On reproductive straightening: Pronatalism,privatization,and queer kin in South Korea

Of marriage and neoliberalism

In canonical queer theory writing on sexuality and neoliberalism, advocacy for same-sex marriage has been critiqued as legalistic formal inclusion that begets privatization, assimilationism, and depoliticization—primarily by focusing on the United States and North America at the turn of the 21^st century (Brown 2006; Butler 2002; Duggan 2003; Warner 1999). As Lisa Duggan claims in her influential definition of homonormativity, “marriage is a strategy for privatizing gay politics and culture for the new neoliberal world order” (2003: 188). This sentiment is echoed in later literature on “queer liberalism” (Eng 2010; Puar 2006; Ward 2008) which holds that desires for recognition through marriage and related state institutions exacerbate class and race-based myopia. In feminist writing even more acutely focused on issues of political economy, theorists have examined how same-sex marriage inclusion dovetails with state efforts to further privatize economic inequality for racialized and marginalized populations. Court decisions to ratify same-sex marriage in the US, for example, were rationalized through a conservative logic where state welfare “burdens” would be reduced by making LGBTQ + households economically dependent on one another in matters of care and parenting (Briggs 2017: 181-182) because marriage renders many ineligible for already limited social security programs (Montegary 2018: 159). As such, it has been aptly argued that advocacy for marriage “equality” naturalizes a racially stratified welfare state, evacuating questions of economic inequality from issues of race, gender, and sexuality (Collins 2004; Cooper 2017; Franke 2015; Kandaswamy 2008).

Recent work in Queer Asia studies has critiqued the framing of marriage and anti-normativity historically reproduced in queer theory as totalizing, arguing that it not only essentializes cultural difference but enacts forms of epistemological colonialism (Chiang and Wong 2017; Jung 2024; Kao 2024). As marriage is a grounded social and economic relation shaped by sedimented histories of governance and marginalization, it is critical to remember that it holds together structurally different hierarchies and politics beyond the US. Likewise, the ways demographic transformations and pronatalism have reorganized welfare and reproductive access ask us to disentangle the conflation of marriage, normativity, and neoliberal privatization that often occurs in lines of queer and feminist critique. Instead of leading to the loss of welfare benefits or the privatization of dependence, in contexts of demographic “crisis” like Korea, heterosexual marriage and parenting become a legal vehicle to access socio-economic privileges and assistance unavailable to others.

To better analyze the heteronormative relationship between demographic change and pronatalism in Korea and related contexts, in the following I develop a concept of “demographic queering” that indexes the ways neoliberalism brings populations to delay and eschew heteronormative life-processes popularly imagined to undergird the nation and its economic growth. I also elaborate on a corresponding concept of “reproductive straightening” which addresses how pronatalism fuses market incentives, marriage, and parenting in attempts to “straighten” these “queered” demographics. Beyond existing approaches to marriage and neoliberalism, I found that for queer couples in Korea exclusion from the rights and welfare organized by marriage not only complicated their economic interdependences with family but also pushed them into deeper bonds of privatized dependency and economic self-responsibility—foreclosing certain reproductive futures and constraining others.

Demographic queering & reproductive straightening

If queer theorist Jack Halberstam (2005: 153) has defined “queer time” as a state of “stretched out adolescence” that challenges the “obvious transition out of childish dependency through marriage and into adult responsibility through reproduction,” then contemporary economic and demographic trends subvert this scenario. For many in Korea and elsewhere, goalposts of heterosexual adulthood are out of reach or undesirable and deepened bonds of dependency have become an everyday reality, largely for reasons related to economic insecurity and housing instability. In this sense, as anthropologist Margot Weiss (2016, 2022) and many others (Allen 2016; Ferguson 2018; Mikdashi and Puar 2014) have suggested, the term “queer” can be understood analytically as a state of being otherwise in relation to normativity, rather than just a shorthand for LGBTQ + identities categories and politics. Neoliberal economic transformations and subsequent demographic changes have thus placed increasingly non-reproductive populations in a “queer” relation to what theorists have identified as “straight time,” a linear, hegemonic understanding of reproduction and futurity (Boellstorff 2007). As Anthropologist Zoe Wool (2021: 289) defines it, straight time encompasses middle-class “life-course rhythms of heteronormativity, governed by normative biopolitical expectations of reproduction, employment, retirement, and longevity.” However, this is not to say that populations who are “queered” in relation to heteronormative adulthood and queer identifying LGBTQ + populations are the same, but that there are important points of mutuality between the two which create both political connections and divisions—an issue I return to later.

If populations are thus becoming demographically queered, even inadvertently, then the marketized reproductive governance enacted in contexts of low marriage and fertility rates become attempts at “reproductive straightening.” Not unlike the logic of structural adjustment policies, these extensions of state support in contexts of austerity and welfare retrenchment become heteronormative modes of biopolitical regulation for both queer-identified and structurally queered populations alike. To elaborate on queer theorist Lee Edelman’s (2004) influential concept of “reproductive futurity,” reproductive straightening materially supports the “future of the child” and the heterosexual family over that of existing queer and structurally queered populations. Projects of reproductive straightening are thus aimed at subsidizing and incentivizing the reproduction of the imperiled heterosexual family form, oft imagined to underly working-age populations, GDP, and national futurity itself. In distinction to Charis Thompson’s concept of “selective pronatalism” (2005:7) which specifies how reproductive support is given to some populations over others, reproductive straightening emphasizes the forms of exclusion and resistance generated in governmental attempts to align lives and reproductive behaviors along heteronormative understandings of adulthood.

Transnationally there is considerable variation in the ways reproductive straightening affects queer, trans, and structurally queered populations, encompassing processes of biological reproduction, in addition to material issues of social reproduction and caregiving. One significant aspect of reproductive straightening involves restrictions around access to ARTs, adoption, and legal family formation. Assisted reproduction is frequently limited to strictly policed conjugal relationships in contexts as varied as Turkey (Gurtin 2016), Poland (Mishtal 2015) and mainland China (Zhu 2021). Yet, even in countries where same-sex unions are partially or fully recognized like Taiwan, Japan, Italy, and Greece, access to assisted reproduction and surrogacy is restricted in the shadow of low-fertility rates. For example, in Italy, where ethno-nationalist anxieties around demographic decline and the “replacement” of Italians by immigrant Others have fueled cash-incentives for the birth of “Italian” children, anti-abortion, and anti-migration politics (Krause 2004; Marchesi 2012; Mattalucci and De Zordo 2022; Muhelebach 2012), same-sex kin and singles who can become pregnant are not only unable to access adoption and ARTs but are also disproportionally targeted by a 2024 ban on international surrogacy that expands an existing 2004 ban on the practice. Alongside work to annul the birth-certificates of children conceived via ARTs abroad and bar non-gestational parents from legal guardianship (Ritholtz and Neil 2023), these decisions attempt to uphold the “natural” family form and straighten the reproduction of queer kinship through the denial of citizenship rights, healthcare, and other state services.

Another aspect of reproductive straightening involves pronatalist policies that tie market incentives and welfare provisions like loans and housing to heterosexual marriage and parenting. In Singapore, for example, which has recently reaffirmed the legal definition of heterosexual marriage and established numerous subsidies for parenting in response to low birthrates, the government has also set aside most housing grants (up to $57,000) and subsidized apartments for young married couples (Choy 2022). LGBTQ + applicants and others categorized as single-buyers can only enter the housing market upon turning 35 with access to smaller apartments, in a context where about 80% of Singaporeans live in state-subsidized housing that often becomes a primary asset to be sold off in one’s 30s and 40s (Choy, 2022; Yue 2023). The organization of welfare around the heteronormative family thus creates economic differentials not just between LGBTQ+ and heterosexual identifying folk, but between the non-married and married, as well as those with the familial resources and capital to access housing stability, and those without.

South Korea’s case is both representative of the above trends and more severe in comparison to the previous examples. While fiscal austerity and neoliberal discourse on self-reliance have historically placed greater burdens on individuals and families for responsibilities of care since the Asian Financial Crisis in the early 2000s (Koo 2022; Yang 2018), state pronatalism has increasingly provided newly married couples and parents with broad material benefits. Thus by denying queer kin and the unmarried equivalent welfare and reproductive rights, reproductive straightening creates both social and biological reproductive stratifications. Though the Korean welfare state itself developed in the wake of the financial crisis, as Jesook Song observes, these programs decided unemployed citizens “deservingness” of aid based on their ability to conform to gendered divisions of labor and the nuclear family form (2009: 14, 94) – an ethos that persists in pronatalist initiatives. Beginning with the creation of the Low Birth Rate and Aging Society Committee in 2003 and expanding exponentially over the next decades through both conservative and liberal presidencies, the state has provided married couples with access to subsidized assisted reproduction services, funds for each child born, expanded maternal and paternal leave, childcare benefits, and housing welfare (Kim 2019)—though even these measures have not yet significantly altered kin dependence, marriage, or childbirth rates.

The most economically impactful policies, which interlocutors felt most excluded from, allow married couples access to well-below average interest rates, public housing placements, and lotteries for coveted spots in private housing. As longstanding policies unique to the Korean real estate market like key-money deposits (jeonse) have prohibitively steep costs and banks frequently require borrowers to be married, over 35, fully employed, and have a record of already living alone, pronatalist welfare puts housing loans even more out of reach for unmarried women and LGBTQ + folk with precarious employment. As Song observes, “the family/marriage-centered sexual norm is manifested not only in social and family pressure to marry (and reproduce) but is embedded in Korea’s housing loan policies” (2014: 43).

In this scheme of reproductive straightening, biopolitical calculations about couples’ likelihood for reproduction also govern access to housing social security. Multi-person public housing is largely reserved for married couples and families, while single-person housing is smaller, temporary, and oriented around the assumption that renters will soon become married and have children. As plainly stated by the government ministry overseeing these programs, public housing plans are intended to “create a housing ladder that can lead to youth employment → marriage → childbirth” (Y.Kim 2022). Similarly, housing lotteries (cheong-yag) are organized into brackets where couples are assigned a score based on factors like the length of their marriage, the number of existing children (fetuses are considered children in this scenario) and income. Newlyweds who have been married for less than 5 years, with existing pregnancies or children are given highly preferential treatment (Korean Ministry of Government Legislation 2023).

During fieldwork I found that there was a complex relationship between demographic queering and reproductive straightening in the lives of many queer Koreans that shaped their everyday politics and futures. On the one hand, popularly understood correlations between economic instability and the increasing number of adults remaining unmarried and not having children allowed many queer interlocutors in their late 20s, 30s, and 40s different means to pass as “straight” while negotiating support from immediate kin and surviving a heteronormative labor market where there are no enforceable anti-discrimination laws—an outcome of “demographic queering” I have examined elsewhere (Wolff 2022). On the other hand, the inaccessibility of housing welfare, ARTs, and the citizenship rights garnered by marriage combined to privatize dependence, entrench ideals of self-reliance, and constrict reproductive possibilities.

Privatized responsibilities

This was especially the case for two interlocutors I will call Soyeon and Doyeon. Both were in their late 30s and identified as lesbians. We became friends at a pride event in June 2021 and would often hang out, eating Mexican food in Itaewon, taking rides on their Vespa, and meeting their close-knit friends—two of whom ran a woman owned sex shop in the famously queer neighborhood. They invited me over to their apartment for drinks one night in July. As we sat on their roof in the miserable humidity, drinking beer out of coffee mugs and eating steamed corn, they began to describe their building disparagingly saying, “It’s so old. It’s terrible!” Unlike the high-rise apartments glinting in the distance, theirs was indeed a worn white brick building from the 1980s, nestled in the back alleys next to some shuttered bars. They informed me that most other tenants had vacated because of structural issues that made units on one side unsafe to inhabit. Earlier they had refused to show me their living space out of some embarrassment, describing it as a one bedroom that was too cramped for two people. In one way, their situation was an example of the substandard housing forms that have become more common for those with low incomes in large metropolitan areas like Seoul (Jung 2017). But in another, it was shaped by their unmarried status under reproductive straightening. Doyeon explained, “You can’t just ask your parents or the government, ‘can you help pay for a house for my girlfriend and I?’ You won’t get economic support because you didn’t get married.”

Doyeon said bitterly that her sister had gotten married a year ago, something legally impossible for them as lesbians in Korea. The newlyweds were able to receive financial gifts from friends and family, take out a housing loan at a well below average interest rate, and apply for a spot in a recently built apartment via the housing lottery reserved for married couples. Soyeon and Doyeon both complained, “A wedding is supposed to be redistributive like p'um-as-i [a traditional form of mutual agricultural aid] we go out of our way to invest money in friends and family members’ weddings, but we’ll never get anything back.” Instead, they had to make it on their own. Living with family and receiving their support wasn’t an option, as both of their parents weren’t aware of their sexual subjectivities or relationship. They once apologetically told me that if we ever visited their hometowns together, they would be calling each other roommates and would explain how we met much differently. Soyeon dwelled on the lack of economic support they had compared to many straight peers who could much more easily accept welfare from their families or the state, remarking, “Whether you have a partner or not, as a lesbian in Korea you’re legally alone. So you need to be economically stable. We need more individual economic security. More secure jobs. More secure lifestyles. We don’t want to live this way, but of course we have to earn more, work harder, and have more economic power than straight people!”

Soyeon and Doyeon’s perspectives on the difference between straight and queer economic survival resonate with a larger theme found in many coupled interlocutors’ oral histories. Queer partners frequently found themselves in deepened bonds of privatized dependency by being denied the same rights and benefits as heterosexual couples and facing estrangement from familial support. Following our rooftop hangout, Doyeon and Soyeon broached the subject again over Vietnamese coffee, explaining that being alienated from family and state support has made them value the bonds within their queer friend groups even more, but that these “families they chose” (Weston 1997) couldn’t offset the exclusions of reproductive straightening. As they were both frequently between temporary and irregular work in the food and service industry, economic issues had become their biggest concern as a couple and they felt a shared sense of “deprivation” (pak-t'al-kam) in relation to married peers. Doyeon bluntly stated, “Everyone I know in the lesbian community says you have to find your own economic security, because you can’t have the same legal protections as married people. I’m not crazy about earning money, but now that we’re turning 40. I’ve come to realize that having money is just better for us in the end…”

Despite their critical awareness that an ethos of individualized self-responsibility and being “crazy” for money was not something they even wanted to embody, this scenario of reproductive straightening and legal exclusion left them with more limited options for housing and mutual support in the present and future. While self-responsible work to maximize economic gains are often glossed as aspects of possessive individualism, or a “neoliberal subjectivity” (Abelmann et al., 2009), Chun and Han (2015:587-90) contend that these labels can obscure different scales of inequality. Martin et al. (2021) crucially observe that there are deep dependencies among the relational obligations of kinship, wage labor, and state provisioning that shatter the illusion of their singularity under neoliberalism (3-4). As Susana Narotzky argues, the neoliberal ideology of self-reliance for one’s “present and future wellbeing” is contradicted by “multiple dependencies—finance, labor, care, and affect—that materially and symbolically support entrepreneurial forms of autonomy” (2021: 22, 32). And yet, the dilemma queer kin face adds another layer of complexity.

For couples like Doyeon and Soyeon, the very possibility of familial and state support is conditioned by heteronormativity and skewed towards the reproduction of heterosexual kinship. Unlike many other queer interlocutors who were single and better able to negotiate familial support and survival by passing as straight, or straight couples who were able to access welfare benefits allotted by pronatalist policies, queer couples’ desire for a life together strained these would-be dependencies. Rather than working towards economic autonomy as a value in and of itself, they were instead forced to manage a dearth of support against their shared marginalization—revealing the ways heteronormativity and pronatalism condition economic dependence and the prospect of social reproduction under reproductive straightening.

Familial exclusions

This issue of privatized dependency and futurity was similarly shared by another lesbian couple in their mid-30s I befriended during fieldwork who I will call Yujin and Yeri. During one of our conversations, they said their biggest desire together was to have “a feeling of stability” (anjeong-gam). When I asked what stability meant, they said it was not just about economic stability, but also about secure personal relationships. However, as we talked before and after our interview, I realized that this relational stability was intimately entangled with economic self-responsibility. Both lived together in Seoul, where Yujin held a well-paying job as a pharmacist and Yeri worked at a small design company. Up until a year ago they had lived separately with their parents but decided to stop because of how stifling it had become for their relationship together. Like many queer and trans Koreans who experience anxieties about being “outed” while living with family (Kim 2021), their partnership ultimately strained relationships of dependence and cohabitation with their parents. Yujin had to constantly monitor how audible their phone conversations were, which often led her to step outside for hours or even talk under a blanket. After overhearing these calls, her parents, who she described as conservative Christians, started suspecting that she had a “boyfriend.” As a result, Yujin decided to use years of hard-won savings to pay the costly deposit and rent for an apartment in Seoul.

Though they had achieved their goal of economic self-sufficiency, both noted that it was something fragile without other forms of support. Yujin explained that since she was little her father had extolled the importance of discipline in education and employment, “speaking aggressively” about class and looking down on others who didn’t hold prestigious forms of cultural capital. As a result she began to repress feelings about her sexuality, worrying it would become a kind of disability towards achieving economic success. She stated, “I thought, ‘if queer people are underprivileged minorities, I can’t become like that.’ So, I controlled my sexuality in the same way I studied. I wanted to give up, I wanted to sleep, I wanted to have fun, but I put getting a good job and grades first.” After coming out in college and meeting Yeri, she redirected this self-responsible energy towards securing their life together.

Now Yujin’s biggest anxieties about their future concerned the possibility of being outed and facing economic discrimination, as well as losing her parents as kin and a potential safety net. Having witnessed upper management deride queer people and their “perversions” multiple times, Yujin said, “it’s not just that I could be fired, but if rumors spread, I could be barred from being hired at any other pharmacies—there aren’t any pharmacists who are “openly” queer (lit. opun kw’ieo)…” Her biggest desire was thus to find more individual job stability by becoming the owner of her own pharmacy. Though it was a challenging entrepreneurial task that would require years of seniority, she reasoned that, “then, even if I got outed, I won’t worry about our future as much.”

Most interlocutors I met similarly worried that being outed in the workplace would result in discrimination or termination—an anxiety corroborated by survey data suggesting nearly half of queer and trans workers who were out in the workplace experienced harassment, disadvantaged assignments, pay inequality, or even firing (NHRCK 2015, 2019). As a gay identifying interlocutor on the job market once explained, “There are so few queer-friendly careers I can count them all on one hand.” Most said that one could only live “openly as queer” if self-employed, which to most, was more unimaginable in Korea’s hyper-competitive economy than part-time work in fields like the cram-school (hakwon) industry or striving for full-time jobs in heteronormative workplaces.

Her queerness additionally created an issue with potential economic support from her family. Yujin said, “Of course you can be economically independent and move out, but having your family’s economic support is really important too. I’m close with my family, but I worry that if I came out to them it could really end our relationship; that they would cut it off. So if I need a big loan from them someday, like for a housing or business deposit, it could make us unstable as well.” Feminist anthropologists have long argued that links between love and economics in kin relationships are intimately interwoven and not easily reducible to one another (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Stout 2015; Wardlow and Hirsch 2006; Yanagisako 2002). Melinda Cooper observes that under neoliberalism “intergenerational parental investment” almost invariably becomes “the primary source of economic welfare for those born into a world of ever diminishing public goods.” (2017:137). As John Cho similarly notes in his study of gay men’s strivings for money over love and community in Korea, the family becomes just such a safety net, operating “as a source not only of emotional intimacy and moral discipline but also financial security” (2020:157).

In contemplating their future, Yeri exhaustedly concluded that “the benefits that hetero people get for following a heterosexual lifepath (inseng-gil) makes me feel a sense of alienation (so-wi gam).” The words caught in her throat, she said to Yujin with tears, “I don’t really care about my own family or job, but whenever we talk about our future together, you always feel anxious, so I feel anxious too...” This point underscored the differences I often found between single and partnered queer interlocutors. Paradoxically enough, Yeri’s deep relational investment and privatized bonds with Yujin exposed her to greater vulnerability and marginalization, whereas as an individual, she had less to lose. Though Heather Love argues that marriage legalization has reduced the marginalized position of same-sex couples (2019:258-9), in Korea queer kin like Yeri and Yujin became arguably more marked by alterity than singles. While queer Koreans can better “pass” as straight due to the social fact of demographic queering, queer couples are faced with the challenging reality of ensuring care for one another despite constrained access to familial and state resources under processes of reproductive straightening.

Reproductive foreclosures

Like Yeri’s feeling of anxiety over prospective caregiving, pronatalism in Korea created issues of reproduction and futurity for a lesbian couple who I will call Haeun and Eunjoo. They were in their mid 30s, worked as part-time English tutors at a cram-school and shared a lower-rent apartment far outside of Seoul. Once while walking together on a gloomy spring day to a nondescript queer café semi-ironically named The Closet we passed a presumably heterosexual couple in their 40s pushing a baby carriage. Shortly after, Haeun laughed and said under her breath, “Did you see? It was an old Maltese. So cute.” To my bemusement they expressed how it was often more common to see people pushing small dogs around in strollers than children. On the subway to work, they also usually saw old men and women sitting in the hot pink upholstered seat designated for “pregnant mothers” more than any actual pregnant mothers.

We settled in to chat over iced Americanos and began discussing their living situation. After getting her master’s degree, Eunjoo lived in the vacant apartment of her grandmother in Seoul and secretly invited Haeun to stay with her for some months. However, other tenants in the building began complaining that two people were living there and driving up the shared utility bill. This brought them to move out instead of blowing their cover as a couple. Scholarship on Korea in the 2000s noted how lesbians and gays entered “contract marriages” with one another (Cho 2009) to navigate normative social pressures to marry and procreate (Suh 2001). However, demographic queering has contemporarily created a smokescreen that allowed the majority of coupled LGBQ interlocutors I met to pass as roommates to parents, coworkers and peers or as “too poor” to afford marriage and children. Eunjoo and Haeun said their parents both had “no idea” about the true nature of their relationship because of how common it is for people to remain unmarried (bihon) and keep a roommate out of economic necessity. At the same time, their parents’ economic support was conditional on them living at home before marriage. As Eunjoo’s mother once said, “later on if you get married, you’ll split up with your roommate, so why even make a house contract?”

Despite this ruse, in 2022 they got married over zoom by using a legal loophole that allows online ministers in Utah to marry people without residency requirements—a practice also undertaken by a few other coupled interlocutors. ⁶ It was a beautiful ceremony that I watched through a password protected link on YouTube, and celebrated with them and other friends some months later. However, they expressed frustration that it couldn’t translate to the rights and welfare associated with marriage. As we grew closer during fieldwork, they expressed a desire to adopt a child someday in addition to their beloved cat, but felt restricted by the legal, economic, and social challenges of doing so.

Eunjoo reiterated this in a later interview stating, “Our marriage wouldn’t be acknowledged, so there could only be one mother. We can’t tie our family together legally, so they would become an orphan if I died. And any shared wealth wouldn’t go to our child, because it’s not our child….” While affordable housing was already a problem that led them to live far outside Seoul, where they were “economically better off but more isolated as queer,” they admitted that a child would compound this issue even further. Haeun observed, “There’s different lotteries for newlyweds that make it so much easier. It’s really hard to afford a home as it is. If we lived here with a child, I would feel the difference between us and heterosexual people even more. Even if we went into public housing as two people, we could only go into a house with one bedroom or studio because we’re not a legal ‘family’”

We began talking again about Gyujin Kim again, as she had recently returned to Korea and held a baby shower satirically entitled, “Meeting for Countermeasures Against the Low Birth Rate in Korea,” which was attended by progressive lawmakers from the Jeong-eui party and marriage equality activists. Highlighting the irony of pronatalism in Korea, Haeun said, “The government keeps pressuring us [women] by using these kinds of systems—if you have a family, and give birth, we’ll recognize you. If it was a case where queer people could live well and have a child, it could be ‘good’ for the nation…” Eunjoo then interjected, “But they would never accept us.” This point highlighted the ways reproductive straightening is not about raising fertility rates in and of themselves but encouraging the reproduction of heterosexual kinship.

As Eunjoo, Haeun, and many other interlocutors expressed, the prospect of marriage was desirable not because it presented an opportunity for normalization or assimilation, but because it would allow access to benefits and citizenship rights that could make future caregiving, or even parenting, more imaginable. As Eunjoo’s response indicates, even if queer marriage and reproduction would “raise” birthrates or hedge population decline, they were doubtful that it even could offer a route to social normalization. Demonstrating the changing relationships between neoliberal capitalism, demographic change, and heteronormativity, reproductive straightening in South Korea is oriented towards bolstering and reproducing the heterosexual family form, imagined to underly the futurity of Korea itself. Queer kinship and reproduction, is incommensurable with the idea of this national futurity and is instead left to the vicissitudes of the market and economic-self responsibility.

In their interpolation as subjects of pronatalist discourse based on their gender and their exclusion based on their sexualities, both conceded that they didn’t want to, and largely couldn’t, raise a child in Korea. I was reminded of other queer interlocutors who had spoken similarly about “queer cosmopolitan” (Ong 2017) aspirations but were unable to do so given their economic and social circumstances. Interlocutors and queer netizens largely withheld critique of the class differentials that allowed Kim to succeed at neoliberalism’s zero-sum game—something that reveals how privatized bonds and self-responsibility become naturalized under reproductive straightening and the extent to which the prospect of queer parenting and reproduction becomes decided by access to capital.

Beyond the idea of providing support and guardianship for a child, Eunjoo reflected on a more basic problem of inheritance, futurity, and death. She said, “The more you earn money, the more you worry. What if my family takes it all? How can I safely give this to Haeun if something happens to me?” She referred to clauses like the “right to return the legal reserve of inheritance” which make it so “blood” relatives can claim a majority of one’s inheritance in the absence of a legal spouse, even if they were deliberately excluded from a will. This issue wasn’t far off, as only a year ago Eunjoo required a serious surgical procedure that required a family member to sign consent and guardianship forms. Haeun added with tears in her eyes, “Isn’t this sad? That we have to think about these things right now? This early?”

She spoke again—both weeping and laughing. “But you wouldn’t experience this kind of thing because…in America, if you wanted to, you could just…ugh. Why am I crying? I’m just so envious…I’m sorry…” As we all commiserated, I felt their pain, as well as my own privilege as a white US citizen who could marry my partner regardless of gender. While recent legal victories in Korea have allowed some same-sex partners to be dependents on health insurance (in an already single-payer system), Eunjoo noted how hard and expensive it would be to litigate issues around medical guardianship and inheritance in court. They had recently begun scraping together resources online about marriage law and reading blogs about legal technicalities, but I noticed that their projected future seemed to unravel as they spoke it into existence. Eunjoo trailed off “Is it even possible? We’re still trying to figure it out…” In a landscape where familial support and state provisioning are becoming necessary conditions for survival, queer kin face foreclosed paths towards certain modes of care and reproduction, where shared assurances in the future are anything but certain.

Conclusion - between queer & queered politics

In South Korea demographic decline and pronatalism are compounding queer, and queered, reproductive struggles. As state provisioning, wage labor, and the support of immediate kin are intimately connected, it becomes important to focus on how stratified access to these resources shape the horizons of possibility for reproduction. How certain forms become thinkable, and others unthinkable. What can anthropology, or the social sciences more broadly, tell us about how reproductive foreclosures, politics, and futures shape one another in the fallout of neoliberal capitalism? As I have argued, demographic queering and reproductive straightening suggest different pathways to understand emerging and often contradictory relationships among neoliberalism, gender, and sexuality. Though demographic queering has made it somewhat easier for many queer Koreans to pursue individual survival, underlying these everyday strategies is the foreclosure of pathways towards parenting and reproductive technologies and, more fundamentally, the harsh reality of ensuring mutual care for queer chosen kin without the legal protections, welfare, or familial support that supplement wage labor for a growing majority of the population. As these dilemmas become aspects of queer and structurally queered life transnationally, it asks us to consider how marriage does not always entail privatization or assimilation, as well as how heteronormativity shapes the intimate dependencies among kinship, labor, and state governance.

A framework of demographic queering and reproductive straightening asks us to not just focus on questions of nonnormative desires and subjectivities, but queered relations and connections (Boyce et al. 2020). While canonical queer theory has construed marriage as depoliticizing, in Korea it provides a touchstone for pressing connections between queer identifying populations and those who stand in a structurally queered relationship to heteronormative adulthood. While the exclusions described in this piece most obviously affect differently positioned queer communities, over the coming decades it will become important for analysts to address how non-reproductive populations’ queered relationships to different aspects of the life-course and pronatalism generate new normativities, stratifications, and, of course, politics. Building on Cathy Cohen’s (1997:438) provocation for a queer politics built on “one’s relationship to power, and not some homogenized identity,” ethnographic explorations of demographic transformation have the potential to examine what interconnections and frictions emerge between queer and queered populations socially, economically, and politically.

For example, in response to increasing reproductive health restrictions, the violences of Donald Trump’s second term, and the US’s own growing pronatalism (Kitchener 2025), there has been a surge of popular interest in Korea’s 4B feminist movement which advocates for the refusal of heterosexual marriage, childbirth, romance, and sexual relationships with men on social media platforms like TikTok. As Lee and Jeong (2021:636) point out, this movement was formed in response to the “pro-natalist move of the Korean state which made no effort to hide from the public its explicit interest in the reproductive capacity of women’s bodies,” and allowed a certain cohort of young cisgender feminists means to politically envision non-reproductive futures. Yet, as Judy Han discusses in an interview with the queer news publication Them, the minority movement’s proponents emphasize gender binaries, over-centralize heterosexual cisgender men, and often traffic in trans-exclusionary biases—attributes at odds with larger queer feminist politics in Korea (Lopéz 2024).

In distinction to these politics of separatism, continued efforts by the longstanding queer activist group Rainbow Action and the Marriage Equality Solidarity movement in Korea have held petitions, protests, and media campaigns to pressure the state not just to legalize same-sex marriage but to open marriages’ rights and economic to larger populations. Echoing these efforts has been the progressive Jeong-ui party’s proposed, but unratified, “Living Partner Act” which would extend the welfare gatekept under heterosexual marriage to, “unmarried people, the elderly, youth, sexual minorities, the disabled, single parents, and unwed parents who live in relationships with people other than their spouses or blood relatives” (Jeong 2023). Inverting the state’s pronatalist slogan of, “a happy future for me and my child,” often seen on bus ads and commercials, a rally cry I often saw in protest banners and echoed among friends was, “let’s move beyond family ‘crisis,’ towards a new kind of family.” Rather than emphasizing the “respectability” of marriage for LGBTQ + Koreans, these movements emphasize mutuality among groups marginalized by their shared “non-reproductive” status.

By deemphasizing queerness as a public identity, this strategy works to protect queer individual activists and advocates (see Wolff 2023). But in another way, it gestures towards new political coalitions that reorient the centrality of heterosexual kinship to the welfare state. These politics, as well as others based in divisions, point to just some starting points that an anthropology of demographic queering and straightening would be apt to undertake. This framework allows inroads to expand these explorations—to trace the relationships between queer and queered populations at a transnational and regional scale. While in a scheme of reproductive straightening the futurity of queer Koreans is conventionally circumscribed, I found that for many it did not foreclose other visions of kinship and solidarity. As Doyeon and Soyeon stated in one our last interviews together, “Because we were never allowed to participate in marriage in the first place, I want to make a different kind of family together. It’s really all we can do. It gives me hope. Not just two people, but a communal family. Without hope how are we going to live anyway?” Rather than pointing back to the normalizing potential of marriage, desires like these begin to gesture towards new political horizons and coalitions forged in a shared relation to power—as fleeting as they might be.