Queering stigma: HIV/AIDS stigma resistance in Seoul

This thesis explores how HIV/AIDS stigma is queered by Korean sexual minorities and people living with HIV. As such it is located at the intersection of Korean Queer Studies and sociology of stigma.

Through qualitative research, the thesis focuses on two points of inquiry. One, it situates HIV/AIDS stigma into the South Korean context by examining the ways in which international HIV/AIDS media narratives originating from the Unites States were localised by the Korean newspaper media in the 1980s and 1990s. The second point of focus relates to the ways in which HIV and AIDS related discrimination and oppression is currently negotiated, managed and resisted in Seoul.

In the thesis, stigma is understood as a social structure produced by institutions of power (Tyler 2020; Scambler 2018), rather than as a ‘mark’ or a ‘label’ that manifests through social interaction between individual people (Goffman 1986). This shift in conceptualisation makes it possible to interrogate stigma through queer theory, which is employed to critically evaluate, analyse and deconstruct hegemonic social orders and structures (Marinucci 2010).

By focusing on the experiences and strategies of the younger generation of Korean sexual minorities and people living with HIV (people born after 1985), the thesis argues that the younger generation of Koreans successfully queer HIV/AIDS stigma through mundane everyday actions and behaviours, so called ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1987), and that through processes of queering – understood as a combination of deconstruction and remaking (Muñoz 1999) – individuals can become stigma resistant.