ABSTRACT
In 2012, Gallery Ryugahŏn in Seoul exhibited a photography series, titled Kunyong (Military Use), by the Korean photographer Hankoo Lee. The photographs, presented 20 years after Lee’s mandatory service in the Korean Army, showcase life in the barracks of the Army battalion he served in. Steeped in the affect of “brotherhood” and intimacy, Lee’s photographs of the young, in-training bodies betray the visual tropes of militarized masculinity. This chapter argues that Lee’s photographs call upon the problematics of bodies in military photography not by “revealing” or signifying queer bodies, but by activating queer imagination: rather than locate the iconography of queer identities in the photographs, the chapter considers queer imagination as a methodological approach in visualizing South Korean conscription and military life. This shifts the focus from singling out homoerotic bodies as the “content” of such images to examining what the photographs propose against the conscription state. Going further, the chapter proposes that queer imagination as a method has the potential to rewrite and rethink the prevailing, and limiting, allegorizations that dominate discussions on military and military-adjacent images, such as those of U.S. military camptowns.
