Essays by Jisung Catherine Kim

Coreanx diaspora: What is Coreanx?

Coreanx Diaspora: What is Coreanx?

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:

binary male or female,

heteronormative,

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

masculinist/patriarchal default,

excluding non-binary and non-conforming folks,

presuming and naturalizing the “Coloniality of Power,”

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

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

“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 and often taken-for-granted systems of white-supremacist POWER(s), Eurocentric KNOWLEDGE(s), and the AGENCY of pre-colonial and decolonial cultures. Using these terms situates embodied beings in the 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…

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

inclusive of non-binary and non-conforming folks,

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 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,

X can stand for problematizing Japanese, American, and 1492-European COLONIALITIES of POWER,

X can stand for the FEMINIST, QUEER, DECOLONIAL intellectual work done by Latinx, creating MUTUAL AID power and backing each other up,

X can stand for our polyamorous, polymorphously perverse IGNORANT LOVE of all that is ancestrally “Korea”! Korea/Corea/Birth-land is—a site of mystery, secrets, dislocation, and cultural extinctions…

X is transmodern; just as “transgender” describes folks in the interstices of gender nonconformity, we transmoderns are in the invisible nooks and layered onion skins of “cultural” nonconformity,

Coreanx is obviously made up. It flaunts its nonconformity to American imperial, Japanese colonial, and Korean masculinist/nationalist territorial ownership of “Koreanness.” Coreanx destabilizes this identity-category with this out-of-the-box re-articulation and re-appropriation,

Coreanx is for Peace on the peninsula. “Corea” resonates with that time before the peninsula was divided and nation-states were created to satisfy the needs of empires, not the people.

I see diasporic folks as people who have been displaced from their so-called ‘origins.’ Your origin has disappeared, has gone missing, has been systematically bombed out of you in a literal and figurative way. Dude—that’s what colonization is: exterminating your culture so you are “extinct” from that sociological formation. If you are a diasporic subject, I have a feeling you’ve got some buried extinction in you that needs excavation.

Nevertheless, you are alive because of your ancestors. Your ancestors live on in you, as @thichnhathanh has said. Therefore, colonization by various empires is incomplete.

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, Korean as a language is gender-neutral, I have attempted to make space for a new Word-as-concept. This word 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, colonial language-as-epistemology.

bell hooks: tribute to the power of one & oneness

Dear bell, dear Ms. hooks, dear beloved Mother of Movements,

You know you’re my resident goddess. You’ve been in and on my heart, mind, soul for my personal eternity, even though I’ve broken up with you a few times, as any mother-daughter, lover-beloved, & subject-object relationship may experience…

War, Women and Culture: a list of artifacts for learning

Dedicated to Gen Z.

Some works of Art to consider in your quest to learn, grow, change the world!

Love you so much!!

-From a Gen X