrary to the prevalent view of coming out as a universally liberating process, our findings indicate that coming out to family is related to increased depressive symptoms in South Korea. Moreover, this coming out stress shows a gendered pattern. Among sexual minority men, compared with those who did not come out, youths who came out to everyone, mother and father, and only siblings report a higher depression level. Being bisexual among men did not provide any protective effect. In contrast, there is no difference observed across coming out patterns among sexual minority women. These findings highlight the importance of considering to whom and in what cultural contexts one comes out to understand the mental health of sexual minorities.

Recently, the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse is gaining attention again in Korean society. The ‘Youth Generation’ discourse reflects the economic difficulties faced by young people in their 20s and 30s. But the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse, which pays attention to the crisis, is not only mobilized in a certain way by the needs of established politicians but also a sign that social reproduction centered on ‘normal families’ is in crisis. In particular, the fact that the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse is highlighted by the pattern of ‘Gender Conflict’ shows that the crises of the youth generation are not comprehensively understood. Therefore, it is necessary to critically reconstruct the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse, focusing on gender and sexuality. This is to examine who is called the ‘Youth,’ what is the political effect of the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse, and what is the process of typing that exists behind the face of the youth. Unlike the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse, which mainly marginalizes the crisis faced by young women as a matter of their own, with the focus on distributional inequality and economic crisis, the collective resistance of young women crosses distribution and recognition and poses fundamental challenges to social reproduction and politics. Also, the phenomenon of the ‘20’s Men’ can be understood as an attempt to cover up and sustain the crisis of broken masculinity norms and social reproduction, as well as replace complex social inequalities with a kind of gendered generation game. Furthermore, this paper concentrates on the problem of the military, which is at the core of the gendered generation game and the gender inequality, and asks to reconstruct the ‘Youth Generation’ discourse focusing on the gender and sexuality.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between the military and homosexuality by analyzing the experiences of sexual minority soldiers in the Korean military beyond the claim that homosexuality in the Korean military is a social and national "problem". In recent years, the anti-homosexual discourses have been spreading that homosexuality in the military is causing the serious national crisis. However, substantive researches or sociological interests are insufficient. Meanwhile, homosexuality in the military has been defined as a perverse existence to be managed and punishment in the change of the 'Sexual Harassment in Military Criminal Act' or 'the Military Discipline Instructions' since the mid - the 2000s. However, unlike anti-homosexual discourse or legal discourse that calls homosexuality in the military as a "problem," non-normative sexual identity in the military actually exists as a process rather than a fixed, essential attribute or category. In the military that is male-centered and heterosexual -oriented, sexual minorities are coping strategies for surviving by "passing" into heterosexuals and practicing being joined into the male bond, or by separately performing military service successfully. Some sexual minorities have been criticizing the military from the point of view of a man who is not a 'heterosexual soldier', that is, an 'inside outsider', by first being aware of and accepting his sexual identity in the military. These experiences reveal that self-representation carried out by sexual minority soldiers in the institutional and cultural conditions of the military is in the dilemma of self-contradiction and invisibility of homosexuality. However, this dilemma comes not from the strategic gender practice itself of the sexual minorities but from the institution itself, which reproduces homophobia and recognizes only heterosexuals as 'men'.

최근 한국에서는 군대 내 동성애를 국가적 위기와 연결하는 반동성애 담론이 거세지고 있다. ‘군형법상 추행죄’나 ‘부대관리훈령’이 2000년대 중반 이후 정비되 는 과정에서 군대 내 동성애(자)는 관리되어야 할 변태적 존재이자 처벌받아야 할 대상으로 규정되어 왔다. 본 연구는 그러한 배경 아래에서 군대 내 남성 동성애자 의 경험을 중심으로 군대와 동성애(자) 간 관계를 분석하는 것을 목표로 한다. 군대 내 동성애(자)를 ‘문제’로 호명하는 반동성애 담론 내지는 법 담론과는 달리 실제 군대 내 비규범적 성 정체성은 고정적이고 본질적인 속성이나 범주이 기보다는 과정으로서 존재한다. 동성애(자)는 군대 내에서 존재하지 않는 것으로 간주되거나 존재를 드러내지 않도록 강요당하며, 이들에 대한 차별대우는 공적/ 사적 영역 그리고 행위와 존재라는 허구적 구분을 통해 정당화된다. 폐쇄적이고 위계적 공간 속에서 성소수자는 이성애자로 ‘패싱’하여 남성 연대 속으로 편입되기를 시도하거나, 군인됨을 성공적으로 수행함으로써 살아남는 전략을 택하기도 한다. 반면 어떤 이들은 군대에서 자신의 성 정체성을 비로소 자각하고 받아들 임으로써, 남성이지만 ‘이성애자 군인’이 아닌 ‘내부의 외부인’의 관점으로 남성 중심적인 군대 문화를 비판하기도 한다. 이는 군대라는 제도적이고 문화적인 조건 속에서 성소수자 군인들이 수행하는 자기재현이 동성애의 비가시화와 커밍아웃에 따른 제도적 폭력 간 딜레마에 빠져있음을 역설적으로 보여준다. 본 연구는 이러한 딜레마가 성소수자의 전략 적 젠더실천 때문이 아니라, 성차별적이고 동성애혐오적인 군대라는 제도, 이성애-남성중심적 한국사회 자체에서 비롯한 것임을 밝히고자 한다.