Part of: Queer Media
Authors: Abigail Cowan, Jung In Lee
Abstract:
Despite growing public visibility and scholarly attention to trans lives in South Korea, existing research has focused largely on structural conditions and social challenges, including access to medical care (Lee et al., 2015; Son et al., 2017), social exclusion (Kim, 2020), and parents’ responses to coming out (Kim & Yang, 2024). This work documents institutional barriers and familial dynamics; yet, with few exceptions (Lim, 2025), research overlooks the discursive and temporal construction of trans people across media. Neglecting media as a site of analysis risks obscuring how identity is negotiated across platforms through interactions among trans people, media hosts, and online audiences. As media representations adopt increasingly progressive tones, the politics of inclusion and exclusion position trans belonging as a conditional formation constrained by heteropatriarchal ideologies rather than a stable or readily accessible category.
One way trans identities are negotiated through media is through chrononormativity. As theorized by Elizabeth Freeman, chrononormativity refers to the ways dominant temporal norms discipline bodies into socially productive and legible rhythms. Within this framework, what Jack Halberstam terms “straight time” can be understood as a specific temporal regime that organizes life trajectories around heteronormative milestones, such as marriage and reproduction, which function as markers of familial and social success. Dean Spade’s concept of transnormativity further explains how trans lives become legitimated within legal and administrative systems only when aligned with normative expectations of gender coherence, medical transition, and social integration. These frameworks extend beyond formal institutions into mediated contexts, where trans identities are rendered intelligible through their alignment with, or deviation from, these temporal and normative expectations (Zimman, 2019).
Yet, these frameworks remain limited in accounting for how trans identities are not confined to individual self-articulations but are continually negotiated through others across time, particularly within mediated contexts. This study addresses constructions of trans (dis)belonging across linked media events by analyzing two episodes on Ask Us Anything Fortune Teller, a popular advice-giving TV show, and corresponding YouTube comments. Using Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event (Wortham & Reyes, 2020) in dialogue with trans studies, the analysis traces how temporal meanings are produced, taken up, and intensified through recontextualization across these interconnected events.
This study proposes temporal governance as a framework for understanding how trans identities become intelligible through sequencing, evaluation, and circulation of temporal norms across relational, institutional, and affective domains. The findings suggest that South Korean advice-giving television functions as a site of temporal governance; trans lives become legible only when they align with normative timelines of gender coherence, transition, and social integration. These advice-giving programs frame trans lives as conditionally intelligible by sequencing them into a moralized timeline, where belonging is only granted when trans people align with normative trajectories. This framing is then recontextualized through public commentary, which consolidates the media’s temporal framework into a more rigid temporal foreclosure by anchoring gender legitimacy in bioessentialist assumptions. Together, these findings reveal how media functions as a site of temporal governance, producing trans (dis)belonging as a conditional and precarious formation shaped by heteropatriarchal norms.
—
References
Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Duke University Press.
Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York University Press.
Kim, B.-M. (2020). Women’s Place and Feminism- Focus on the Exclusion of Transgender Women -. Journal of Korean Modern Literature, null(71), 83–117. https://doi.org/10.35419/KMLIT.2020..71.003
Kim, H., & Yang, S. (2024). Mother’s Experiences of their Transgender Children’s Coming Out. Korean Journal of Human Ecology, 33(2), 171–185. https://doi.org/10.5934/kjhe.2024.33.2.171
Lee, H., Yoon, J., Kim， Seung-Sup, Park, J., & Lee, H. (2015). Transgender People’s Access to Health Care in Korea. Health and Social Welfare Review, 35(4), 64–94. https://doi.org/10.15709/HSWR.2015.35.4.64
Lim, D. (2025). Platformized Trans/Gender Performativity—The Legibility and Cultural Politics of the Transgender Celebrity Pungja. Study of Humanities, 43, 33–65. https://doi.org/10.31323/SH.2025.06.43.02
Son, I., Lee, H., Park, J., & Kim, S.-S. (2017). Social Stigma and Medical Marginalization in Healthcare Service Among Transgender People in South Korea. Korean Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 155–189. https://doi.org/10.21562/kjs.2017.05.51.2.155
Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of the law. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press.
Wortham, S., & Reyes, A. (2020). Discourse analysis of ethnographic data. In S. Wortham & A. Reyes, Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event (2nd ed., pp. 75–113). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003049708-3
Zimman, L. (2019). Trans self-identification and the language of neoliberal selfhood: Agency, power, and the limits of monologic discourse. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2019(256), 147–175. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2018-2016
