South Korea's economic restructuring following the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis increased deregulation, privatization, and labor flexibility, creating new forms of social precarity. This article examines this precarity to rethink the relationship between macrolevel social changes and microprocesses of social life in relation to urban inequality. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2009 and 2011 and in-depth interviews with twenty-two South Korean young adults, the author analyzes how a host of young adults strive for their belonging as they confront their own social precarity in a highly unequal and rapidly changing urban environment. Many young domestic migrants who moved to the Seoul metropolitan area are precarious workers and vulnerable tenants in emerging forms of substandard housing. Their attempts to reconcile the idealized notion of home and their precarious realities reveal the uneven and hidden effects of neoliberal restructuring.
How could queer activism for social change be possible in an authoritarian but neoliberal environment? What does neoliberalism imply for queer struggles in non-Western contexts where liberal democracy is absent or non-existent? This article introduces the concept of ‘quiet politics’ to establish a new theoretical lens for understanding queer organizing under global capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data on the rise of corporate diversity activism in Singapore, it analyzes how queer employees navigate the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in multinational corporations. The concept of quiet politics helps us understand the nuanced ways in which queer subjects ‘quietly’ mobilize themselves through a negotiation of neoliberalism, queer politics, and the authoritarian government that persecutes homosexuality. In doing so, this article challenges the Western notion of queer liberalism and sheds new light on the complex entanglement of neoliberal capitalism, corporate diversity, contentious politics, and queer activism from a global perspective.
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