The Shadow Erotic of the Traveling Kumiho

Sunhay You is the postdoctoral fellow at the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies department. Her research focuses on cultural representations of Asian and Asian American women's erotic sexuality in the wake of US Empire. Drawing from her book project, The Shadow Erotic of Korean and Korean Diasporic Women, this talk examines how the erotic constitutes a force that orients subjects toward life-giving pursuits, which paradoxically invites greater vulnerabilities to death within the postcolonial context of South Korea and the Korean/American diaspora. This confluence between life and death is most evident in representations of Korean women ghosts and non-human figures such as the Kumiho, a mythical nine-tailed fox within Korean folklore. You goes on to argue that these haunting representations of Korean women find new expression in the US to account for the colonial-imperial legacies of US Empire.