Butch's hands up : creating the Korean butch women's herstory

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Master’s Thesis

Butch’a Hands Up

-Creating the Korean Butch Women’s Herstory-

Hyun Jung Kim

MSc Sociology: Gender, Sexuality and Society

University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dr. Margriet van Heesch

Second Reader: Dr. Sarah Bracke

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Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 My First Encounter with Butch and the Debates

I remember the first day of high school in March 2008 like yesterday. I knew almost nobody because I had recently moved to a new neighborhood in Daejeon, one of the large cities in South Korea. Everything around me was new. I scanned the classroom, feeling nervous and excited at the same time. There were only girls in the room because of the gender separation of the school. Then someone caught my eye. She was the only girl in the classroom who had short hair, just a little bit longer than the boys. The short-haired girl was wearing a girls’ uniform, a skirt, like all the other girls. But her haircut made her stand out. Nabi not only looked different from everybody else in the room, but she also carried a different ambience. I instantly felt a strong curiosity towards her. I wanted to know more about this unusual girl.

After few months of escaping from the skirt by putting on sweatpants, Nabi came to school one day in sleek navy-colored pants. She had started wearing the boys’ uniform. She seemed more than confident in that outfit. She never returned to skirts. She had already stopped putting on makeup in the first month of school. She cut her hair shorter every time she went to the hairdresser and flattened her chest every morning with a compress bandage. Nobody, at least nobody among the students, questioned why she was not wearing skirts because it just seemed right that she wore pants instead of skirts.

I cannot recall the exact moment of learning about butch-femme labels. But I assume that I picked them up in one of the online lesbian communities that I was a member of. Such words were not even known to ‘straight’ people at that time in Korea. The use of “butch” can be traced back to the 1940’s in the United States (Maltz, 1998) but it is unclear when and how the term was introduced to Korea. Before butch became widely used in Korea, there was the predicate ba-ji-ssi (literally meaning Mr. Pants) which could be understood as the Korean lesbian label that corresponds with the American use of butch (Jeon, 1996; Han, 1998). Nevertheless, ba-ji-ssi and chi-ma-ssi (literally meaning Ms. Skirts, similar to ‘femme’) were no longer being used in the community by the time I was discovering myself as a queer around 2008. It was only in the

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summer of 2017 when Troublers, a documentary film following the life of a 73-years-old ba-ji-ssi, was released that I came across the terms (Lee, 2015). Nowadays, the Western lesbian categories, such as butch and femme, are very much familiar to Korean lesbians, especially the younger generation, regardless of their own identification with the labels.

I often hear my lesbian friends who refuse the butch-femme categorization looking down on butch-femme relationship for mimicking heterosexuality. Moreover, butch women have been and still are often perceived to be merely copying men, striving for male privilege (Gardiner, 2002; Levitt & Hiestand, 2004). They were even thought of as ‘the enemy within’ by American radical feminists in the 1970s (Love, 2000:106). Whenever I encountered hateful comments or ignorant things on butch women, I became uncomfortable. Sometimes I felt as if I was being insulted although I do not consider myself a butch. But I could not help it because what I have observed and experienced during my high school years with a butch girlfriend was more complicated than a simple mimicry of men and heterosexuality. So I tried to refute the derisive comments. I thought I knew what living as butch was like. But at one point I realized that I didn’t. I have not lived one single day as a butch. It struck me that despite my noble intention I was being equally ignorant by thinking that I knew about the life I haven’t lived. Moreover, it occurred to me that the actual life stories of Korean butch women were missing in the debates around them. Therefore, the only thing I did know for sure was that the lives of butch women deserved to be better understood. Maybe it’s time to stop assuming things about butch women and to start listening to the stories they tell. Which is why I would like to now turn my focus to the Korean butches.

The aim of this research is to look deeper into the experiences that Korean butches go through constantly in their daily lives; living, loving, studying, working, and being recognized as butch. It is not of my interest to diagnose the ‘masculine’ women who love women, as if they are pathological. The question is not why some women are butch but how some people make sense of the butch category and live as one. How can lesbians recognize butch in Korea? Are you born butch or do you choose to be butch? Is butch something you do or are? Is there a specific Korean way of being butch? The main question that is at the center of this research is: How do people become and live as butch in Korea?

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Before going deeper in to the contemporary butch lives, I would like to first look at lesbianism and butches in Korean history. Like aforementioned ba-ji-ssi, butch lesbians were addressed with different names, or stigmas, if they had names at all. Consequently, to study female homosexuality and butch before modern Korea is to not only look at what is recorded but also to discover what is not recognized as lesbianism. Where could have butch lesbians been hiding in Korean history?

I also hope to gain knowledge on Korean butch women’s understanding of ‘butchness’ and their experience of subject formation. Here, subject formation is understood as an ongoing procedure in which the subject emerges as an effect of the precedent power and also as an agent that exercises its own power (Butler, 1997). How do Korean butch women define butch? What is considered to be ‘butchy’ to them and what is not? What is the meaning of identifying as butch to Korean butches? What efforts do butch women make in order to be butch enough? And, how do they relate to butchness with their body?

Another set of subquestions I will ask throughout the research is about the life of butch lesbians. How do they find and fall in love, or fall out of love? How do they talk about sex? Where are the butches studying or working? Who are the people they get along with?

Finding answers for the questions asked in this research has significance in several different ways. First of all, as I will elaborate more in depth throughout the upcoming sections, studies on homosexuality in Korea have just started to be done. When I typed in dong-sung-ae (homosexuality) as a keyword in Naver Academic, results showed that within the scarce but growing volume of studies on sexuality in Korea almost half of the published articles on homosexuality was published by English literature journals and law journals.1 Articles published in sociology or social studies journals were relatively small in number. In addition, among the unpublished theses and dissertations that were yielded from the keyword dong-sung-ae, almost half of those were written by scholars of religion studies and theology. Their utmost interest lies in ‘criticizing’ and ‘curing’ homosexuality.2

The results show how Korean academia lacks

1_{Naver Academic (}_{http://academic.naver.com/}_{) is a Korean search portal for academic articles, including published}

articles and some of the unpublished theses/dissertations. I used this website because unlike Google Scholar, they provide disciplinary information.

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sociological perspective on homosexuality, let alone female homosexuality. I aim to expose the differences within what is simplified to ‘homosexuality’ as if the experiences are all the same. Living as a female sexual minority in Korea is one thing and living as a butch is yet another. By looking into the lives of butch women, my research will be one of the many ways to capture the unique situation of butches and the complexity of sex, gender and sexuality interplaying in current Korean society.

The interviewees spoke of their experiences with their own voice in this study. This research is an act of archiving life stories of female queer subjects living in 21st century South Korea. Archival projects, such as my research, also make it possible for other people, transcending time and space, to engage in a dialogue with the recorded narratives. It will visualize the lives of butch women that are often invisible, misunderstood or deliberately silenced, to be properly recognized. And, I hope and believe, the experience of narrating their own butch lives and of being listened will be empowering in any possible ways for the participants.

Now that I have introduced my research topic and the questions I aimed to answer, I will continue to explain my method of data gathering and analysis in the following section. Then, I will present the background discussions and theoretical framework of the study. The first chapter will conclude with presenting the outline of this thesis.

1-2 What and How: On Data Collection and Analysis

The data collected and analyzed for this study have been gathered mainly in two ways: related literature research and in-depth interview.

In order to recover the lesbianism and butch from remaining invisible and unrecognized in Korean history, and to situate this study in a historical context, it was necessary to gather and analyze relevant studies. However, I could only find a handful of precedent researches that deal with historical accounts of female homosexuality and homoromance, especially those of masculine women and women who disguised as men before the adaptation of butch lesbian as a sexual identity in Korea (e.g. Cha, 2009; Kim, 2008; Heo, 2016). In addition to the scarcity of

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relevant research, the historical accounts of homosexuality have often been dismissed as merely ‘perverse’ acts or were simply neglected to be recorded. Therefore, in order to study and establish a genealogy of queer Korea, a queer-reading of history was inevitable.

Finding a way to tap into the lives of Korean butches living in 21st century was essential to this research. Female individuals who identify themselves as butch, regardless of their sexuality, have been asked to tell their stories. An interview guide that contained a set of inquiries which are essential to the research was made before starting the interviews with the intention to maintain consistency with the questions I ask and to not lose focus on the research topic while interviewing. While intersectional markers such as age, ethnicity, religion, residential area, education level and income were not specifically controlled during data collecting, they have been taken into account for the analysis.

The initial plan was to look for potential participants by posting a survey link made with Google Forms on Twitter and a Korean online lesbian community ‘Roda’. Searching for interviewees on a mobile lesbian dating app ‘TopL’ was also part of my initial plan. However, the online lesbian community refused to allow me posting recruitment links on the website because I was not a member of the community. Korean online lesbian communities have undergone several incidents where members’ personal information were deliberately disclosed by homophobic people. Which, in result, led to the communities being discreet and cautious. Finding interview participants on lesbian dating app was also not really successful. Some even expressed being offended by me looking for butches with an intention other than wanting to ‘purely’ date them. Consequently, I was able to find only 1 interviewee from the dating app.

One of the reasons for deciding to recruit research participants on online platforms is that they are known to be the spaces where many of young Korean lesbians socialize. And because people have to introduce themselves with labels rather than nonverbal expressions in such spaces, butch-femme categories are frequently used in online lesbian communities. Thus, it could be inferred that the possibility of finding self-identified butch women will be higher in such spaces.

I posted a digital recruitment document on my personal Twitter account during the last week of March 2018. The application form included explanation of the research topic and asked

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for the respondents’ age, sexual preference (e.g., homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality, etc.), current residential area, contact and confirmation of their self-identification as butch. The purpose of posting the survey was not to gather quantitative data but to recruit voluntary participants and obtain their contact information. With the help of RAVE, the queer student organization of Chung-Nam University, I was able to receive a total of 33 positive responses. Respondents who identified as butch were individually contacted afterwards for arranging a face-to-face interview. Despite the unexpected number of initial respondents, almost half of them did not reply in the process of contacting and scheduling the interview.

I was able to meet 11 random butches in person for the interview, and did a Skype interview with one butch who was staying outside of Korea at that time. In addition to that, 2 butch lesbians who are my friends shared their stories for the research. In the end, a total of 14 interviews were conducted. I stayed in Korea in April and June 2018 with the purpose of doing interviews and gathering additional data. All of the interviews were conducted and transcribed in Korean. Excerpts from the transcribed data included in the thesis were translated from Korean to English by the researcher.

The life stories gathered from the interviews were analyzed using narrative analysis method (Atkinson, 1998; McAdams, 2008). Narrative is defined with variations among researchers and the academic fields it is used in (Sutherland, Breen, & Lewis, 2013). In this research, I follow McAdams (2008), and understand “narrative” as the structure of stories which interviewees tell. The knowledge and assumptions used in the process of constructing stories were taken into account during analysis.

After all, conveying one’s trajectory of how they build a sense of themselves and relevant experiences to other people with language is another way of telling a life story. I chose to analyze the data with narrative analysis method because “the self comes to terms with society through narrative identity” (McAdams, 2008, p. 243). Participants’ stories were analyzed by looking at which moments in their lives were selected to be narrated, who are highlighted as key agents in the stories, and most importantly, what and how they choose to tell the stories to the researcher (Riessman, 2012; Sutherland et al., 2013).

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Now that I have illustrated on the methodologies of data collection and analysis, I will go on to explain the background discussions around homosexuality and LGBT rights in Korea.

1-3 Background Discussions

In this section, I will illustrate the background discussions of homosexuality and LGBT rights in South Korea by looking at the legal aspect of LGBT rights. The cultural and religious context, such as Confucianism, Christianity, and familialism, will also be explained here in relation with the social perceptions of homosexuality in Korea.

After the impeachment of former president Geun-hye Park, campaigns and debates for an early presidential election started in the spring of 2017. Then-candidate Jae-in Moon was considered having the highest possibilities of being the next president, which he actually became. His earlier career as a student activist for Pro-democratic movement in the 70s and 80s, and as a human rights attorney against Korea’s military dictatorship made up his character as a presidential candidate who will finally prioritize human rights over discrimination and economic efficiency. However, when the presidential candidate from a far-right party, Jun-pyo Hong, deliberately brought up homosexuality as an issue in a televised presidential debate and asked Moon about his opinion on the issue, Moon answered that he opposed homosexuality.3 It was the moment where the current status of homosexuality in Korea was so transparently observable. The leading candidate from Democratic Party was able to state in public that he opposed homosexuality, without the fear of being heavily criticized as a homophobe. And indeed, Moon’s approval rating remained the highest for the rest of election. President Moon officially stated that he does not agree with legalizing same-sex marriage and that he also does not agree with establishing the Anti-discrimination Law that is supposed to protect sexual minorities from symbolic and physical violence and discrimination.4

3

This debate was one of the six televised presidential debates, co-hosted and aired by JTBC in 25 April, 2017. See

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-26/south-koreas-presidential-frontrunner-angers-lgbt-activists/8474332 for additional details about the debate.

4_{Retrieved from:}

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Attempts to legislate the Anti-discrimination Law which includes gender identity and sexuality as relevant categories were made in 2007, 2010, and 2018, and confronted fierce opposition from Korean Christian communities (Kwon-Kim & Cho, 2011; Chase, 2012; Youn, 2018). Members of the National Assembly were reluctant to pursue the legislation, and all three attempts foundered. The growing homophobic activism of the Christian organizations in Korea is one of the main reasons why lesbians and gays continue to be perceived as ‘sexual perverts’ and be discriminated against (Youn, 2018).

There are no regulatory laws that prohibit or penalize homosexual acts in Korea, except Article 92-6 of Military Criminal Act which prohibits ‘anal sex’ in the army (Na, Han & Koo, 2014). In 2017, an Army captain was accused for having sexual intercourse with another soldier in the barracks. Suspicions were brought up that it was a result of a bigger undercover investigation directed by the military to identify gays in the army.5 In addition, same-sex marriage or any kind of civil partnership between people of same sex is not legalized in Korea at the moment (June 2018).

The year 1996 was when three lesbian activists, Hae-sung Jeon, Hae-sol Lee, and Eun-ha Kim came out to public claiming their sexual identity as ‘lesbian’ for the first time in Korean history (Kki-ri-kki-ri, 2004). Lesbian and gay rights movements in Korea proliferated with the popularization of PC communication services in the 1990s and the development of Internet which followed after (Kwon-Kim & Cho, 2011; Kki-ri-kki-ri, 2004; Chase, 2012). Despite the strong and loud aversion from Christian homophobic groups, Seoul Queer Culture Festival (SQCF), which includes the pride parade and queer film festival, has been held annually since 2000.6 Pride festivals are also continuously starting to take place in other Korean cities, such as Busan, Daegu, Jeonju, Incheon, and Jejudo.7

5_{Retrieved from:}_{https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/11/asia/south-korea-lgbt-military/index.html} 6_{http://sqcf.org/}

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Subject, narrative, gender, homosexuality, lesbian, butch. These are all important concepts for this research. However, the definitions of each terms are ambivalent (Sutherland et al., 2013; Padgug, 2007). Moreover, the analysis depends on how the researcher understands such key concepts (Riessman, 2005; Cass, 1984). Which is why I allocate this section to make clear how I understand the key concepts in regard to my research topic.

I, as a Korean student currently studying sociology in the Netherlands, experience a dilemma when I try to use the words ‘homosexuality’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘butch’ during research, especially in this case because my research subjects are Korean people but my intended readers are not. Although these ‘foreign’ terms are now very much used in Korea, they are also ‘localized’ in meanings and exist in a different socio-linguistic-cultural context from that of the West (Jackson, 2001). For example, Australian researcher Peter A. Jackson asserts that the words, some local and some coming from the West, used for categorization of female and male homosexuals primarily carry implications of gender-blending over sexual images (2001). However, as far as I have searched, no studies have been published on the Korean history of queer terminologies and their use, neither of the ‘imported’ nor the ‘local’. Which is why I hesitate operationalizing homosexuality, lesbian and butch simply in accordance with their Western definitions. If so, I may fail to capture a specific Korean usage of the concepts. Therefore, I will make use of the Western-oriented sexual identities in this study, but leave space for the Korean context and adaptation of the terms to intervene during analysis.

The term ‘identity’ is used to indicate a person’s pronouncement on the feeling of connection and membership to certain social categories (Jenness, 2002). Likewise, identity is often used in relation to gender and sexuality as gender identity or sexual identity to express one’s association with certain gender or sexuality. According to American sociologist Valerie Jenness, conducting female homoerotic/sexual acts is different from self-identifying with the social category for female homosexual persons: lesbian (2002). That is to say, “a ‘doing’ is not a ‘being’” (2002: 65). Jenness therefore puts emphasis on the significance of self-identification and explores how the change of categorical meaning, in her case ‘lesbian’, influences the self-identifying process. I agree with Jenness that self-identification with social category is a critical

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aspect of subject formation, and that is why my interview participants will be women who self-identify as butch. However, I would argue that the construction of a subject is not only in the realm of identification but is realized through the interplay of both ‘doings’ and ‘beings’. The performativity of one’s gender and sexuality must be taken into account along with the aspect of identification as a part of subject forming process (Butler, 1997; 2011a; 2011b).

What I also aim with this research is to make an attempt to understanding the performativity of butchness. By saying “performativity”, I refer to how American philosopher Judith Butler (2011b) conceptualized the performative aspect of gender as a constant negotiation between the social and the subject, opposed to a static and essentialist point of view on it. That is to say, I would like to focus on how the research participants carry their butchness out in a series of repetitive actions. It is an attempt to understand butch as a gender rather than a mere lesbian label.

I was inspired by Butler’s book Senses of the Subject (2015) with the idea of looking at “subject formation” of butch women, and also how I shall look at it. In the Introduction, she disagrees to viewing subject formation as a one-way causal relation. That is to say, she refuses the idea that the “I” is solely constructed by regulatory power, such as gender norms, which exists before the “I” comes into the social world. Instead, Butler asserts that “The task is to think of being acted on and acting as simultaneous, and not only as a sequence” (2015: 6). What I take from Butler’s argument is that when studying subject formation, it is important to identify the power structures and their mechanisms, but that is not enough. The key is to capture the moment of concurrent interplay between the structure and the subject-to-be, and look at how the narrator makes sense of that.

When I say I will look at the “experience” of butches, I refer to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s understanding of the concept. According to Foucault, experience is “the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture” (1984/1990: 4), and at a particular time, I would add. Thus, combining it with Butler’s view on subject formation, I will aim at capturing the simultaneous interrelations between knowledge, normativity and butch women’s subjectivity in current Korea.

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Operationalization of key concepts and an illustration of theoretical framework of this research have been explained. Now I will continue to present an overview of the remaining chapters of the thesis in the next section.

1-5 Overview of the Thesis

So far, I have introduced the research questions and the importance of finding answers to them. I have also provided the readers with a brief account of the Korean context on sexual minorities, focusing on the human rights aspect. The operationalization of the key concepts used in this research and the theoretical framework has also been presented in the previous section.

In the second chapter, I will elaborate on the Korean stories of female homosexuality and butches before the introduction of Western oriented LGBT identities. Here, I will explore

existing literature on female homosexuality and homoromance through “reparative reading”. In addition, I will also look into studies on the Korean all-female cast opera, Yeo-seong Guk-geuk, to understand how female homosexuality and butchness could have existed in Korea in pre-LGBT days. With this chapter, I will answer the second subquestion: How and where can we find the butches in Korean history?

In the third chapter, I will present findings from the butch interviews about the

understanding of butchness and its working definition in current Korea. Reoccurring themes and contradictory attitudes from the interview will be pinpointed in order to answer my second set of sub-questions on butchness and the subject formation process.

In the fourth chapter, I will elaborate on the stories of living as butch women: their love, sex and work. The precariousness of pursuing a visible queer life as a female-born individual will be illustrated here, drawn upon the stories of my interviewees. On the other hand, the fun and excitement of living a butch life that was also detectable from the interviews will be talked about in this chapter.

In the fifth chapter, I will reflect upon the findings from Chapter 2, 3 and 4, to integrate them into an overall analysis on the lives of butch women in Korea.

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In the sixth chapter, I will first provide a brief summary of the research, from its

intentions to its main findings. The research questions which were stated in the first chapter will be answered. After that, recommendations for further research will be made along with

reflections on the research experience.

Chapter 2: What Has Been Said and What Has Not Been Said?

2-1 Introduction

Like many other Asian societies, homosexuality is often seen as a foreign ‘epidemic’, especially a Western-originating one, in Korea (REFERENCE). While the terms Korean people use nowadays to refer to sexual preferences and sexual identities are indeed mostly adopted from English, this does not mean that homosexual acts did not exist before the Western terms were introduced to Korea. Descriptions of homosexual behaviors between women and those of men can be found in the recorded history of ancient Korean dynasties (Kim & Hahn, 2006).

In this chapter, I will share the glimpses of female homosexuality and butch lesbians in Korean history, and explore how women who may have been butch lesbians are being studied.

2-2 ‘Heroine Novels’ of Chosun Dynasty

Confucianism has been functioning as a fundamental value system in Korea since Chosun Dynasty, and to this day the Confucianist heritage still remains deeply in Korean culture (Kwon-Kim & Cho, 2011). The Confucianist idea on sex/gender is that women and men are designated to play different roles in the world by nature, in harmony with each other. Women are symbolized as the Earth, the Moon, the Yin (meaning negativity and lunar in Chinese) while men are symbolized as the sky, the Sun, the Yang (meaning positivity and solar in Chinese) (Fang & Faure, 2011). Along with the heteronormative Yin-Yang theory, a strict line is made between the private sphere and the public. Women were confined to private domain and hardly allowed to be involved in public affairs, which eventually justified the importance and necessity of the patriarch.

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It is surprising, but also seems logical, that stories of heroic women some of who disguised as men and made great achievements were written during the Confucianist Chosun Dynasty. Remaining records suggest that ‘heroine novel’ genre started to appear in Korea around late 17th century (Jeong, 2012). The female protagonist would dress in men’s attire and serve the army during wartime or work for the King and the country. Born with extraordinary talents but unfortunately in a woman’s body, the women make great achievements as men. After the triumph, she eventually returns to living as a ‘normal’ woman, married to a man.

<Bang-han-nim-jeon>, a story that is known to be written in the late 19th century, bears a significant difference from other heroine novels (Kim, 2008). The female protagonist, Han-nim Bang, chooses to live as a man, and becomes a government official. What makes this story distinctive from other heroine novels is that she marries another woman, bing Yang. Hye-bing realized early in her life that marrying a man meant being subordinated to him, and sought a way out of it. When her father arranged his daughter’s marriage with Han-nim, who was a competent young ‘man’, Han-nim confessed to bing that he was actually a woman. Hye-bing considered it as a chance to escape patriarchy, and married Han-nim. They got married as a heterosexual couple from an outsider’s view but a homosexual couple in reality.

In the novel, Han-nim and Hye-bing’s relationship is described as ji-gi, an appreciative friendship. Readers cannot find descriptions of sexual intimacy between the two women in the novel. There is also no implication that either Han-nim or Hye-bing are sexually attracted to women in general, so to consider them as lesbians may be inaccurate. However, Korean literature researcher Kyung-Mi Kim suggests that female homosexual relationships were likely to be framed as decent and spiritual friendship in medieval Korean novels (2008). Thus, it leaves possibilities that the two female protagonists’ relationship may have implications of lesbianism.

I have introduced the female heroine novels of medieval Korea and an exemplary butch-like figure from one of the novels. In the next section, I will explain how butches were seen as perverts during the Japanese colonial regime in Korea.

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2-3 Butches as Perverts in Japanese Colonial Regime (1900-40)

Cha (2009) analyzes discourses around sexual behaviors that were seen as ‘bentai’ in newspaper and magazine articles published between 1920 and 1939, a period when Korea was colonized by Japan.8 The 1920s was also a transitional period when Korean society went through an epistemic and cultural change from a Confucianist society to a modern one. The excessive influence of Confucianism, which considered sex as a private issue and prohibited discussing it in the public sphere, started to be displaced by the idea that sex/uality can be a public issue and that people should be well-educated about sex to make a disciplined society. It was also a transition from viewing sex as somewhat a ritual to an object that can be studied by science. Of course, at that time science generally meant natural science, such as biology and medical science, not really social science.

While crossdressing behaviors of men were considered pathologic, those of women were not viewed as ‘abnormal’ identification with the opposite sex (Cha, 2009:54). In her study, Cha especially puts her focus on how discourses on female homosexuality are formed in line with a heteronormative order. According to Cha, intimate relationships between women were not considered deeply problematic. Unlike the homosexual relationship between men, which tended to be oversexualized and pathologized, female homosexuality was ‘carefully desexualized’ and excused as an unintended result of the absence of man (Cha, 2009:59).

Intellectuals of the 1920s, men of course, asserted that women and men are biologically born with different sexual attitudes. The idea was that while women had the attribute of an ova, patient and awaiting, men were given an active characteristic by nature. That is to say, sexual difference theory was widely promoted to the public by mass media in the beginning of 1920s in Korea. Then, were there any articles about masculine women who had homosexual relationship with women in the 20s and 30s, who might be called butch these days? If so, how were these ‘unwomanly’ lives understood in the given context where the idea that women were born to be feminine was prevalent?

8_{‘Bentai’ (變態) is a Japanese word for pervert/perverse. It is also a Korean language that is used to indicate the}

same meaning, but in Korean ‘bentai’ is pronounced as byeon-tae. Cha uses the Japanese word because her study is about the perverse acts during Japanese colonial regime.

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Cha explains that she could easily discover a newspaper article series that covers the lives of women who lived the social life as men, worked in so-called ‘real man’s’ jobs, and had wife and kids (2009:54). She argues that the media used two types of ‘strategies’ to solve the puzzling story. First, emphasizing the wife’s testimony of not noticing the ‘biological truth’ of her husband. Second, carefully eliminating the homosexual implication by representing the women’s relationship as being closer to a friendship.

Now that we have looked at the Japanese colonial regime, I will move on to introducing the Korean all-female opera which became huge right after Korean War, and present the butches of the theatre troupes.

2-4 Korean All-Female Opera: Yeo-seong Guk-geuk

Yeo-seong Guk-geuk is a genre of Korean opera in which all of the cast is female (Back, 2000). It started to appear before Korean War (1950) and gained nationwide popularity after the war. The speed of its growth, both the genre itself and its popularity, was unusually rapid (Jeon, 2014). Records from the seong Guk-geuk Association show that during the ‘golden age’ of Yeo-seong Guk-geuk a total of 16 theatre groups existed and the number of plays that were on stage was around 180 (Kim, 2017).

Then how popular was the women’s opera? Korean theatre critic Min-yeong Yu writes that it is not wrong to call the 1950s ‘the time of Yeo-seong Guk-geuk’ (2001:81). The all-female play was so much favored by people that even the traditional Korean opera ‘Pan-so-ri’ and Hollywood movies had to give away their audience to the newborn theatrical genre when their show times overlapped (Jeon, 2014). It is here, in the Yeo-seong Guk-geuk scene, where I think I can find people who could have been butches in Korea during the 1950s.

Every role in the female opera was played by female actors regardless of the character’s gender. The male role-playing of female actors attracted many things: attention of the public, passionate affection from fangirls, and prospective male role-playing actresses (Kim, 2010).

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A former actress in one of all-female theater groups described in an interview how her sister, who was also an actress in the same theater group, was involved in an affair with a colleague (Kim, 2010:114). The affair took place in the most famous Yeo-seong Guk-geuk troupe, Lim-Chun-Aeng Troupe. An actress (J) has been outwardly expressing her feelings to another actress named Kyung-soo Kim (K) who was one of the most beloved male role-playing actress in the 1950s. It was a unilateral crush but was considered problematic by the head of the troupe, Chun-aeng Lim. She stripped K’s clothes off in front of the whole troupe and asked J, “Look! Is she a man? No, right?” (Kim, 2010:114). However, K’s sister reminisced that even such humiliation did not wither the one-sided love, and that K eventually went to bed with J every night ‘out of pity’ (Kim, 2010:114). What happened in the room between the two actresses is unknown, but would it be accurate to understand their behavior as ‘homosexual’ or ‘homoerotic’? Kim (2010) coins the term ‘homointimacy’ to encompass the emotional part of same-sex relationships in Korea during the 1950s, a time in which the Western concepts and theories of sexuality may not be able to fully explain. Still, the stories of former actresses are romantic enough to assume the existence of butches in the all-female opera troupes.

In this section, I articulated on the Korean all-female opera which was a big hit during the 1960s, especially among women audience. Anecdotes of ‘homointimate’ affairs between the actresses were also presented here. In the next section, I will present the auto-ethnography of a prominent Korean Butch Lesbian activist.

2-5 The “I” Story of Modern Korean Butch Lesbian

Despite the neglect in queer studies of the conspicuous topic, Korean lesbian activist Chae-yun Han has written an article on ‘female masculinity’, especially engaging butch lesbians into the discussion (2017). Being a butch lesbian herself, Han starts her chapter with an auto-ethnographical introduction. She describes how women in the women’s toilet are startled when she enters the space, and how Han’s presence is accepted when they hear her voice. Certain traits like having a short hair and not wearing makeup on the face somehow present her as a man to other people, while her high-pitched voice confirms her femaleness.

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Moreover, Han explains how butches are misinterpreted in a society where heterosexuality is the norm. According to her, butches are imagined as either ‘immature’ women who have not yet attained the right skills to be a ‘proper’ woman, or as women who admire men so much that they mimic masculinity. Han exposes the heteronormative ideology behind such views on butch women, and she reconfirms the connection between heteronormativity and dichotomous gender system.

Han goes further into analyzing the masculinities of butch lesbians and transgender men. She argues that while transgender men aim at being recognized as a ‘normal’ man by the society, butch women seek acknowledgement of their masculinity from other women. According to Han, “masculinity of butch women goes through the process of reviewing current masculinity with women’s taste and preference” (2017: 199, trans. HJK).

Han’s article introduces several perspectives on lesbian masculinity and heteronormativity that are inspiring for a further study. However, none of her assertions are backed up by empirical data other than brief auto-ethnographical recalls in the article. The absence of supportive research makes her argument seem feeble, which further stimulates me to research on the lives of butch women.

In the upcoming chapter, I will articulate the moments of simultaneous interrelations between knowledge, normativity and butch women’s subjectivity, which I could capture during the interviews.

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Chapter 3: The Butch Subject Formation

With the aim of finding a way to listen to the stories of becoming butch and living as a butch in Korea, I conducted in-depth interviews with 14 self-identified Korean butches.9 All of the interviewees were in their mid-twenties, except one participant who was in her thirties.

The interviews were semi-structured, meaning that an interview guide with essential questions was prepared beforehand the actual interviews. The interview guide contained five themes: understanding of butch/ness, gender norms, homophobia and butchphobia, sexual practices, and their own body. Under each themes, a set of key questions were listed, such as ‘How did you first learn about butch?’ or ‘How do you relate with your female-born body?’ The interview guide helped keep consistency while carrying out 14 interviews.

In the following sections, I will present the participants’ stories of becoming butch by revisiting the anecdotes with three key aspects of experience: knowledge, normativity and subjectivity. The three factors coordinate concurrently in real life and cannot be separated one by one, strictly speaking. However, in order to capture the interactive work of knowledge, normativity and subjectivity, it was necessary to artificially distinguish them. The coordination of the three factors in the butch subject formation process will be further discussed in Chapter 5. In addition to that, the participants’ experiences of body dysphoria will be presented.

3-2 Knowledge: Learning About Lesbian and Butch

One needs to have a sense of what ‘something’ is to decide whether one is or wants to be ‘something’. Butch is the something in this case. Lesbian and butch are not words one can easily come across in school textbooks or television, especially if you are living in Korea. Then how do soon-to-be butches acquire this queer knowledge, both the terminology itself and the meaning? I asked research participants to recall how they first learned about lesbian and butch.

9_{Among the participants, one person described her sexuality as bisexual, and thus, the participant group is not called}

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A majority of the participants answered that they have picked up butch from the Internet, either while searching the web or in online communities. Some had vivid memories of the first encounter. Others could only share sketches of the first encounter. “There was an Internet community named Chung-Yi-Ca when I was in elementary school.10 I learned the word ‘lesbian’ there, and also learned about butch, femme, and their respective meanings” (Sol) “Probably when I was in elementary school? I don’t know how. I guess from the Internet, but I can’t remember at all how I came to know that word.” (Jihye)

Joohyun was living in Denmark at the time I was doing my research. Due to technical disruptions, we could not connect on Skype so I had to ask her to explain her looks. She depicted herself as a “short-haired person who wears shirts and pants”. Then she added that she is “probably masculine”, although she further commented that she doesn’t “like using that expression”. Her depiction of herself corresponded with her Skype profile picture. Joohyun recalled that she didn’t know about butch or femme until she joined a queer students association in her university. She had girlfriends in high school but it was only after she met a friend in the association who told her that people like her are “called butch” that she became aware of the lesbian labels. In her case, somebody who already had the knowledge made the judgment before she could think for herself.

Tae has had ‘affairs’ with girlfriends during school years but didn’t have the knowledge to intellectualize her experience at that time. When I asked her where she first saw the word ‘butch’, she mentioned Fun Home, an American graphic novel. Fun Home is American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir which was originally published in 2006 in US. Its first Korean version was published in 2008. Tae was around 19 years old when she first read the comic book, which is the age when most Koreans graduate high school and enter another phase of life. It was the time when Tae started to actively search and learn about her sexuality.

“When I first saw ‘butch’ in Fun Home, the comic’s context around that word was similar to what I have been experiencing. So I assumed that this (butch) is how this (me) is called.” (Tae)

10_{Chung-Yi-Ca is an acronym for Chung-so-nyun Yi-ban Café. Chung-so-nyun means adolescent; Yi-ban is a slang}

indicating homosexual persons, derived from the word Il-ban meaning ‘normal’ (Il is the Korean word for the number 1 while Yi means the number 2); and cafes are popular forms of cyber community in Korea.

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Subcultures that are not specifically about lesbian also played a role in some of the participants’ queer learning. Jisu explained that she first came across the term ‘butch’ within male homosexual subculture, BL.

“I was into the boys’ love culture (BL) when I was 20.11

I first saw the word ‘butch’ in BL communities and thought, ‘So butch is the gong (top) and femme is the su (bottom).’ I didn’t care much about the terms because I wasn’t really interested in female homosexual relationships. I was more into BL.” (Jisu)

It is interesting to see how she was first acquainted with gong/su, the Korean terms indicating top/bottom in gay culture, then related butch/femme with the gay terms when she was making sense of the lesbian labels. Similar to Jisu, some girls find their way into lesbian culture and community via male homosexual subculture, such as BL or fanfics. Fan fiction, also known as fanfic, is another type of subculture in which fans create fictional stories with the plot lines or characters of the original source text (Thomas, 2011). While fan fictions that are studied in the West mostly stem from novel series like the Harry Potter series, fan-fic refers to imaginative homosexual stories of K-pop celebrities written by teenagers in Korea (Kim & Kim, 2004). The fanfic culture in Korea, which I too have been a part of as a reader, is biased to male homosexuality while the vast majority of the creator and the consumer are women whose age varies from teen to thirties (Ryu, 2008).

All the interviewees spoke as if there is a consensus about the definition of butch: a woman-loving-woman who is comparatively more masculine than femme. However, they also wanted to me to know that they were aware of the fact that the consensus was a false one. Some of the interviewees were not fitting in the stereotype themselves, and even if the interviewee herself was somewhat stereotypical, she would mention kin-meo-bu or on-tek-bu-chi sometime during the interview.12 It was clear that the definition of butch has been expanding, turning ambiguous. Despite the obscurity, ‘dominance’ was the keyword that came out repeatedly when

11_{Boys’ love, also known as BL or yaoi, is a comic genre originating from Japan. Its main theme is the romantic and}

sexual ‘love’ between ‘boys’.

12_{Kin-meo-bu is short for kin-meo-ri-bu-chi which means butch with long hair. On-tek-bu-chi means butch who}

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I asked the interviewees to share their own definitions of butch. The inclination towards showing dominant behavior in relationships was the unchangeable core of butchness.

Now that I have looked into how the research participants have obtained knowledge on female homosexuality and butch, I will proceed to examine the normative aspect of the interviewees’ stories.

3-3 Normativity: Butch Identification as Entrance Ticket to Lesbian Community

Butch women indeed counter certain gender norms by presenting oneself as not feminine and not loving men in a society that is heteronormative. However, they are still subject to different kinds of norms.

Mina recalls the first time she was joining an online lesbian club. There was a ticking box that had three options: butch, femme, and jeon-cheon.13 She hadn’t identified yet as a butch at that time so she chose the third option. But she remembers that there was a tacit pressure implicitly forcing her to decide what her ‘real’ label is. Her choice, which was neither butch nor femme, was considered as a standby before realizing what she actually is. It was not easy for Mina to feel a full sense of belonging in the community with the third label. “I had no choice but to identify as either butch or femme. If such culture didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have identified as butch.” (Mina) Another participant also said that “it’s rather ‘not being femme’ than identifying specifically as butch.” (Yeri) She did not express being uncomfortable with adding labels on herself. However, the normative aspect of butch identification was revealed when she said, “But it doesn’t feel right to say ‘I don’t identify with anything’, so I’m butch for convenience, I guess?” (Yeri)

Some appropriated the lesbian subcategory not only to obtain membership in the community but also to find the right partners easily.

13

Jeon-cheon is short for jeon-cheon-hu, which means someone who can be anything. Mu-seong-hyang, meaning someone who doesn’t apply any labels, is also frequently used in Korea as the third lesbian label along with jeon-cheon.

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It was impossible for me to recognize Bora as a research participant when she walked into the café where we were supposed to meet. She had breast-long hair and was wearing skinny jeans. Her eyes were sparkling from the shimmer eyeshadow she put on, and her lips were tinted red. In short, she looked very ‘feminine’. When asked why she identifies as butch, her answer was:

“I’ve met women of all kinds; butch, femme, neither of both. But of the people I’ve met, I couldn’t get along well with women who said that they were butch or who didn’t identify with any subcategories. There is this ‘butch couples up with femme’ thing, you know. So because I find femmes as better partners, I identify as butch. Just to make things easy for me.” (Bora)

As clearly stated in Bora’s reply, the pseudo-heteronormativity that pervades in lesbian culture played a crucial role in her identifying as a butch.

Another type of normativity that could be observed in the interviews was of course the butch stereotype. Butches are under double standards. People, including some lesbians, think butches are too masculine because the attire, attitude and bodily postures of a stereotypical butch resemble those of men. At the same time, butches are required to be butchy enough in order to be really butch or else their butchness is called into question. Just like what Nana shared with derision, butches concurrently hear “Why is your chest so flat?” and “Your boobs are rather big for a butch.”

Suah introduced herself as a butch and a bisexual. With her long hair and flared skirt, her appearance was far from a typical butch look.

“I don’t like cutting my hair short. And I wear skirts often, like today. I mean, I wear skirts! Then am I not corresponding to the butch figure that people expect? Wow, it must be difficult for me to meet someone!” (Suah)

Suah had a sense of what people usually expect from a butch, and knows that she does not fit in the stereotype. The discordance between the stereotype and herself brings apprehension to Suah regarding meeting other people.

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Likewise, MinMin recalls that when she was a teenager, “they (butches) had to constantly verify their butchness. Sometimes they were taunted like when men are shamed for being feminine. ‘Are you a femme?’” (MinMin) A work of normativity that induces butches to voluntarily obey the norm, as well as a modified form of misogyny that conspires with it, can be picked up here.

The normativity in the participants’ subject formation process has been clarified in this section. Throughout the upcoming section, the subjective responses of the butches to the knowledges and norms will be laid out.

3-4 Subjectivity: Accept, Deny or How Else?

The butches whom I have interviewed share a commonality in that they identify as butch. But they were also very different from the appearances to sexual preferences. The reason for such variety of butches can be so many, and they could be analyzed psychologically or sociologically. However, instead of trying to clarify what might have possibly caused the wide variations, I would like to focus on the subjectivity of the research participants. Their subjectively different attitudes towards the knowledge and normativity which have been presented in the sections above and the diverse actions that follow the attitudes create variations among butches. Then how do these subjectivities look like?

Yeri was someone who had a clear idea of what kind of butch she wants to be. Borrowing her own words, “Manner maketh man, and manner also maketh butch.” She also explained that she aspires to be seen like a gentleman, both in her looks and attitude. When I asked her how much she thinks of herself as a butch she replied,

“You need to have energy to show manners, you know. I’m too tired these days that I’m losing my butch attitude. So I sometimes ask myself, ‘Can I call myself a butch if I don’t have the attitude? Where’s my conscience?’” (Yeri)

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The ideal type of butch which Yeri desired to be remained untouched and unquestioned. Instead of modifying the definition of butch to her convenience, she was questioning herself whether she met the criteria or not in order to be considered a butch.

In contrast to Yeri’s story, Bora was able to navigate her way through the discrepancy between the normative butchness and herself. After learning about lesbian and butch/femme during middle school, Bora became more serious about thinking of herself as a butch lesbian. She cut her hair short and stopped wearing makeup when she went to high school. The biggest alteration was choosing to wear boys’ uniform pants instead of girls’ skirt.

“[I wondered] ‘Is it okay for me to have long hair? I’m a butch.’ … That was my period of transition. I was obsessed with ‘a butch should be like this’ kind of thought. So I had my hair short during the whole high school years. But I didn’t like that. I didn’t like to not wear makeup. But I just lived like that because I thought that is what a butch should be.” (Bora)

Around graduation, Bora had ‘grown up’ enough to think differently. She was still certain of her being a butch, but she no longer tried to fit herself into the box. She rather expanded the boundaries of butchness by thinking ‘I will be myself, and I will still be a butch.’

However, not every interviewee was satisfied with labelling herself as butch. “You know, some people feel comfortable when they can be categorized, while others like me don’t like the complexity of categories. I prefer to escape from being defined.” (Mina)

It seems ironical for a person who voluntarily participated in this research as a self-identified butch to say that she prefers “to escape from being defined.” But the repulsion makes sense after realizing that Mina is the one who described butch/femme labels as “the entrance ticket” to lesbian communities.

MinMin appeared in dark, flowy outfit. She was wearing black strapped sandals on her feet and full makeup on her face. During the interview, she casually pointed out how her exterior is “not something of a butch.” But she did not seem deeply ashamed about it. She somehow seemed transcendent of the constraint of fitting into butch stereotype. Identifying as butch was more than a personal inclination for her. It started as a political act.

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“I was interested in theatre and performance. There is a feminist theatre group named Yeo-sung-goe-mul (Female Monster) and they wanted to do drag shows to break down the gender binary system. So I started doing drag king performances with them. I haven’t adapted any kind of lesbian label before doing drag but I became too devoted in drag performance (laugh) that I started performing butch in my daily life. That led me to identifying as butch.” (MinMin)

Surprisingly, MinMin was one of the few drag kings performing in Korea. Yeri has already mentioned MinMin as her drag king idol. MinMin asked me a question during the interview. “What do you think the difference between drag king and butch are?” I hesitated to answer because it was a difficult question. Min answered her question herself. “I think the difference lies in the existence of political aim. Having the hair short-cut and wearing pants without political reasons but with only ‘personal reasons’, well, I think that can be butch. But performing drag, drag king, has a goal, you know. To counter gender binary system.” (Min)

Now that I’ve went through all three aspects of subject formation, the knowledge, normativity and subjectivity, I will articulate on the research participants’ anecdotes about gender dysphoria with their female body in the next section.

3-5 Experiencing Trouble with Female Body

“Bodies that matter”, Judith Butler titled her book so (1993). Butler asserts that bodies, their very materiality, are the site in which different types of regulatory and normative powers act upon. In other words, bodies are able to achieve meanings and materiality through discourses. By looking at how the butches are relating with their bodies, the discursive powers that shape their bodies can be captured. That is to say, the ways they pose or vocalize, or their feelings and attitudes towards certain body parts are not always simply habitual or coincidental but the consequence of discursive powers.

It is not an easy thing to feel fully satisfied about one’s own body, especially if you are born and raised as a woman. A woman’s body is under constant examination and assessment, an assessment that is also internalized too often, too deeply. Despite the vulnerable position women

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share, butches sometimes experience more dissonance with their body (Eves, 2004). The body trouble that some of the butches experience may not be as much severe as what transgender individuals go through. However, sometimes the borderlines between transgendered persons’ gender dysphoria and butch women’s body-related trouble are not so clear (REFERENCE). In this section, I will first introduce the stories of what some of the interviewees themselves called ‘gender dysphoria’. What are the body parts that are ‘problematic’ to butches? Why are they troubling the butches? And what are the expedients they have found in order to cope with the trouble?

My inquiry was whether the participant has experienced any kind of uncomfortableness with her female-born body or not. It was not hard to assume that breasts and genitals were to be mentioned often when talking about this topic.

“I have never liked my body. I think so. … I hate having noticeable body parts when the wind blows.” (Joohyun)

Joohyun used the adjective ‘noticeable’ to indicate her breasts. It shows that her largest concern lies in her breasts being noticed by other people. She did not want the existence of two mounds on her chest to be visually evident.

Similar attitudes towards breasts, not of others but of them-butch-selves, were recognizable during the research. All of the interviewees who talked about experiences of breast discomfort wanted to have smaller breasts. No one wanted them to be bigger.

“I used to be one of those who bind their breasts. I hated having breasts. … My actual body image is different from what I want it to be. I want to have small breasts.” (Tae)

Some were in rather ‘lucky’ situations with regards to breasts.

“I don’t really have big breasts. My friends would rather tease me for having such a flat chest. I don’t really have any dissatisfaction about my female body.” (Sol)

“I know that some people bind their breasts. I tried it a few times but it was so uncomfortable. I just wear sport bras now. I mean, I don’t really have big breasts and they don’t stand out.” (Somi)

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Sol and Somi did not express overt concerns of their breasts being noticed. However, what they could not hide was the advantageous aspect of originally having small breasts. It only speaks of the same desire: the desire of minimizing or concealing breasts.

For some of the research participants, the body-related gender trouble was maximized when the body was engaged in sexual acts.

“It was difficult to acknowledge my body as mine. It was really, really difficult. … My cognition of myself, my body, and having sex just didn’t link well. The mismatch was a little bit stressful. … Now I feel comfortable because the three things are interlocked.” (Tae) “What was certainly important for me in the course of identifying as butch was the dysphoria. Although I am not a transgender, I felt awkward when I was playing the bottom during sex. My body didn’t feel like mine. So I thought that if butch/femme is about top/bottom then I must be a butch, not a femme.” (Mina)

What Tae and Mina explained to me was a feeling of disconnection between the body and the soul. But where does the discontinuity come from? What does it suggest about butch women’s situation?

For Tae, her “body was always something that was obstructing her thoughts” because her body was not like the imagery body she wanted to have; a muscular body with small breasts. It took her some time to accept her corporeal reality as it is and settle ‘in’ the body as a doer, not ‘outside’ her body as an observer.

On the other hand, different from the participants who were bothered by the breast problem, some of the participants expressed their desire towards having a penis. “I don’t really have a dysphoria. But I’m a bit uncertain about being a cis-gendered person. … I think of myself as genderqueer. … I don’t have dysphoria about my female genitals but I think it will be more comfortable to have a penis. My breasts are not big but I still prefer them to be smaller because I want my body to fit men’s suit better.” (Yeri)

“I think I have never had discontent about my breasts. … I don’t care but I would prefer having a penis. It’s really embarrassing. … I want to have my genitals transitioned if I make a lot of money one day.” (Jisu)

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Women who are ‘masculine’ and sexually desiring other women are wanting to have penis! Is this the evidence which proves that the radical feminists’ critiques were indeed correct? Are the butches really ‘pseudo-males’ who could not suppress or forget the Freudian notion of penis envy and be women (1905)?

In this chapter, I have guided you through the experiences of butch subject formation process of the interviewees. The knowledge, normativity and subjectivity were distinguished for the purpose of breaking down the intricate interactions of the three factors in the course of ‘experiencing’ subject formation. In addition, the corporeal materiality of the butches was also discussed, mainly focusing on the troubles the participants have went through. Now, in the upcoming chapter, I will delineate the daily lives of Korean butch women, their love, pain, joy, work, and social life.

Chapter 4: How Are the Butches Living?

The process of how someone formulates herself as a butch subject has been put on the table in the previous chapter. With the help of Foucault’s understanding of ‘experience’ as the concurrent interaction of knowledge, normativity and subjectivity, I have introduced to you the diverse ways butch women experience subject formation process. However, becoming a butch can be distinguished from living as a butch. Living, the eating, sleeping, loving, hating, mating, working, entertaining, learning, teaching, and so on, is constituted of so many emotions and actions. In this chapter, I will focus on the love, sex and work of the research participants.

Now that I have given an introduction to the fourth chapter, I will show throughout the next section how the interviewees fall in love, maintain the romantic relationships, and fall out of love.

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It is an unwritten rule in the Korean lesbian culture that “butch and femme go together” (Jihye). Of course, women who do not embrace the butch/femme categories and stay as ‘not-categorized’ will snort at the idea, but they too would not deny the fact that such rule exists in the lesbian field. Before hurrying off to identify and criticize the heteronormativity that lies underneath the lesbian version of it, how about looking at just how the lesbian romantic relationships are shaped and colored? With the help of the butch interviewees’ narration of their love stories, we are able to take a look into the reality of the relationship-making culture of young Korean lesbians. Where do lesbians find each other? Are there differences between meeting someone online and offline? How does the butch-femme rule affect the modes of finding and maintaining romantic relationships for the butch interviewees? What other than the aforementioned normativity can be discussed with regards to love relations of butch lesbians?

It was already mentioned in Chapter 3 that butch women sometimes are more inclined to accept the butch label in order to meet femme women, making use of the unwritten rule. It is more “convenient to meet femmes” if one declares herself as butch. On the other hand, Soyun expressed a slightly different attitude towards the butch category when finding partners.

“I’m not really the hard butch type. So it does me no good to actively publicize myself as a butch. … If I appeal myself too much as butch, someone who favors really hard-core butch may be attracted to the word. But I’m not [that kind of butch]. It is better that I describe myself as ‘a butch but not so butchy’ (laugh) for the others to give an accurate estimate.” (Soyun)

Soyun described herself as a “nerdy butch” who seems to be in need of protection instead of dominating over others. The atypical traits of herself as a butch, which she was well aware of, held her back from actively claiming the butch label. Although Soyun did not specifically talk about her preferences of partners, the effect of ‘butch-femme couple’ normativity was observable in other ways:

“I believed that she (a woman Soyun had crush on) will like butches because she looked like a femme. But it turned out that she doesn’t [like butch style]. She said that she likes women who look like herself: femme style. I learned a big lesson.” (Soyun)