“Dulled Emotions and Dying Humanity”: The Jjimjilbang (Gay Bathhouse) as a Dark Space in Seoul

Abstract This article examines the discourses surrounding the emergence and growing popularity of Korean-style gay bathhouses known as jjimjilbangs in Seoul. Drawing on two years of field research conducted by the author in 2001–3, as well as follow-up research carried out in the summers up to the present, the author argues that Korean gay men have contradictory experiences of pleasure and abjection within jjimjilbangs. Such contradictory experiences arise not from their inherent depravity—as often depicted within mainstream media—but from the structural conditions of gay life in South Korea’s family-based society, in which homosexuality is considered so shameful for the entire family that “only orphans come out.” Unable to openly show their faces in public, men seek out these “dark spaces” to meet other men for sexual encounters. Unable to overcome these structural conditions, however, the men become trapped in “long tunnels of darkness.” In focusing on jjimjilbangs, this article contributes to the emerging body of literature on Queer Asia, which, in its insistence on the social embeddedness of individuals in the family and other social institutions, is articulating a counter-discourse to the hegemonic Western queer scholarship, based on the liberal notion of the “free” individual.