Pending: The Temporality of Crisis and Normalcy during COVID-19 in South Korean Queer Activism

Abstract COVID-19 has been dubbed an unprecedented crisis in South Korea and elsewhere. What does this frame explain about disruptions in the political environment during the pandemic? This article explores how Korean queer activists navigated allegedly exceptional times. The pandemic created some procedural changes in the ways in which queer activists organized popular campaigns and participated in policy governance. However, making adjustments and being in a constant state of pending were by no means new to them. Even before the public health crisis, they had to engage with operational anomalies and dysfunctional normalcy. Therefore, the queer experience of COVID-19 calls for an alternative way to consider the temporality of the pandemic beyond a temporary crisis or transitional time. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2019 and 2021, this article argues that the liberal notion of crisis as a temporary rupture obscures the lived experience of queer Koreans and proposes alternative attention to duration as a specific temporality of their political organizing.