Abstract

Cross-dressing is a genre of Korean television drama that has been experiencing domestic and international popularity. I argue that the cross-dressing drama series have queer potential to subvert gender norms strictly regulated in contemporary Korea. I use a queer theoretical framework to analyze popular Korean television dramas featuring female cross-dressers, such as Coffee Prince [커피프린스 1호점] (2007), Love in the Moonlight [구르미 그린 달빛] (2016), and The King’s Affection [연모] (2021). I suggest these drama series queer gender norms by questioning the societal significance placed on identifying a person’s gender as either a man or a woman. By mobilizing various queer methods to achieve queer survival and, ultimately, to attain queer thrival, the dramas’ cross-dressing protagonists complicate Korean norms of gender and, to some extent, sexuality. Cross-dressing characters in Korean television drama series raise questions about gender and sexual norms in the Korean context and encourage viewers to think beyond societally taken-for-granted norms to be open to accepting categorical ambiguity.