Abstract

This article examines the queer literary communities that emerged through South Korea’s PC communication networks (commercial dial-up online services) and the early internet from the late 1990s through the 2000s, with particular attention to the communal writing they fostered. Against the backdrop of the unprecedented visibility queer literature has gained since the mid-2010s through self-representation and autofiction, the article takes the question “Who can occupy the position of the self-narrating subject today?” as a method for rereading the texts that preceded this turn, thereby opening another route for discussing queer literature. In the late 1990s, queer literary communities developed at the intersection of “new generation” culture and a broader media transition, creating an independent literary ecology that linked online writing groups, literary websites, and print publication, in which writing functioned as a medium of mutual affective response. Kim Bee, a trans woman writer who began her career in these communities, presents in her first story collection, Nananunana (2006), narrators who gaze at the lives of others rather than foregrounding themselves, and a narrative mode that, moving between first-person and third-person narration, never resolves into confession. The article interprets this withdrawal of the “I” and its turn toward others as a narrative form shaped by the media conditions under which personal experience was externalized as communal record, and by the affective force of what Kim herself calls the “false”. It argues that the “I” in this writing was not owned and displayed by an individual but circulated and shared within a community. Attending further to the strikingly different ways the same writing has been read under changing political conjunctures, the article shows that the queer literature of the past and that of the present are at once discontinuous and connected, and proposes that writing through the “false” be revisited not as an origin retrospectively inserted into a linear literary history but as a counterpoint to the contemporary dominance of self-representation, and as a historical point of reference for a form of writing that reaches others like oneself without claiming ownership of the “I”.