The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia

Parasites are typically maligned: they take without giving, weaken the individual or social body, and produce disorder. However, in Latrinxia: A New Utopia, a 2019 installation by South Korean artist Dew Kim in which future humans have been transformed into ‘anus worms’ (ttongkoch’ung), the parasite is mined for its potential, in Michel Serres’ words, to ‘generate a different order’ (1982). This article traces in Latrinxia and the homophobic slur of ttongkoch’ung the legacies of colonial capitalism and Cold War geopolitics, and the formation of rigidly sexed, gendered, and ideally healthy and impenetrable bodies implemented partly through medical interventions such as the anti-parasite initiatives of the late twentieth century. Examining the installation’s markers of cleanliness and filth, gay sexual subcultures, and shamanism, I argue that Latrinxiaoffers a queer understanding of the body as penetrable, with implications for sex, gender, desire, and the human. This constitutes one promise offered by the image of the ‘anus worm’ parasite. I conclude by situating Latrinxia in the economy of so-called global contemporary art and the growing currencies of the ‘queer’ and the ‘local’, weighing up the economic and cultural promises of queer visibility against the gains for LGBTQ+ people.