Alex Wolff

Alex Wolff (They/Them/She/Hers) researches relationships among economic change, demographic shifts, and queer life in South Korea. They examine how LGBTQ+ Koreans create sociality and politics while navigating everyday forms of discrimination, changing norms around heterosexual adulthood, mounting economic vulnerability, and regimes of legal marginalization. In South Korea, heteronormative notions about a middle-class life-course of stable employment that leads to marriage, housing independence, and parenting are being tested. Economic instability has made it difficult for many young people to participate in these processes, leading to dramatically low marriage and fertility rates, and many in their 20s and 30s depending on parents for economic support and housing. Wolff’s research found that in this situation LGBTQ+ Koreans are finding different opportunities to pass as “normal” in everyday life—something that creates certain forms of possibility even as it complicates their existing marginalization. Many used alibis about the normalcy of not planning for marriage or children to negotiate economic independence with their families of origin or avoid everyday discrimination from straight peers. Yet, because exposing one’s identity threatens to break these individual privileges and invite further discrimination, the prospect of creating collective politics or even planning for their own futures became more perilous. By examining these issues, Wolff’s research bares the tensions at the heart of Korea’s postmillennial cultural and social transformations. Building on participant observation, interview, and oral history research conducted from 2018-2021, they are currently preparing the manuscript “Queer Precarities: Economies of Adulthood and LGBTQ+ Politics in South Korea” and a forthcoming article in the journal Sexualities.

Select Publications 

2024                (Forthcoming) “Queer Economies of Kinship and Liminal Agency in the Korean University.” Sexualities.  

2023                “We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here.” Anthropology News website. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/were-queer-were-not-here/ 

2022                “Insecurity in Security: Queer Precarity and Politics in South Korea.” Items, Social Science Research Council (SSRC). https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-fellows/insecurity-in-security-queer-precarity-and-politics-in-south-korea/ 

2022                 “Queer Sousveillance: Publics, Politics, and Social Media in South Korea” in The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology, ed. Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes and Jolynna Sinanan, London: Routledge