Reparation Work and Queer Youth Activism in South Korea

How do communities shaped by structural harms address their social wounds and become political subjects? How is a queer politics of the wounded possible beyond the logics of agony and resentment? This presentation introduces the concept of reparation work to answer these theoretical questions within the context of LGBTQ student activism in contemporary South Korea. Drawing from feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship, I examine how social wounds, stemming from institutionalized homophobia, not only shape queer youth as the wounded but also enable them as political subjects to repair those wounds. Specifically, I explore how queer students transform their wounds into sites of reparation, building reparative communities and envisioning reparative futures through everyday acts like band-aid campaigns and public displays of their faces, alongside more organized efforts to challenge heteronormative campus politics and policies. I argue that, through reparation work, queer youth activists navigate their wounded pasts, challenge the structures of wounding, and envision livable futures as they negotiate changing university environments and the precarious transition to young adulthood. Ultimately, this presentation situates reparation work as a theoretical framework for understanding broader struggles for justice in marginalized communities and calls for greater attention to queer analyses of youth politics in a globalized world.