Taemin as Mudang: K-Pop, Queerness, and the Logic of Shamanism
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from Mandala of the Buddhist Deity Chakrasamvara, 1490 (LACMA) and concept teaser images from Taemin’s Never Gonna Dance Again: Act 2, 2020.
The Mudang dons a war helmet, placing it over her head; she swings and thrusts a large sword in practiced motions. Her assistants beat their drums to wake the spirits, and the ghosts and gods in attendance open their eyes to spectate. The Mudang twirls and jumps and slashes through animal offerings, leaping and bounding across the ceremonial floor. The music rises and the Janggun Spirit enters her; she becomes a vessel for a god of war. She feels a “whole army standing behind” her and hears them “cheering”; empowered in her trance state, she is swept up by ecstasy. Some of her rituals involve several days of singing, dancing, and divine playacting; her gods lend her their strength in return for the shaman’s skillful entertainment.
The stadium goes dark and pulses with music; an audience of thousands erupts in screams and applause. Taemin descends from the ceiling, blindfolded and hanging upside down with his arms extended outward to form an inverted cross. He sings and dances for hours on end, bounds across the stage, and slides across tilted moving platforms with an effortless grace. He leaps several feet into the air and lands lightly on his feet; the trance induced by crowd and stage overtakes him and fills him with energy. With his relentless footwork and his perfect twirls and turns, he would seem almost superhuman if not for the sweat dripping from his skin.
The Mudang wears military regalia and dances atop a row of knives; the way they do not cut her feet is evidence of the Janggun’s power. The Mudang is “strong and wild,” and the “Janggun feels very masculine” as he moves her body. Her mouth opens and her lips move and the space fills with sound, but it is the booming voice of a Divine General that emerges. [1]
Taemin wears a horned headdress with a long black veil, a suit jacket, and a skirt; he is a mixture of Virgin and Devil, evil and innocence. Taemin dances in the “middle ground, mixing both masculine and feminine movements.” Taemin wears a purple Palomo suit designed around the theme of both Catholic and gay rave interpretations of “Ecstasy”; he adorns himself with hair extensions and wears a Charles Jeffrey Loverboy graphic tee bearing the genderqueer symbol. Taemin stares into the camera and mouths the words “killing me softly,” but it is BoA’s voice that emits from his lips.
“Mudang” is one of several terms used to refer to Korean shamans, who are the bearers of the oldest religious tradition on the Korean peninsula. Korean shamanism is passed down through spiritual lineage, where each spirit mother guides the new initiates fated to work with her into their shared practice. The Mudang’s job is to channel the authority of the gods, and since the majority of mudang are women who can be possessed by spirits of any gender, Korean shamanism has historically been a site of resistance against patriarchal structures. Commenting on the subversive power of shamans, anthropologist Laurel Kendall notes, “Women use possession as a strategy; in trance, they speak the unspeakable.”
Though fewer in number, there are also male shamans, or baksu mudang. Because Korean shamanism is considered a female vocation and men typically play support roles rather than being shamans themselves, the Baksu Mudang is associated with homosexuality and cross-dressing. In addition, many of them dress and live as women and have male partners outside of their ceremonial roles. Mudang Seonmi, an initiated Korean American shaman-priest who has discussed Korean folk practices on social media, notes on Reddit that there has been a “big turning point in the last 80 years” in which “more men have become initiated and [are] practicing as baksu, instead of only being musicians or helping hands. They are usually viewed as being LGBTQ (and many are). … [The shamanic] tradition helps us gain power and control that we otherwise [do] not have access to.”
Writer and transgender activist Pauline Park identifies the Baksu Mudang as one of several “proto-transgenderal shamanic figures” across different Indigenous cultures. While Western nations often engage in colonial pinkwashing to justify imperial intervention, non-normative gender identities have always existed in non-white cultures, and Park gestures to these identities as a model for queer Asian/Pacific Islanders to “engage in identity formation in a way that avoids the binary opposition of LGBT = white [while] API = non-LGBT.” Rather than assigning Western labels to these proto-transgenderal figures or promoting queer API identification with people whose gender presentation carries specific meaning within their particular communities, Park presents these figures as sites of radical image-making that “enable us to re-envision ourselves as queer and API by pointing to predecessors in our cultures of origin.”
My interpretation of the Mudang figure extends Park’s work by asserting that, as an important source of queer Korean lineage, the Mudang’s gender performance is not just something antiquated to resurrect and preserve but a living and breathing practice that has continued to evolve and affect contemporary society. For me, the Mudang is an ever-present but underacknowledged figure within the Korean collective psyche, a figure whose transgressive power permeates Korean popular culture in ways that have not been fully recognized.
Many aspects of Korean art, music, performance, and storytelling have been influenced by the tradition of the Mudang, but my focus here will be on its resonance within K-pop. Chuyun Oh and David C. Oh’s study of K-pop cross-dressing provocatively opens with Taemin as “a woman” with “long, brown wavy hair, knee-length white lace dress, and high heels,” in a queer performance that the authors trace back to the traditional Korean art of “talnori, in which male singers have traditionally worn female masks to perform cross-gender roles.” I want to expand this genealogy by proposing the figure of the Mudang and her counterpart, the Baksu Mudang, as the origin of gender-subversive queer performance within Korean history. My aim is to connect this to a different dimension of K-pop’s gender play: performative male androgyny. Borrowing from Oh and Oh’s argument that K-pop cross-dressing ultimately “shield[s] its performers from being perceived as queer” due to the public perception of such gender transgressions as “nori,” or play, I posit that Korean receptions of the Mudang figure have similarly shielded Taemin’s androgyny from negative public opinion (and thus from negative ramifications to his career). Read as a shamanic figure, Taemin’s gender performance operates on a register that is inherently queer, even if the gender signifiers suggested in his performances have no relation to his own undisclosed identity or experience. It does not matter whether the Baksu Mudang identifies as a woman; when he dons the goddess’s regalia, he becomes her. When Taemin wears women’s clothing and performs gender fluidity, his work expands the possibilities of gender representation within Korean media regardless of his personal identification.
Ultimately, I argue that Taemin performs a modern, secular, and globalized version of the Mudang practice of hanpuri through his two-act album Never Gonna Dance Again (2020). Hanpuri, meaning the untying of resentment and grief, is a spiritual process achieved through ritual: ritualistic music and performance disentangle and release the accumulated energy of emotional pain, leading to catharsis that then transforms the energy into communal uplift. When understood through the lens of Korean shamanic practices, Taemin’s musical blending of Western and Korean elements creates an audiovisual performance that invites people from all over the world into communal catharsis to release the pain from social stigma and restriction and transform it into collective joy.
Reading Korean music and performance through the lens of Korean indigenous folk practices is a way of resisting colonial and Orientalist narratives around representations of queerness within Korean media culture. Such understandings underscore the political dimensions of K-pop as both industry and art: we must contend with the “popular” in K-pop both in the Adornoian sense of a profit-driven mass culture industry and in the anthropological sense of that which belongs to the “people”—in this case, the Korean people and the histories and legacies of Korean gender-subversive performances.
In early Korean history, shamanism is nearly synonymous with music and performance. Observing the identical structures of shaman music and folk songs, musicologist Hahn Man-young concludes that “the origin of Korean music lies in shaman ritual.” The Mudang’s music was the music of the common people, in historical contrast to royal music, which had been influenced by China and Central Asia. For much of its dynastic history, Korea was a tributary state of China, so genres such as dang-ak (literally “Tang music,” that is, music adapted from Tang China) and aak (“elegant music”) were imported from the neighboring country. In contrast, shamanism-derived Korean folk music, such as the street opera genre of pansori, is indigenous, with little influence from other countries. Like other shamanism-derived Korean folk genres, pansori follows the style of the Mudang’s ritual. As opposed to the solemnity and elegance of court music, pansori is raucous, percussive, dramatic, and based in narrative. In fact, the essential narratives of pansori are directly derived from shaman songs.
There are certain similarities between pansori and K-pop that suggest a line of influence. Pansori is divided into sori (song), aniri (narration), and ballim (mimetic gestures), in the same way that K-pop songs typically feature sung verses, speak-singing rap sections, and choreography. In addition, pansori emphasizes “empathy with the audience” through the practice of chuimsae during the performance, in which the instrumentalist and audience interject with calls of encouragement to the singer. This is echoed in the coordinated fan chants during live K-pop performances, which also allow the audience to become a part of the song. The inherently syncretic nature of Korean shamanism facilitates the subsequent adaptation and hybridization of its musical forms. It is possible that contemporary K-pop rap emerged from a combination of, on the one hand, Korean people’s historical familiarity with pansori’s alternation between sung and spoken words and, on the other hand, global pop music’s incorporation of Black American rap.
Lineage, so central to the transmission of shamanic powers, plays a key role within the K-pop music industry as well. Each mudang is from a specific spiritual household and lineage, within which the established and respected spirit mother presides over the selection of the candidate, her naerim-gut initiation ritual, and her lengthy training period. The Mudang’s lineage can be identified through the arrangement of her offering table, the gods in her pantheon, and the style of dancing and vocalization. In the same way, pansori singers, “primarily descended from inherited shamans or itinerant performers,” are also identifiable by their “lineage of pansori transmission.” The performer’s lineage influences their style, ability, and prestige.
Similarly, within the K-pop industry, the historic Big Three production companies—SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment—each has their own distinctive performance style. Most YG artists lean toward hip-hop aesthetics and sound, while many JYP artists are trained with a focus on dancing and to sing in a breathy, Motown-inflected R&B style similar to that of JYP founder Park Jin-young. SM’s signature style is heavily informed by the work of the record producer Kenzie and the producer and vocal coach Yoo Young-jin. SM tracks tend to be experimental, with distinct transitions between sections. SM also prioritizes vocal training, as artists are rigorously trained in R&B-style belting and runs.
Constantly expanding their aesthetics and sound, SM frequently releases unconventional songs that end up topping national music charts and becoming iconic pop culture moments (recent examples include aespa’s “Next Level” and NCT 127’s “Sticker”). Himself a SM artist, Taemin’s artistic choices were thus made under the auspices of a company known for its successful experimental music releases. Taemin’s SM lineage naturalizes his purposeful androgyny and the taboo storylines within his music, providing his subversive image and performances with a kind of shield.
Another form of lineage that conditions the public reception of Taemin’s gender expression is one determined for him by the people. A 2017 allkpop article declares: “Netizens Pass on Uhm Jung Hwa and Lee Hyori’s Title of ‘Sexy Star’ to SHINee’s Taemin.” Widely loved by South Koreans despite their risqué musical performances, Lee Hyori and Uhm Jung Hwa were groundbreaking in their displays of female sexual power. Taemin’s studio album Move made him the bearer of this tradition, at least according to the Korean social media discourse that his album release ignited. Netizens also compared Move’s title track to Park Ji Yoon’s “Coming of Age Ceremony,” which had been highly controversial for its racy lyrics and performance. A netizen quoted in the allkpop article claims that Park’s song “still remains one of the sexiest in K-pop history” and that Taemin’s “Move” belongs to that list as well.
In an interview with Taemin, Billboard describes “Move” as the artist’s attempt to “break gender stereotypes and the perceived limits of K-pop’s artistry.” Taemin states that his goal was “to go beyond what K-pop typically is perceived as” and to present a concept that is “more edgy, more powerful.” While the artist had been previously known for his energetic and even aggressive dance style, his collaboration with choreographer Koharu Sugawara in “Move” was a completely new project “to find a middle ground, mixing both masculine and feminine movements into the choreography together.” The choreography looks deceptively simple, with soft and flowing arm and hip movements that are purposefully designed to “seem possible and impossible all at the same time.”
Despite South Korea’s Confucian patriarchy (a patriarchy re-entrenched through the neocolonial institutions installed and maintained by the US) and despite the widespread perception of homosexuality as a Western disease, “Move” became a national phenomenon. The song went viral in a time before TikTok, with many people posting videos of themselves copying the sensual androgynous choreography. South Koreans declared themselves to have caught the “‘Move’ disease.” An understanding of the historical genealogy of Korean gender performance—that is, understanding such performances through the logic of lineage—explains how this phenomenon came to be. The Korean public responded to “Move” by situating Taemin within a particular cultural lineage; they read Taemin’s gender play as channeling the star power of nationally beloved women performers and therefore accept and embrace it, and even honor Taemin as continuing their legacy through his artistic power. Since 2017, dark androgynous styling coupled with sensual choreography has become an identifiable celebrity image that more and more male K-pop soloists are emulating. With “Move,” Taemin not only earned his place in a line of women pop stars but also inaugurated his own school of style.
Before discussing the shamanic ritual of hanpuri (literally: the untying of han) and its symbolic role in Taemin’s Never Gonna Dance Again, we must first reckon with the complex significance of han as a sociocultural concept. Defined as a uniquely Korean sense of resentment, rage, and sadness, han is widely regarded as a national affliction and the essential ethos of an oppressed people. Sandra So Hee Chi Kim has argued, however, that its biologistic significance only emerged during the Japanese colonial period to justify Japanese occupation. Subsequently, the term was reclaimed by the anti-Japanese independence struggle as a rallying concept within Korean ethnonationalist discourse.
In the Korean Buddhist tradition, however, han is not a concept used on its own but one aspect of a more comprehensive philosophy used to describe and categorize human suffering. The word “han” is often used to refer to the more complete term of “wonhan,” which is itself synonymous with “resentment.” Historically, “won” means the suffering caused by unfulfilled expectations or dreams, while “han” means the suffering that results when one is harmed by another person. As wonhan is accumulated across lifetimes and through ancestry, the term is intimately related to the concepts of karma and ancestral veneration and cannot be separated from the syncretic Buddhist and Taoist cosmology that it emerged from. This conception of human suffering and interrelation is fully integrated into the practice of the Mudang as well, and that is the vantage point from which I employ the term. Though it is not inaccurate to describe han as pain accumulated through the experience of oppression, the original term is descriptive and cannot serve as a diagnosis of a biologically inevitable national affliction that “run[s] in the blood of all Koreans.” By scraping away the colonial significations that the concept has accrued, I hope to return han to its original context.
In the 13-step shamanic death rite called the Ogu-gut, the Mudang guides the restless spirit of the deceased into the afterlife through a release—an untying—of the spirit’s wonhan. This untying is the spiritual process of hanpuri. During the first half of the ceremony, friends and family of the deceased participate in ritualized mourning, sobbing, and other physical manifestations of grief. But then there is a turning point in the ceremony, called the Chomangja-gut, where the family bids goodbye to the deceased, who has been released from its wonhan and is ready to depart for the spirit realm. Mourning shifts to celebration as the community dances to the rhythm of drums, cymbals, and gongs to send the spirit off into the next life.
Ethnomusicologist Simon Mills describes the Mudang as a “folk psychiatrist” who works through psychodrama to create “catharsis.” Similarly, Taemin describes Never Gonna Dance Again (NGDA) as representing a “catharsis” followed by the “finding [of] a new ego, a new identity.” Mapping the dual structure of the Ogu-gut onto the two parts of the album, I interpret NGDA: Act 1 as representing the manifestation of pain and subsequent release of that wonhan through hanpuri, while NGDA: Act 2 represents the consequent transformation and liberation of the spirit after the untying of pain.
In the music video for “Criminal,” the title track of NGDA: Act 1, Taemin is trapped in hell. He dances in an office with a lava floor that references the film The Devil’s Advocate (1997). In another scene, he is led away by police in handcuffs, and there is blood on his upturned hands. In the choreography, Taemin, wearing a single eyepatch, begins on his knees in a subjugated position with his hands bound together. His movements are stiff; he moves as if his dancers are pulling and pushing at him and he cannot become free. In the shots of Taemin where he is surrounded by police, he is wearing a black mesh shirt with decorative silver chainmail draped over his shoulders, which resonates as a decidedly queer image. Combined with elaborate jewelry and dramatic eye shadow, it is an outfit that would not look out of place at a gay club. For the queer viewer, the criminalization of homosexuality comes to mind. Other scenes—Taemin writhing on the floor with a dazed look, wearing a silk shirt and matching gloves; Taemin leaning heavily on one male dancer’s back while being pulled up by another one—exhibit a similar eroticism, evoking the decidedly taboo topics of gay male sexuality and BDSM. The song’s tension comes from Taemin’s character knowing that his romantic and sexual inclinations are “criminal” but not wanting to let them go. The scenario’s wonhan stems from his unfulfilled desire for freedom and from the violence of having those desires surveilled and policed.
Mills notes that the Ogu-gut is “abundant” with “symbolic representations of the desired psychological process of puri (loosening).” One such example is kopuri (knot release), where the Mudang joyfully unties a long length of knotted fabric to symbolize the release of wonhan from the deceased. Analogously, Taemin’s music video transmutes the institutional violence of police handcuffs into more erotic images of Taemin’s hands bound with soft fabric, which he then pulls off with his teeth. By drawing an equivalence between the handcuffs and fabric, Taemin transforms punitive captivity into something evocative of sexual play. Untying the fabric is an act of catharsis: he finds release through leaning into his illicit desires. His enactment and embrace of what is penalized is what allows him to find his own power and release himself from social confines.
NGDA: Act 2 dramatizes the next stage of the Ogu-gut, the celebration of that transformative turning point where the wonhan has become untied. Hanpuri has taken place and successfully freed the spirit so it can move forward in a new form. Taemin explains that “Idea,” the title track of NGDA: Act 2, was inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave: “Instead of ‘being trapped in a cave’ and living in the shadow of the truth, I want to free myself from the darkness and embark on a journey of enlightenment where I discover a new ego, identity and meaning.” Within NDGA, “Criminal” in Act 1 represents Taemin’s struggle to become unchained from the cave wall and escape the world of shadows, while “Idea” in Act 2 dramatizes his journey of acquiring knowledge in order to unravel the lies of his life and achieve self-liberation.
In an Instagram live Q&A, director Jo Beomjin explains that in his music video for “Idea,” Taemin is an undead human who has trespassed into heaven, which is depicted as a high-end bar full of well-dressed models adorned with colorful face paint. Taemin has consistently engaged with and subverted Catholic imagery in his discography, and his 2019 single “Want” does this in a notably explicit way. In that music video, Taemin dances in front of a projection of The Gates of Hell, Auguste Rodin’s sculptural depiction of the entrance to hell (specifically, the second circle of hell, Lust) that Dante envisioned in Inferno. Conversely, the “Idea” music video features Taemin’s first depiction of himself in heaven, and yet it is as a trespasser into a space of high society where he does not belong. The denizens of heaven stare at him, silently deriding him. By the end, however, Taemin and his dancers have taken over the bar and destroyed both the heaven that he was excluded from and the hell that he had been trapped in before.
Like the Mudang, Taemin traverses life and death, the mortal world and the spirit world. However, Taemin did not accomplish this on his own. Like the Mudang, a mortal whose power derives from her role as the conduit of gods and ghosts, Taemin has no power on his own and can only house and enact the will and might of the higher powers that have chosen him. “Idea” contains an uncredited feature: a woman vocalist provides backing support and sings the hook (“Killing me, killing me softly”). The vocalist is none other than Taemin’s SM labelmate BoA, widely regarded as the “Queen of K-pop,” whose unprecedented success in the Japanese market in the early 2000s helped launch the first phase of the Korean Wave.
Significantly, BoA has consistently challenged gender boundaries in her career. In 2005, she pushed against the stereotypical image of the female pop star as cute and girly with her single “Girls On Top,” which rails against women needing to have “a pretty face, sexy waist, pearls and lace” and declares instead: “I just wanna be true to myself.” In promotions for this single, BoA subverted her own previously sweet and shy image by sporting a wolfcut and wearing more masculine clothing. This cemented her status as a queer icon in the Korean LGBT scene, and she was even invited to perform at San Francisco Pride in 2009. In the same year, she released two Japanese singles, “Eien” and “Bump Bump!,” featuring a markedly androgynous and even transmasculine style that continued in her studio album Identity in 2010, where she has her hair cut short, alternates between suits and more casual menswear, and dances in a hip-hop style specifically associated with male performers. Lisette Bustamante, who has worked with stars like Janet Jackson, Usher, Prince, and Britney Spears, said in an interview that her choreography for “Eien” was meant to be “masculine-feminine,” deliberately evocative of “BoA’s ability to dance” in both feminine and masculine dance styles. BoA’s reputation and popularity have not been affected by her acts of gender transgression. Among South Korean people, she is widely admired for her artistry as well as for her contributions to the country’s music industry and the post-IMF economy more broadly.
In the music video for “Idea,” Taemin wears a cropped white turtleneck, white jeans, and a wide belt, items that evoke BoA’s performance outfits in the 2000s for early hits such as her song “No. 1.” When the refrain “killing me, killing me softly” strikes up, Taemin mouths the lyrics, but it is BoA’s voice that sings through him. Following the logic of the Mudang, Taemin channels BoA’s power as a performer and cultural icon to destroy the chains that bind him and find his way into a reality where he can live outside of the oppressive structures he had been suffering under and become who he truly is.
In the music video’s final scene, Taemin and his dancers perform at the top of a reflective staircase; his blue suit and the white feathers accessorizing his dancers mirror the blue sky and white clouds that form their backdrop. Lightning flashes around them. The Mudang operates within a cosmology based in Taoism and Buddhism, and within that religious language the Korean word for sky (“haneul”) is synonymous with “heaven.” Taemin as Baksu Mudang channels divine power to destroy the false Western binary of good/evil and heaven/hell, ultimately becoming one with the true heaven that is both within nature and within himself. In this way, Taemin escapes the world of illusion and encounters a true reality where he is neither holy nor condemned, but simply human.
This narrative resonates both with the Mudang’s work and with queer experience. Applying a Korean, which is to say at once indigenous and syncretic, strategy to Western art forms and concepts, Taemin expresses a universally applicable message—one of escaping scrutiny and exile and of breaking through the constructed realities that penalize us to discover and create a new iteration of the self. Further, he invites his fans and audience into cathartic release through their engagement with his work—by learning the song and choreography, participating in the music through fan chants, and finding the Easter eggs in his teaser images where he references his previous releases (SHINee’s “Everybody” in 2013, his solo “Press Your Number” in 2016). The goal of hanpuri is inherently collective. As the Mudang Kim Junghee puts it, “if my han is able to flow out, then everybody else’s han is able to flow out.” The untying of wonhan transforms han into “heung,” what Mills describes as a kind of collective uplift, the community “joining together in a spirit of sameness—as one.” Through the Ogu-gut, the living are able to resolve their own lingering emotions toward the deceased and release their grief at the same time that the spirit’s han is untied; “it is a mutual release.”
By adapting and appropriating Western cultural materials as vessels for his own indigenous narrative, Taemin facilitates the release of his audience’s wonhan in a distinctly Korean mode of communal uplift. In this way, his work blends the globally and commercially popular with the indigenous folk popular, challenging multiple binaries and paradigms in an accessible way and with a light touch. Taemin’s performance does not only create ambiguities between male and female, East and West, and future and past, but also leverages qualities from each to best communicate his Korean narrative to as many people as possible.
In the historied and persistent figure of the Mudang, Korean performance culture finds a politically subversive source. Shaman music is the origin of Korean folk music and therefore the predecessor of Korean popular music on a very literal level. These were the songs of the rice fields, the music in the market square, and the entertainment on festival days. While K-pop is not the most popular music genre within South Korea (that distinction belongs to the Korean ballad), it functions similarly to folk music for many South Koreans today. It gets you up in the morning, motivates you at work and in the gym, and provides acoustic background for the daily rituals that unfold in restaurants, stores, and cafés. The K-pop songs and dances that everyone knows circulate in and through post-work drinking sessions, karaoke rooms, and talent shows. They also increasingly mediate South Korea to the world, tasked as K-pop is to serve national ambitions for soft power. In this way, K-pop performs a dual function: it is both an evolution of folk music belonging to the Korean people and the neocolonial avatar of the Republic of Korea. Even as K-pop companies are utilized by the state to disseminate a certain national image and attract foreign capital, the corporations are still beholden to the musical and aesthetic sensibilities of South Korean people.
As a result of these tensions, K-pop provides a rich site for discussing the significance of gender subversion within a patriarchal, neocolonial economy. In my interpretation, Taemin’s work disrupts the Orientalist and pinkwashing narratives that criticize Korean popular culture from an ostensibly more progressive Western vantage point. My reading advances the broader idea that colonized people have always had art forms and social roles that are specific to queer life and community; it is in fact colonial narratives that erase our queer past and force modern-day queer Korean people to conform to Western gender expression to become legible as queer.
The resonances between Taemin’s music and shamanism give his work a performative effect: Taemin transcends the confines of gender in the same way that a shaman channeling spirits accomplishes death-defying feats. Such a mode of interpretation opens up broader questions as well: What if all gender performances were acts of channeling? What if, instead of being beholden to the requirements of our identity markers, queer people’s daily acts of transgression and subversion are small rituals that bridge the realm of the timeless queer abstract with the here and now? If so, perhaps all queer people living our authentic lives are blessed by a higher power that makes us their agents and avatars. In this queer world beyond the cave, gender is exuberant and fluid and lawless. Through our ecstatic performance as shamans of queerness, the stifling, punitive, joyless gender of today can be untied, transformed, and cleansed. Ə
[1] Quoted descriptions of the Mudang in this section come from Dirk Schlottman’s interview with Mudang Lee Myeong Cha in “Spirit Possession in Korean Shaman Rituals of the Hwanghaedo-Tradition.”.