Since their introduction in the 1990s to address labor shortages, migrant workers in South Korea (hereafter Korea) have become indispensable yet remain marginalized, facing discrimination and lacking legal protections. Despite efforts such as the Employment Permit System, disparities persist, often exacerbated by sociocultural norms that prioritize ethnic homogeneity and the "pure blood" ideology, leading to systemic discrimination and social exclusion. I consider the artwork of contemporary Korean artists who engage with these realities, notably Mixrice, Yuri An, and the AfroAsia Collective. Each foregrounds a different migrant community as a constitutive element of Korean society, illuminating the complexities of migrant life and the struggle for a cohesive identity in Korea. Mixrice's projects focus on community interaction and integration, often in collaboration with Southeast Asian workers. Yuri An probes the fraught identities of the Joseonjok, Chinese nationals of Korean descent. With a community-based multidisciplinary practice, the AfroAsia Collective captures the lives of African migrant workers, bringing attention to their everyday existence and aspirations. Together, the practices of these artists dismantle inherited stereotypes and expose the contested terrain of belonging in a society negotiating demographic transformation. By examining these artistic approaches, I contend that "Koreanness" must be reimagined through the lens of migration, shifting the nation once heralded as a "land of promise" toward a future where plurality and diversity are recognized as the very grounds of its identity.
This article focuses on the work of New York-based artist Rachelle Mozman Solano (b. 1972). In particular it analyzes Mozman Solano's photographic series Casa de mujeres (House of women, 2009-13), in which, with the assistance of her Panamanian mother, the artist reenacts stories of family rivalries based on class and racial difference. The Casa de mujeres series tells ghost stories about the trauma related to complex racial formations on the Panamanian isthmus resulting from colonization and imperialism. The author critically examines Mozman Solano's adoption of methods from auto-ethnography and psychoanalysis in this series and discusses how such methods reframe how we think about family photography in general. Through these staged photographs, the series sheds light on the role of women in reproducing social structures and racial hierarchies. By centering the role of women, especially mothers, Mozman Solano's images suggest that the task of undoing the violence of these pigmentocracies largely remains a family matter. The article concludes by examining the broader implications of the Casa de mujeres series for subjects in the Central American diaspora.
In this essay the author theorizes "dysphoric aesthetics" by moving dysphoria beyond its medical deployment as a pathologizing criteria toward a method for trans ethics and aesthetics. Lancaster proposes that embodied encounters with trans art practices can elicit generative dysphoric experiences. In so doing, they contribute a trans approach to activated spectatorship, which takes seriously how art can cultivate embodied responses that have the capacity to affectively and somatically change us, as well as expand our own capacities for sensitive attunement to others and the world. As exemplary models of dysphoric aesthetics, the installation works of multidisciplinary artists P. Staff (b. 1987) and Ashton S. Phillips (b. 1981) mobilize sites of struggle and disturbance to attend to the difficulties of relational embodiment in the context of exploitative and oppressive biopolitical systems. Staff's and Phillips's work demonstrates that dysphoric aesthetics refuses to deliver some easily liberated version of trans subjectivity in a state of cured completion, or to reveal a trans subject at all; rather, their work materializes methods for working with feeling and sensation that are deeply political. Such work specifically deploys material and conceptual forms of contamination-primarily toxicity and plasticity-to create embodied awareness of the ways we are fundamentally enmeshed with the more-than-human world and conditioned by environmental contaminants. The installations of these artists become sites for exploring social and political harm in an aesthetic realm that won't limit us to those sites, in relation with other species and processes used to expel some from the status of the human. These encounters prompt us to stay with the discomfort to work with and through the unmanageable conditions that make some of us dysphoric.
Here I theorize a phenomenon of contemporary art that I call "zoomorphic feminism." Zoomorphic feminism is a visual and intellectual provocation at the intersection of species and gender and often materializes through transformations or hybrid states between feminized human and nonhuman animal bodies. The visual and material tactics of zoomorphic feminism include: makeup, prosthetics, and costume; collage; and more traditional image- and object-making like painting and sculpture. Such hybrid bodies can recall the global history of art's many images of deities, and mythological and folkloric creatures that share human and nonhuman body parts, or the ability to pass between different kinds of bodies. However, the points of reference for zoomorphic feminist artworks are often equally from recent pop culture such as children's cartoons, sci-fi and horror cinema, the furry fandom, and transspecies kink cultures. Zoomorphic feminist art treats the human body as a site of metamorphosis and possibility while highlighting, critiquing, and exploring the ways that species, gender, race, and other categories of being and identity relate. The references and arguments that such artworks enact participate in wider posthumanist thought currents regarding the enmeshment of species, gender, and race as ways of marking, thinking, and disrupting difference and power. I analyze works by the artists Julie Buffalohead, Juliana Huxtable, Wangechi Mutu, Agnes Questionmark, and Marianna Simnett as exemplary of zoomorphic feminism.
I am honored and delighted to be taking up the directorship of the Program in Medieval Studies in the new year. I want to thank Anne D. Hedeman for her dynamism and collegiality as director during the last three years. The programs of events for each year now archived on our website (www.medieval.uiuc.edu) reflect the richly varied interests of our members and a stream of distinguished visitors from around the world. Anne D. was key to the establishment of the program. It was she who drew together a bunch of us to compete for one of the seven exchanges that Illinois approved with France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1998. (The Program in Medieval Studies was the only humanities group to be funded. Our exchange was so successful that it was renewed for two years beyond the initial three.) This collaboration inspired us to work together to apply for official recognition as a Program with a graduate certificate. Then Stephen Jaeger came to be our first director in 2001, and in his wake new colleagues joined us in Classics, History, English, and Architecture. Anne D. has sustained the momentum generated six years ago. I owe a great debt to Charlie Wright for generously agreeing to act as director during the fall semester. He has accomplished an amazing amount for the program, organizing a high profile international conference for next fall on “Translating the Middle Ages,” drafting bylaws, initiating a proposal for an undergraduate minor in medieval studies—all of this besides teaching two courses and editing JEGP! Going forward, we hope to develop our undergraduate course offerings, build links with other programs on campus, strengthen exchange programs, and further increase our visibility on the national and international scenes. I look forward to continuing the work that Anne D. and Charlie have done.
