PLEASE NOTE: For non-Columbia guests, registration is required to access the Morningside campus 24 hours prior to the event. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 12:00 PM on Friday, October 23rd for campus access.
Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event and subsequently reviewed. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event.
Speaker: Todd A. Henry, Professor of Modern Korean/East Asian History, University of California, San Diego
Moderator: Jungwon Kim, King Sejong Associate Professor of Korean Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
Todd A. Henry is Professor of Modern Korean/East Asian History at the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Program in Transnational Korean Studies. He is the author of Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (UC Press, 2014; Korean translation, 2020) and Profits of Queerness: Media, Biomedicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2026), among other publications. He also edited Queer Korea (Duke University Press, 2020; Korean translation, 2023) and researched and produced the 30-minute film, “Paradise” (2023; Director: Hong Minki), on the history of gay sociality in 1970s–1990s South Korea. He is currently writing a companion volume to Profits of Queerness focused on the 1980s and early 1990s and is directing a feature-length documentary on André Kim (1935–2010), South Korea’s first male fashion designer and an underrecognized pioneer of today’s Korean Wave.
In Profits of Queerness: Media, Biomedicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980(University of Hawai‘i Press, July 2026), Todd A. Henry presents an embodied reassessment of South Korea’s tumultuous era of industrial development. Combining queer and feminist approaches with carceral studies and the medical humanities, this interdisciplinary study reveals how societal conformity to strict norms of gender, sex, and sexuality was foundational to the operation of militarized capitalism in a divided nation. Drawing on an extensive archive of understudied sources—including medical reports, sensationalistic exposés, popular films, and oral histories—Henry argues that the intersection of mass media, sexual medicine, and state policing worked to entrench rigid binaries, such as “male” versus “female” and “healthy” versus “deviant.” He thus shows how a combination of pathologizing doctors, surveilling officers, and everyday vigilantes consolidated a “mass dictatorship” driven by narrowly (re-)productive goals. These darker biopolitical realities have frequently been masked by triumphalist narratives celebrating South Korea’s miraculous postwar recovery. To counter this historical silencing, Henry develops a bottom-up methodology of “shadow reading.” By looking beneath official accounts, he traces how queer and intersex citizens subverted pejorative diagnoses and state surveillance, developing practices of survival and empowerment on the fringes of an illiberal society. More broadly, Profits of Queerness introduces the concept of “hetero-authoritarianism,” offering scholars a critical lens to both understand and challenge similar forms of psychosomatic domination circulating across the world today.
Todd A. Henry will be delivering his book talk on Monday, October 26, 2026 at 12:30 PM.