Jemok eopseum: the repurposing of Tumblr for gay South Korean DIY pornography

ABSTRACT

This article examines how an online community of gay South Korean porn producers, consumers, and distributors used Tumblr to co-construct a porn platform under government censorship of porn. Utilizing assemblage theory, the article traces the cultural and political lines that not only shape Korea’s internet ecology but also prompted gay Korean men to adopt Tumblr as their go-to aggregate porn website. Tumblr offered a space in which gay Korean porn consumers desiring ‘sameness’ could see and hear themselves sexually represented. Ultimately, in examining the specificities of the South Korean context, I also seek to encourage porn studies scholarship to continually consider the cultural, social, geopolitical, and temporal contexts of porn consumption, production, and circulation, so as to avoid the indiscriminate application of the Western perspective to other sociocultural contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Censorship
• community formation
• gay pornography
• South Korea
• Tumblr

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Because of the illegal status of porn production and distribution in South Korea and for the sake of protecting the identities of bloggers (as well as the blogs as a source of porn for consumers), this article uses the initials of the usernames for all Tumblr accounts discussed.

2 The identification of the users as ‘gay’ and ‘male’ in this article is based on statements made by the users themselves on their blogs.

3 In examining Korean Tumblr pages, it appears that there are generally two categories of GIFs being circulated: porn GIFs of commercial Western content and erotic K-pop GIFs. The frequency of their appearance seems to depend on the porn preferences of the blogger and the degree to which they want to showcase explicit material. Thus, if the blogger curates a page of explicit DIY Korean porn, then GIFs appeared infrequently, if at all. Given the lack of discussion of porn GIFs in Korean scholarly circles, more research on this topic is needed.

4 Similar to DVD rooms, Korea has other sexual establishments that masquerade as their non-sexual counterparts, allowing them to blend in with their surroundings; for example, karaoke rooms with ‘host’ or ‘hostess’ workers, adult-oriented PC rooms (internet cafes) and saunas [jjimjilbang] that are more akin to Japanese public baths than the typical cruising bathhouses of the West.

5 Korea, as both a nation-state and the dynasties that preceded it, has a long history of government censorship. Currently, censorship’s continued use is justified through the rhetoric of imminent war with North Korea (as the two countries are technically still at war). For a more detailed history of South Korea’s censorship laws, see Fish (2009).

6 Like Japanese-produced porn, both Happy Eban and Koreamans made use of the mosaic in their productions, thus blurring – both figuratively and literally – the line of obscenity.

7 Although many foreign-based porn sites are normally blocked in South Korea, Pornhub was temporarily accessible at the time of writing but has since been blocked again. This illustrates why researchers should – as Katrien Jacobs (2012) argues – pay attention to the fluctuating boundaries of censorship as it relates to pornography.

8 The usernames ‘korgay31901’, ‘busannamja21’, and ‘gksrnrqkxja30’ are fictitious and are used for illustrative purposes but are informed by actual usernames.

9 For a concise overview of Soranet, see Ock (2019).