Kyunghee Eo

Kyunghee Eo is a scholar of modern and contemporary Korean literature and popular culture, with a focus on the cultural production and representation of women, sexual minorities, and youth. Her research explores how narrative and visual cultures create worlds of fantasy, pleasure, and utopian possibility, and interrogates whether these aesthetic experiences have served meaningful political functions for historically marginalized populations.

 

Her first book manuscript, Perversions of Purity: Girl Sensibility in South Korean Literature and Culture, traces the historical formation and transformation of sonyŏ kamsŏng (girl sensibility) across Korean literature, film, and popular culture from the colonial period to the present. Taking girl sensibility as a distinct narrative and visual aesthetic, the book argues that it articulated sentimental fantasies of beauty, intimacy, and material plenitude amid the historical constraints of Japanese colonialism, the Cold War, and late capitalism. Girl sensibility recurs across a wide range of forms and media, from highbrow literature and auteur cinema to girls’ magazines, sunjŏng manhwa, and K-pop, but audience access to each of these genres was unevenly structured by class and cultural literacy. By tracing girl sensibility across this generic range, the book shifts attention from the representational content of cultural texts to the historical processes through which women and sexual minorities secured authorial positions in both prestige and popular forms. It also contends that it was readerly and spectatorial pleasure, no less than political commitment, that provided young Koreans with the impetus to become writers and cultural producers in their adulthood.

 

Kyunghee received a BA (2007) and MA (2012) in English literature at Yonsei University in South Korea, followed by a PhD (2021) in English at the University of Southern California. Before coming to Yale, she was Assistant Professor of Korean at the University of Colorado Boulder. More of her writings and translations can be found in Revisiting Minjung (Michigan UP, 2019), Readymade Bodhisattva (Kaya Press, 2019), Queer Korea (Duke UP, 2020), and VOSTOK (Vostok Press, 2016).