“Good Sweat, Bad Sweat”: The Affectional Community of Gay Sports Groups in Seoul, South Korea

ABSTRACT:Based on ethnographic field research, this article examines the “affectional community” of Internet-based gay sports groups in Seoul, South Korea. Referring to “networks of support that do not depend on the bonds of blood or the license of the state, but that are freely chosen and nurtured” (D’Emilio 1980), such affectional communities have been vital for the emotional survival of non-normative populations such as LGBTQ people. However, with the growing number of single people as part of the process of detraditionalization (Giddens 1992), they have also become important for all individuals living in late-modernity to meet social, emotional, and financial needs that had once been met by the heterosexual family. Still, this paper argues that Korean gay men face particular challenges in creating an affectional community in a country, where they have historically been permitted only sexual (and not social) relations. They must not only overcome a primarily sex- and consumer-oriented gay culture, they must also reject romantic entanglements within the sports groups that threaten the group relationality of an affectional community based on friendship. In examining the affectional community of Koreans sports groups, this article contributes to the ongoing theorization of queer globalization (Cruz-Malave and Manalansan 2002, Povinelli and Chauncey 1999) in the non-liberal and communitarian context of East Asia. It also speaks out against the rigid separation of affect from feeling and emotion, evident in the so-called “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007) within the humanities and social sciences, arguing that all are embodied forms of cognition.