Romeo at the Girls’ School: Fantasy of the Girls’ Queer Teen Adaptation of Shakespeare

This article adopts a transnational approach to the practice of cross-gender casting and the queer fascination with women playing Shakespeare’s male roles. It offers a case study of the South Korean film Fantasy of the Girls (Jungmin Ahn, 2018), exploring the film’s both strategic transgression of gender norms and boundary-crossing adaptation in the transnational context. Fantasy of the Girls features an all-women school theatre group staging Romeo and Juliet and joins similar cross-cast Shakespeare productions in exploring the interaction between the narrative text and the actor’s gendered embodiment, including in terms of the potent effect of gender-transgressive casting on audiences. To trace the ways in which the film uses the device of cross-cast Shakespearean performance to consider young South Korean women’s queer desires, and to examine the special geo-cultural contexts at play, I turn to a distinctive form of queer youth culture which emerged in 1990s South Korea: iban. In this cultural practice, cross-dressing functions as a crucial means of identity production, as another, albeit implicit, reference underpinning the gender-nonconforming Hanam’s performance of Romeo. The coming-of-age film offers a reflection on the connection between the iban fantasy and Shakespeare’s text, which, in turn, provides a model for identity construction, through which the queer teen girls can voice and explore desires that are otherwise inexpressible. Ultimately, Fantasy of the Girls leverages Shakespeare to foreground the unique experiences of queer teen girls in twenty-first century South Korea.