Coreanx Diaspora: What is Coreanx?

This essay explores the radical reimagining of Korean identity through the concept of COREANX. Inspired by Latinx, it challenges colonial narratives, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. I hope this piece sparks reflection, critique, and conversation

What is Coreanx?

Latinx is a term that reappropriates identity and ontology from gendered Spanish and its legacy as colonial linguistic hegemony.

Latinx challenges the Spanish language’s excessive, essentialist pre-determination of identity as:

  1. binary male or female,

  2. heteronormative,

  3. sex and gender as “natural” and not already problematic,

  4. masculinist/patriarchal default,

  5. excluding non-binary and non-conforming folks,

  6. presuming and naturalizing the “Coloniality of Power,”

  7. excluding and erasing INDIGENOUS and BIPOC critique of the “West,” and, very importantly,

  8. reinscribing this term of identity as a SITE of FEMINIST, QUEER resistance.

  9. “X” suggests potentiality, experimentation, new beginnings, and possibilities.

So as signifiers, ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ are not only problematic from the POV of gender and sexuality. They are simultaneously problematic in their COLONIAL reproduction of deep-seated white-supremacist POWER(s), and Eurocentric KNOWLEDGE(s). These words, used and performed repeatedly, rub out and negate the AGENCY of pre-colonial and decolonial cultures. Using these terms situates embodied beings in the boring, biased epistemological framework of Eurocentric Colonial Western Discourse.

For me, in the way Edward Said uprooted Eurocentric thought by truly problematizing the word “Oriental,” LATINX is a revolutionary “word” that is leading to colonial consciousness’s calamity and ruin!!!

So I’m a fan.

With this set of premises in place, let me explain why I use the term COREANX: I want to similarly problematize “Corean” with the connotations of “X.”

COREANX is…

  1. outside normative Western and patriarchal “Korean” assumptions of masculinist default,

  2. inclusive of non-binary and non-conforming folks,

  3. problematizing postcolonial, nationalist conceptions of “pure” “Korean” hogwash found in ROK and DPRK survival strategies against fear of re-colonization by Japan,

    x can stand for…

  4. DIASPORA and help us imagine a new framework of Korean-ness that is detached from the peninsula and its inhabitants who sometimes believe they are superior or more authentically “Korean” than non-peninsula residents,

  5. problematizing Japanese, American, and European COLONIALITIES of POWER,

  6. Feminist, queer, and decolonial Indexicality, rooting Mutual Aid Power to back each other up, within, and without, our lived differences

    x represents:

  7. Polyamorous, polymorphous desire for the “disappeaered ” knowledge schema that is ancestrally “Korean/Corean”

  8. Korea/Corea/Birth-land as a site of grief, mystery, secrets, dislocation, & vanishing

  9. A transmodern way of being, thriving in the tension between capitalist forces and ancestral traditions, reimagining what has been erased and what is still possible—like PEACE

Coreanx is obviously made up—and it knows it. It flaunts its campy, playful nonconformity to American imperial, Japanese colonial, and Korean masculinist/nationalist territorial ownership of “Koreanness.”

The term “Corea” resonates with a time before the peninsula was divided, when nation-states were created to satisfy the needs of Empires, not the people.

Coreanx destabilizes this identity-category with an out-of-the-box, irreverent re-articulation and re-appropriation.

Colonization tries to erase us. Origins are bombed out—literally and figuratively. Our colonizers create a new nation-state that functions as their private property, even though it may appear to be a sovereign nation-state.

We, the diasporic, are survivors. We, the diasporic, don’t know where we are from in a deep, knowing sense. We’ve been displaced by material distance, as well as immaterial and spiritual displacement.

Yet, if you are diasporic, you carry a kind of buried extinction waiting to be excavated. Why? Because your very life force is a gift from your ancestors. You are alive because they were alive.

In every cell of your body, you can recognize the presence of your ancestors,” as Thich Nhat Hanh has said.

In conclusion—some of my favorite words, LOL—I have made the case that COREANX is a necessary invention in our ongoing, collective challenge to Empire’s narratives.

Even though the Korean language is gender-neutral, I have attempted to make space for a new Word. This word, Coreanx, is outside the “Korean language.” It is a new linguistic SIGNIFIER for evoking and invoking all that cannot be contained in heteronormative, white-supremacist, American-centric, patriarchal, colonial language-as-epistemology.

What does Coreanx mean to you?
Tell me, tell me…. dadadadada tell me…
your thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams! Comment here or on my IG page…

To cite this essay:

Kim, Jisung Catherine. Coreanx Diaspora: What Is Coreanx? 2025. Available at: https://www.thefragrantstars.com/coreanx