South Korea's military is the most fierce battlespace in the confrontation between the minority human rights movement and the anti-homosexual conservative forces. Considering the unique context of the South Korean military such as the forced military conscriptions due to the legacy of the Cold War system and military tensions with North Korea as well as closed barrack life, the homosexuality discourse in the South Korean military is extended not just to the human rights of sexual minorities.
In early 2017, during the 19th presidential election TV debate, ideological verification such as 'do you agree with homosexuality in the military' to the major presidential candidates was publicly expressed. In that same year, despite controversy over human rights infringement, tracking down homosexual soldiers occurred under Article 92 (6) of the Military Criminal Act. At the time, the Army investigators tracked down dozens of homosexual soldiers, many of whom have been prosecuted for indecent conduct violations under the Military Criminal Act. And media in the divided country rushed to report the constitutionality of homosexuality in the military from a political point of view as conservatives and progressive.
To examine how Korea's partisanship media set a frame about the issue and what is the underlying assumption and concealment, we extract related news from July 2017 to December 2019 in a computational method and the data is categorized into the conservative media and the progressive media. And it is applied network analysis techniques to identify semantic associations of words contained in the articles. In this context, we adopt Goffman's theory of frames (1974) as a framework. Second, to examine the social perception of the issue, online opinions are collected from December 2011 to December 2019, with 15096 posts from Twitter, 848 posts with 16842 comments from online communities in South Korea and analyzed through time series analysis.
As a result of the data analysis, especially the concepts of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘national security’ in Korean conservative media are in opposition to each other, also negative coverage of homosexuality in the military is more than that of the progressive media. In the online communities, nationalist antagonism, which refers to homosexuals as 'pro-North Korean/a Red' and 'The North Korean puppet regime' regarding the issues, has been discovered. Rationally, 'pro-North Korean' and 'homosexuality' have no particular reason to be tied to a common theme, thus we indicate that this is the collective reproduction of online discourses in which one wants to dislike what one hates, reinforces social stigma for the subject, and promotes disgust and fear.
We criticize media excessive sectarianism on the human rights of sexual minorities and indicate that its political attitude encourages the irrational stigmatization on homosexuality in the South Korean Military in the online space.