Tag: sport

If You’re the Average K-Pop Fan, This Book is Not for You

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Korean Popular Culture Reader, Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe Ed., Duke University Press, 2014.

KPop ReaderWhy publish a reader on Korean popular culture? Because it sells. This is the startling confession the two editors of this volume, Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, make in their introduction. They are very open about it: their scholarly interest in Korea’s contemporary pop culture arose as a response to students’s interest in the field. It was a purely commercial, demand-driven affair. As they confess, “Korean studies had a difficult time selling its tradition and modern aesthetics in course syllabuses until hallyu (Korean Wave) came along.” Now students enrolling in cultural studies on American or European campuses want to share their passion for K-pop, Korean TV dramas, movies, manhwa comics, and other recent cultural sensations coming from Korea. Responding to high demand, graduate schools began churning out young PhD’s who specialized in such cultural productions. Course syllabuses were designed, classes were opened, workshops were convened, and in a short time the mass of accumulated knowledge was sufficient to allow the publication of a reader.

Teaching Korean pop culture on American campuses

But the average K-pop fan or drama viewer will surely be taken aback by the content of this volume. If they are looking for easy clues to interpret Korean dramas or the latest fad in boys bands’ hairstyle, then they will probably drop the book after a few pages. There are magazines or websites for this kind of information. As scholars, the authors have loftier interests and higher ambitions than just discussing whether Girls’ Generation really empowers young women or instead reproduces sexual cliches, or why the ‘Gangnam Style’ video generated so many clicks on Youtube. In fact, in another candid move, the editors confess what they really think about K-pop: it sucks. Or as they put it, “Thus far, Korean popular music has yet to produce one single progression of chords that has created a ripple effect of global critical response without the aid of inane music videos and excessive use of hair gels.” Yes, you read it right. For a book devoted to Korean pop culture, with a section on popular music that discusses artists ranging from Seo Taiji to the girls band 2NE1, this is the strongest indictment one could make.

But the ambition of the editors, and of the authors they assembled, is not only to sell books. They have a hidden agenda: they want to show that popular culture matters, and that it is no less noble and worthy of study than manifestations of high culture. As they see it, a discipline should not be judged by the prestige associated with the social reality under consideration, but should be valued from the perspectives and viewpoints it brings on seemingly arcane or mundane topics. There is even a general law at play here: the lower the culture, the higher the theory. The commoner your research topic, the more dexterity you have to prove in using difficult concepts and arcane prose. Conversely, commentaries of high cultural productions can accommodate a bland style and a lack of theoretical references. You may use Bourdieu or Deleuze to comment on photography and other minor arts, but paintings from the Italian Quattrocento or Baroque architecture demand more conventional writing tools. Some critics, such as Slavoj Zizek, have become masters at commenting low brow cultural productions with high brow philosophical references.

So the solution of the authors is to trick students into enrolling in their class with the promise of studying catchy topics such as K-pop or K-drama, and then to brainwash them with a heavy dose of politically-correct theory and academic scholarship. Lured by the attraction of pop culture, they are given the full treatment associated with the cultural studies curriculum. This can be summed up by three injunctions: contextualize, historicize, theorize. The aim is to contextualize contemporary Korean culture within its local and regional or global environment, while historicizing its colonial and post-colonial legacies, thereby leading to new theorizing about global cultural futures. Another move is to broaden the scope of phenomena under review to the whole spectrum of popular culture. The Korean Popular Culture Reader therefore includes chapters on sports, on cuisine, on advertising, and one video games. Conversely, there are no chapters on cultural heritage or on folk productions associated with traditional Koreanness: crafts, calligraphy, ceramics, Korean painting, pansori, seungmu dance, etc.

Contextualize, historicize, theorize

The first injunction to contextualize is taken very seriously by the authors. Cultural artifacts are not symbolic signifiers or self-referential texts that could be subjected to a purely formal, textual analysis. They are social facts, and should be explained as such. The authors refrain from sweeping assumptions about Korean popular culture as expressing essentially Korean cultural traits or as being naturally in tune with other Asian peoples’ aspirations. Instead, they look for archival evidence and locally grounded causalities. They seek neither to defend nor to attack popular culture, but rather attempt to place it in a context and describe how it works. Beyond apparent continuities, they uncover historical ruptures and shifts, and insist on the singularity of each domain of cultural practice. They are also careful to situate Korean popular culture within its regional, global, and transnational context. As the success of hallyu illustrates, Korean pop culture is now represented on an international stage and can no longer be understood narrowly through a model of national identity.

The chapter on the failure of game consoles, and the rise of alternative gaming platforms played on computers at home or in PC bangs, is a fine example of social contextualization. Home computers caught on in Korea for the same reason game consoles didn’t: blame Confucianism and the heavy focus on education. Parents bought their children computers to run educational software and improve English skills. Similarly, PC bangs offered young people a public space that was outside the remote reach of parental surveillance or elder supervision. PC bangs have thrived by giving young people the chance to translate online relationships into real-life ones, or to team under the leadership of a master player to attack a castle or win a battle in role-playing games. The Korean professional game player, who excels in MMORPG games and becomes a worldwide celebrity but who cannot speak English, has become an iconic figure in game-related media.

The political potency of the melodrama

Analyzing street fashion and movie cultures in 1950s’ Seoul, Steven Chung shows that Korea’s compressed modernity takes place against the background of global cultural circulation that cannot be reduced to a unilateral Americanization process. The 1950s was a remarkable decade for movie stars, and the roles played by actor Kim Sung-ho illustrate the ambivalence toward familial patriarchy and political authoritarianism. The political potency of the melodrama is nowhere more apparent than in North Korean movies, with its aesthetics of socialist realism and the overbearing gaze of the benevolent leader in hidden-hero narratives. Bong Joon-ho’s movie Mother strikes Korean viewers with the discrepancy between the iconic status of the two main actors, Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin, associated with motherhood and with idol stardom, and the role they endorse in the narrative, an abusive mother and a half-wit son.

The book cover featuring the glitz and chutzpah of Korean contemporary scene–with a picture of a live concert–is there to deceive as much as to allure. In fact, only nine chapters out of seventeen focus on the contemporary, and only two essays address issues commonly associated with the Korean Wave–one on K-drama fandom and another on girl bands. Many contributions to the volume deal with the colonial or post-colonial past, as contemporary Korean popular culture remains intimately connected to the history of colonial modernity. It was during the early part of the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) that the first instantiation of the popular emerged. The idiom “popular culture” is not easy to translate into Korean, but the words inki or yuhaeng, taken from the Japanese, suggest the mix of individualism, commercialism, and cosmopolitan ideals that stood at the core of Korean colonial modernity. The history of cultural transfers, collage, plagiarism, and creative adaptation is repeated in many sectors, from popular songs to manhwa and even to Korean cuisine, as processed kimchi and makgolli appear to own much of their popularity to their adoption by the Japanese consumer.

At the origin of modern Korean literature, we find love of the romantic kind, translated into Korean as yonae or sarang. As Boduerae Kwon writes, “It was by leaning on the concept of romantic love that Korean literature tutored itself in the art of writing, nurtured the awakening of individual consciousness, and sharpened the powers of social critique.” Boy meets girl was a new concept in early century Korea: as a new import into the Korean language, yonae required a pose that suited the novelty of the word.” North Korea relied on its own set of concepts and ideologies, such as taejung (the masses) or inmin (the national citizen). It is no coincidence that both Stalin and Kim Il-sung recognized the power of film and considered it not only the most important art form but one of the primary means for creating a new art of living as well. “Cinema was used as the primary technique and medium for the construction of socialism and the creation of a national people,” writes Travis Workman, who uses Baudrillard and Debord to show that socialist realism was in many ways more real than really existing socialism.

The stoking of male fantasy

As much as they put popular culture into context and trace its historical development, the authors put cultural phenomena in theoretical perspective. The book is not too heavy on theory: most of the savant references and conceptual discussions are put forward by the two editors in the short introductions preceding each section. But all authors share an ambition that goes beyond the mere description of cultural facts. Cultural studies is predicated on the premise that the cultural sphere has replaced the socioeconomic sphere as the main site of political struggle and ideological production. At the same time, popular culture is caught in a process of commodification and commercialization that makes it incapable of articulating a coherent worldview that would effectively challenge domination. Perhaps most striking in Korean pop culture is the absence of the transgressive element. K-pop acts, or more specifically female K-pop singers, are visual stars who epitomize the “stoking of male fantasy” while cultivating a shy innocence and mild appearance. Although Seo Taiji upset the established order in the 1990s with his school-dropout status and signature snowboard look, “there was no profanity, no sexism, no use of any substance, no piercings, and no tattoos.” This lack of rebellious impulse is what may have conducted the editors to formulate their damning indictment of K-pop.

Supporting the Korean National Team

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, and Global Korea, Rachael Miyung Joo, Duke University Press, 2012.

Rachael Joo.jpgThe participant observer is the one who spoils the fun. He or she comes up with questions and doubts at the moment when the public wants answers and certitudes. Participating and observing are often two irreconcilable tasks. The observer introduces a distance when participants want to adhere to the show, and creates distinctions when the group wants to feel as one. Despite the pretense to the contrary, the researcher cannot fully belong, cannot fully take part into the action. Even when he or she choses to live among the natives, the anthropologist reminds people that he or she retains other obligations and belongings. The anthropologist dwells in the village but belongs to academia. The group can never claim him or her as one of them, because both know that he or she will have to leave one day and that his or her stay is temporary. Anthropologists are those who write things down at the end of the day: their commitment goes to scholarship, and they are dedicated to writing a book or a monograph about their experience in the field. They maintain critical distance and cultivate abstract reasoning, using categories that are in essence different from the ones that people use to frame their own experience.

The participant observer is a person who spoils the fun

Rachael Miyung Joo is the typical party spoiler. She is the only one who doesn’t wear a red T-shirt when the Korean national team is playing and people are watching the football game retransmission. When her female roommates cry and go crazy to celebrate victory, she stands back and watches from a distance. She feels closer to a solitary male supporter who sheds tears of emotion at the beauty of the game than to the crowd of cheering girls and boys who have only limited knowledge of the game rules. She bluntly confesses to her friends that she finds the players from the Italian team more attractive. She uses categories such as gender, race, and nationhood, and introduces critical distance with the immediacy of experience, when people around her just want to enjoy the fun and share the excitement. She highlights the constructed nature of national unity and the ambivalence of ethnic categories at the time when media coverage celebrates Korea as one and heralds the advent of global Koreanness. Whereas media attention focuses on female fans and their mild display of sex appeal, she brings in feminist theory to denounce the commodification of women’s bodies and the prevalence of heterosexual norms.

Rachael Miyung Joo’s fieldwork took place around the date of 2002, the year of the soccer World Cup tournament hosted jointly by South Korea and by Japan (the Japanese part is sorely lacking in the book). It is a two-sited ethnography, based on participant observation made in Seoul and in Los Angeles. In addition to soccer, Joo also documents other sports where Koreans fare particularly well: golf, where ethnic Koreans dominate the Ladies Profesionnal Golf Association, but also baseball, with the participation of ethnic Koreans in the Major League, and figure skating, dominated by multi-medalist Kim Yuna. Her ethnography uses analytical categories borrowed from philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, media studies, and critical theory. She draw from Althusser’s notion of “interpellation”, which describes how individuals are hailed through ideology. For example, the South Korean state attempts to “interpellate” Koreans in the United States as overseas Koreans—that is, loyal Korean national subjects.

The 2002 Football World Cup as a high mark of Korean transnational identity

She borrows from media studies the expression “assemblage”, a combination of institutions, images, and people that constitute the genre of media sport. Appadurai’s anthropology of the global provides her with the notion of “diasporic public spheres” that are constituted though collective and simultaneous engagements by subjects located in different spaces around the world. She offers her own concepts, such as “intimate publics”, a notion that combines the individual sphere and the public realm, or “everyday forms of self-fashioning” that she observes in Seoul’s streets. She elaborates on the notion of the transnational which is declined in all her book’s chapter headings: “transnational media sport”, “transnational athletes”, and “transnational publics”. She defines “multicultural nationalism” as “a culturalist notion of diversity that erase material differences and power inequalities between and among groups, as well as one that sees racial, national, and ethnic differences as essentially the same.”

Her main study is on the 2002 FIFA World Cup. As she writes in the introduction, “this month-long event was not primarily about sport per se; it was a great opportunity to celebrate with millions of others under the aegis of supporting the nation.” People knew they were participating in a historical event of global significance, because this had happened before: the 1988 Olympic Games are still remembered as a turning point in Korean history. One generation had passed, democracy had settled, and Koreans were even more self-confident. They felt united as one, and gave unanimous support to their national team. Young women were particularly conspicuous: they wore the color of the national team, painted the national flag on their faces and bodies, and led the crowds who were chanting and partying in the streets. For the author, “the sexual desire and excitement generated around Korean national athletes operate as allegories of desire for the Korean nation.” This desire for a fantasized Koreanness transcended borders: supporting the Korean team enabled Korean-Americans living in Los Angeles to articulate their ethnic identity and their relationship with the Korean nation.

Korean female golfers are women who don’t sweat

The female golfers who dominate the tournaments of the Ladies Professional Golf Association provide another interesting case study. According to the LPGA, 43 of 123 international players were South Korean as of July 2011. This list did not include Korean-born players who were naturalized US citizens or ethnic Koreans living abroad, including Michelle Wie or Christina Kim from the United States and Lydia Ko from New Zealand. Again, Joo sees hegemony at work in the way these female athletes represent ideas of gender, nation, and ethnicity. The sexuality of Korean female athletes is presented in contradictory ways as daughters to be protected within the Korean family and as hypersexualized Asian women to be marketed in transnational commercial contexts. As national icons, successful female golfers demonstrate how Koreans should adjust to the neoliberal contexts of a globalizing Korea. The whole nation rejoiced at the remarkable success of the golfer Se Ri Pak, who won two of the four major tournaments on the LPGA tour in her rookie year of 1998, while the nation was reeling from the trauma of the Asian financial crisis. She came to symbolize how South Korea might pull itself out of the crisis through global competitiveness, individual drive, and private capital.

In South Korea, the dominant discussion of golfers assumes that their success is due to their talent, hard work, and the sacrifice of their families. Often families move from South Korea to the United States or Australia to raise their daughters in golf-centered environments, to send their children to golf academies, and to live in areas where golf can be played year-round. In media narrative, father and daughter must bond to fight competitors in a foreign land. The father comes to standing for the national interest as he protects the progeny of the ore an nation in foreign contexts and ensures its enduring success. Some commentators also assume that Korean women are naturally well suited to forms of sport that require extreme precision and concentration, such as archery, billiards, figure skating, and golf. Conversely, non-Korean media sometimes point out that Korean golfers display a robotic quality—the idea that they lack emotion, creativity, and individuality. These cultural stereotypes are nothing new. During the Cold War, athletes from socialist countries were often stereotyped as collectivistic, militaristic, and emotionless. In the globalization age, Korean athletes are valorized as national heroes for disciplining their bodies, garnering global media attention, and demonstrating economic results. The female golfer also strengthens the capitalist ideologies of segmented labor markets that treat female labor as unskilled and subordinate.

Taeguk Warriors

Much media attention in South Korea is directed at athletes who compete abroad. These nationals icons bring global visibility to the nation, helping Korean corporations to win brand name recognition and bringing national or ethnic pride . Athletes who play abroad represent the image of the newly globalized Korean subject who leaves the country to succeed yet continues to maintain a strong sense of Korean identity. Sport operates in the affective realms of mass media to intensify and embolden feelings of nationalism and competition. Sport events also create contexts for the production of powerful feelings of nationalism and ethnic identity by diasporic subjects. Male athletes are often presented as warriors for the nation within the context of international competition. During the 2012 London Olympics, following South Korea’s victory of Japan, soccer player Park Jong-woo displayed a sign proclaiming Korean possession over the contested Eastern Sea island known as Dokdo to Koreans. As a consequence he was banned from the medal ceremony and unlike his other 17 teammates he did not receive a bronze medal for his performance. In recent years, the competition between Kim Yuna and her Japanese rival Asada Mao was staged as a nationalist revenge of Korea against her former colonial ruler.

Joo also shows the role that Korean media sport plays in shaping ideas of Korea and Koreanness for Korean Americans. Spectators who watch Korean athletes playing within US-centered sporting leagues are exposed to ideologies of ethnicity and nationalism. In the American context, a shift towards transnationalism as distinct from multiculturalism has tended to maintain the national distinctiveness of players, so that South Korean and other Asian athletes are characterized primarily as foreign nationals. As athletes themselves may work to diminish the significance of their own ethnic or national differences, corporate interests in sport often exploit these difference to market players of color to a racially segmented consumer market. In line with the racial presentation of Asian Americans as a model minority, Asian/American athletes are praised for assimilating within the context of US sport by being “team” players, behaving as obedient students of their coaches and agents, and avoiding negative or excessive attention on their personal lives.

A model ethnic minority in the United States

Athletes who enter the United States often become symbols of the American dream of immigrants and those who remain in their homelands. For the sport industry, foreign athletes also function as a conduit through which entire national markets might develop. The idea that players from abroad come with an entire nation of viewers is enthusiastically mentioned by commentators and sports writers. The Korean and Korean American fan base in baseball or in golf has increased considerably with the entry of Korean nationals into Major League Baseball and the LPGA. Clearly, disparities exist between South Korean and Korean American audiences, and national locations make a considerable difference in the ways that athletes are understood. In Korea, Korean American athletes were considered to be overseas Koreans—Koreans in a foreign land. In America, events such as the 2002 World Cup contributed to activate a sense of Koreanness among Korean Americans. Many members of the Korean diaspora in the United States maintain active material, psychological, and emotional connections to Korea. With the emergence of Korean players in professional sport, Korean Americans began to feel a new sense of ethnic pride and transnational belonging.

In Los Angeles’ Koreatown, large crowds gathered to watch football games on large screens and cheered with thousands of others as fans did in Seoul. They engaged in simultaneous acts of media consumption across geographic and national boundaries. Although Latinos were also present in the Koreatown crowds, the uniformity of public support for the Korean team precluded the possibility of expressing a preference for another team or acting outside of the scripted behaviors of the event. On the day of the Germany-Korea semifinal, even Latino TV anchors wore the “Be the Reds” shirts in solidarity with the Korean fans. This stood in sharp contrast to the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where shops run by ethnic Koreans were take as targets by African Americans and other ethnic groups. Korean media in both the United States and South Korea widely hailed this event as a major coming of age in the Korean American community. Of course, there is a certain irony that the mainstreaming of Korea America into American society constituted Korean Americans as a group of supporters of the Korean national team. They were fundamentally depicted as essentially Korean nationals on US soil.

Mass mobilizations and demonstrations in Korea

This irony is not lost on the author. True to her vocation as a party spoiler, she points out the ambiguities and ambivalence of media sport events. Her whole book is written against the enthusiasm of sport fandom and the collective emotions of the crowd. She continuously warns against the immediacy of adhering to collective events, which are always not far from mass hysteria and totalitarian regimentation. Behind the exhilarating feelings of joy and empowerment, she detects nationalistic hubris, sexual exploitation, and cultural hegemony. Her book is written against her own feelings and proclivities: she confesses that she, too, enjoyed the mass mobilization and national exhilaration. It is only after the facts, when she went back to graduate school and was exposed to a heavy dose of critical theory, that she took a negative view on what she had first experienced in blissful ignorance.

The only time when she detects a political potential in mass events is when they fit her ideological agenda. She therefore supports the mass protests that took place in 2002 in the wake of the “tank incident” in which two young schoolgirls were run over by a US Army vehicle, or in 2008 when the Lee Myung-bak administration decided to lift the ban on the import of US beef. These large-scale protests recalled the “affective memories” and participation rituals that were first experienced during the 2020 World Cup events. It doesn’t matter that these mass rallies had strong nationalistic undertones and a marked anti-American posture: for the author, this is a natural response to decades of what she calls US hegemony (not noticing the fact that her brand of cultural studies also participates in this hegemony). Visiting Seoul in 2008, she felt at home joining the demonstrations calling for the resignation of the newly-elected president and which gathered a motley crew of “gay and lesbian organizations, immigrant rights groups, Buddhist nuns and monks, Christian organizations, labor unions, well-established non-profit groups, and citizen consumer groups, among many others.” If this is her vision of where Korean society should be heading, then why didn’t she choose to chronicle political events, instead of devoting a book to a phenomenon towards which she feels deeply ambivalent?