Hello and welcome to Queer as Fiction, where we talk about queer historical media.

I'm Alice.

I'm Eli, and I'm Jasmine.

And today we're talking about the 1988 intersex lesbian Korean film Sabangji.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Banerong-Bunmarang people of the Kulin Nation

as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay my respects to their elders, past and present.

They're the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We have some content warnings for this episode.

This episode will include discussions of historical intersexphobia, sexophobia, queerphobia. It will include discussions of the non-consensual

medical examination of an intersex person, misgendering of an intersex person in quotes,

ableism, sexual assault, suicide, slavery, and violence and execution. If any of that's something

you don't want to hear, please feel free to skip this episode and check out our other content. I'm going to start off this episode with a plot summary of the film, so as we reference it throughout, you'll know what's going on. I'll also mention that it's available on YouTube with English subtitles for free, and it's only 90 minutes long, so you can also just watch it if you've got 90 minutes before you listen to this podcast. We'll then talk about the real historical events that the film is based on and what we know about attitudes to intersex people at the time in 15th century career. Then we'll come back to the movie and talk about what was going on in Korean film in the 80s that led to this film being made and what it's meant to queer and intersect people more recently.

I'm so excited. Oh, that's good. Before we start, I just want to flag that I've done my best with Korean pronunciation, but I've probably got some of it wrong. It's a language I'm not at all familiar with. I also want to quickly comment on Korean names. So in Korea, the family name generally goes first, followed by the given name. So regarding Sa-Bung-G,

Sai is the surname and Bangji is the given name.

But throughout the film and in all

the texts I read, Sa Bangji was consistently referred to by her full name rather than as

Tsar or Bangji. So I've chosen to follow that convention because that seemed to be what was the

norm among people who know more about Korea names than me. And the same for a few other characters and historical figures. I saw it sometimes written down as two words and sometimes as one word. Do you have anything that you can tell me about that? No, I don't know why it's done that way. You will also sometimes see it written Sarpungi with a P instead of a B because that distinction doesn't exist in Korean as it does in English. Yeah, that makes sense. So there's a bit of variation in how you'll see it transliterated. Finally, regarding names, I'll also mention that I'll talk about some Korean academics. Some of them style their names with the surname first. Some of them style it with the given name first. I've just followed whatever that academic does when I talked about

them, whatever form of their name they publish under. I also just want to make a comment about

talking about intersex people on a queer history podcast because I know that not all intersex

people consider themselves queer and I just wanted to acknowledge that. On the other hand,

some intersex people do consider themselves queer. And so I think for that reason, it is appropriate to talk about intersex people on a queer history podcast, but I will occasionally say things like, you know, queer and intersex people. It's not that I'm suggesting no intersex people are queer. It's just I want to acknowledge that some intersex people are not. So, let's get into the plot of the film. It's a bit involved, so bear with me here.

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