Join Ruin (archivist/director of QueerArch) and Chae-yoon Hahn (co-founder of QueerArch) to discuss the past, the present and the future of QueerArch.

QueerArch originally began with a donated collection from BUDDY, one of the first gay and lesbian magazines in South Korea, and Chae-yoon Hahn’s personal archive in 2002. Since then, it has grown into the current collection that includes thousands of publications, over 700 films from the Seoul Queer Film Festival and hundreds of artifacts, and remains the only public queer archive in the country.

As activists and researchers in Gender Studies, Ruin and Hahn have been important voices in both LGBTQ activism and academia. In this conversation, they will discuss the history of QueerArch and its meaning in Korea as well as their efforts to make the archive more diverse with the representation of women and transgender people.

Ruin is a lead researcher at the Institute for Trans/Gender/Queer Studies in Seoul and the director of QueerArch (the Korean Queer Archive). Zher main research interests include tracing the history of transgenerqueer persons in South Korea and advancing critical ways of thinking about gender/sexuality and violence.

Chae-yoon Hahn is an activist. She works at the Korean Sexual-minority Culture & Rights Center and is currently the managing director of the Seoul Queer Culture Festival. She was a co-founder of QueerArch and editor-in-chief of the queer magazine BUDDY (1998-2003).