Junyoung Kim - Orientalism, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture in the U.S.
Junyoung is pursuing a PhD in Korean Studies at the University of Washington. His areas of interest are queerness and masculinity in modern Korea, as impacted by Japanese colonization and American military occupation.
Area of Concentration Courses
Korean 189 - Korean Film Authors
East Asian Languages 181 - East Asian Film: Special Topics in Genre
LGBT 145 - Interpreting the Queer Past: Methods and Problems in the History of Sexuality
Asian American Studies 138 - Asian American Sexualities (UC Santa Barbara)
Feminist Studies 142 - Black Women Filmmakers (UC Santa Barbara)
Thesis
American Orientalism and Speculative Fiction: Examining the Matrix and After Yang
Junyoung’s thesis examined American immigration legislation from the late 19th century up to the 1965 Immigration Act and its impact upon filmic definitions of Asianness as “alien” in America. In particular, he incorporated an analysis of how American hegemonic masculinity was threatened by the immigration of Chinese migrant labor workers and how this threat was pathologized through the speculative fiction genre. Junyoung’s thesis discusses two American speculative fiction films, The Matrix (1999) and After Yang (2021), looking at the degree to which their constructions of otherness and non-humanity are aligned with a notion of Asianness. By putting contemporary speculative fiction work in dialogue with the historical racialization of Asian bodies in America, he hopes to illuminate the connection between ethnonationalism and definitions of the “alien” in fictional media and real life,.
