The Politics of the Dancing Body: Racialized and Gendered Femininity in K-pop (original) (raw)

K-Pop Orientalism: US Cultural Imperialism in Korean Popular Music from 1954 to 2018

2021

This project examines how Orientalism has impacted the U.S. and South Korea relationship in a sociocultural context, the history of Korean and Asian people in the U.S., and how these relationships affect the creation, production, and American reception of K-pop. It posits that Orientalist representations within American media produce and perpetuate problematic myths about K-Pop which impact Korean media production and do not alleviate ethnic stereotyping of Asian people and orientalist sentiments against them in the West. Orientalist discourse is found to have persisted into the modern and contemporary age thus impacting the cultural production of Korea and in particular, Korean popular music. I aim to elucidate that by including Asian-American discourse, a discourse that ruptures the binary of East-West or Orient-Occident frameworks, we can have a more transversal understanding of the creation, production, and American reception of Korean pop culture that ruptures the Orientalist logic of "difference". As this thesis poises itself to uncover orientalist representations and realities as well as highlight the role of Asian and Korean-Americans throughout the history of the sociocultural relationship between the U.S. and South Korea, the structure of this thesis attempts to articulate a history of K-Pop-starting from 1954 and ending in 2018. culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient". Similarly, I believe that without 9 understanding cultural imperialism and the concept of Orientalism in how American culture managed and produced their version of the "Orient", our understanding of Korean popular culture studies is incomplete. Said acknowledges that the American understanding of the Orient will seem less dense than the European one; however their Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures "ought to be creating a more sober, more realistic "Oriental" awareness. He also notes that what 10 American Orientalism has in common with earlier forms of Orientalism, is a kind of "intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture." Indeed, many scholars following Said have 11 acknowledged how American Orientalism has diverged from Said's British and French Orientalism. American Orientalism is rooted in the attitudes of European immigrants who arrived during the 16th and 17th centuries, causing the developing United States to begin incorporating notions of "The Orient" and "Asiatics" within its social formations well before the arrival of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century. Christina Klein's monograph Cold 12 War Orientalism argues that "narratives of anti-conquest" within middlebrow culture from 13 1945-1961 denied the imperial nature of U.S. expansion. These narratives brought the South Korea-U.S. alliance alive by "translating them into personal terms and imbuing them with sentiment" in the everyday popular culture of their time like book club main selections, 14

From Hybridity of Cultural Production to Hyperreality of Post-feminism in K-pop: A Theoretical Reconsideration for Critical Approaches to Cultural Assemblages in Neoliberal Culture Industry

European Journal of Korean Studies, 2019

This paper evaluates a current discourse of cultural hybridity that is deployed to examine the global success of local popular culture from South Korea. Indicating the discourse is descriptive without retaining an explanatory merit, I propose an alternative perspective based on Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulation and hyperreality, while focusing on the political economy of cultural hybridization. Examining how the Korean popular music (K-pop) industry mixes various audiovisual elements, I argue cultural hybridity in K-pop is not so much an autonomous, self-reflective cultural endeavor as an industrial means to maximize profits while perpetuating the status quo of gender relations. Re-inserting K-pop within the industry's structural configurations, I analyze how and why a hyper-real personality of female idols who sport contradictory characteristics, innocence and explicit sexuality, becomes a new ideal femininity. Indicating neoliberal and post-feminist ramifications in K-pop's hybridity, I redress the myopic, descriptive nature of the current scholarship.

Not So Soft After All: Kkonminam Masculinities in Contemporary South Korean Popular Culture

2008

This paper discusses the relatively recent appearance of the so-called kkonminam (literally, 'flower-like men') and the circulation of images of 'soft' masculinity in contemporary South Korean (hereafter, Korea) popular culture. From the outset, images of kkonminam would seem to stand in stark contrast to other previous hegemonic media representations of masculinity in in 1990 Korea , which have typically featured militarised and hypermasculine images of unfeeling he-men for whom women were expected to fall because of their incredible manliness, which was characterized by a rough, unkempt exterior and unreliability in male-female relationships. At the same time this ideal also demanded absolute loyalty to the brotherhood of men and the state. In addition to these, dramas and cinematic representations frequently feature scenes of violence when the main character is cornered and the testosterone is shown to boil over. In contrast to this, kkonminam men in popular dramas and romantic comedies are portrayed as attentive, sensitive and ready to express their feelings if needs be. They are well-groomed and fashionably dressed, accessorised with the latest man-bag, and excessively concerned with their looks. They are also invariably young and not adverse to using any cosmetic or surgical intervention to stay looking that way, nor averse to showing off their well-toned muscular bodies when an opportunity arises.