I present my project Kkotkkotham as a part of the panel “Producing and (Re)Imagining Queer and Trans Potentiality” in SCMS 2023! Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference will be held in Denver, Colorado, from 12th to 15th April. Our panel is numbered A24, and will take place on Wednesday April 12th 9am MDT. This panel is sponsored by Queer and Trans Caucus of SCMS, and my travel expense will partly be covered by Cornell University. 

Abstract: About a century apart, actress Anna May Wong’s screen persona and performance artist Sin Wai Kin’s drag persona share a sense of what I define as Kkotkkotam, an aesthetic of queerly feminine perseverance of East Asian diaspora. Wong’s elegant detachment from the scene of harassment and racial prejudice, and Sin’s use of impassive, stiff and domineering facial expression reorient and queer the narrative of Orientalist femininity. Korean word Kkotkkotam brings two supposedly contrary traits of firmness and frailness together to denote something flexible yet strong, or limp but upright. Such a paradoxical makeup of this term aptly captures a sense of perseverance through a fraught atmosphere while alluding to the elegance and dignity that squarely faces what comes after ‘in spite of.’ Through their performances of impassive facial expression, detached demeanor, these two aesthetic practices of East Asian diaspora demonstrate a feminine way to quietly persevere their dignity with Kkotkkotam. Taking this insight further, I frame Kkotkkotham in relation to Asian American inscrutability (Huang 2022) and Ornamentalism (Cheng 2019) of Asian femininity to eventually establish it as a distinctly East Asian feminine way of envisioning a concrete utopia (Muñoz 2009). Be it cinematic or a scripted speculative fiction, I propose that their performances step aside from the present to stand out of time. Framing them alongside the utopian temporality of Muñozian utopia, I contend that their performances of Kkotkkotham create a rupture within the present where they are demanded and expected to perpetuate Orientalist imagery of feminine docility, silence, and submissiveness.