Chuyun Oh

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counterhegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest "white-expat-fans" to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with Kpop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes my six-year autoethnographic work in response to From Silence to Power in Austin, TX from 2013 to 2019. Performed by survivors of sexual abuse, the performance externalized trauma, recognized time via repetition, re-contextualized their minded-bodies and transformed from silenced victims to survivors. Kinesthetic empathy moved me to work through my trauma as a co-performer. I have written performance reviews, given three conference presentations and performed an autoethnography Dancethnography in TX, NY, MD, PA, and CA. This project evolved from ethnography on others, to autoethnography and to reverse ethnography through which I witness (im)possibilities of dance in speaking trauma due to decorative virtuosity.

Focusing on K-pop male singers’ dance practice videos on YouTube and fans’ comments, Oh provides a lively and insightful analysis on the intersection of female spectatorship and male sexuality. Examining the bodily labor of the male dancers and their harsh working conditions displayed in the videos, Oh explores why female viewers are drawn to these low-budget dance practice videos. Oh highlights the female desire that eroticizes sympathetically the physical and economic circumstances of the male dancers, which the author calls the Cinderella complex in reverse. The chapter guides readers on alternative ways of reading Asian masculinity and demystifying male sexuality in relation to issues of the body, class, and female spectatorship.

This article examines the practice of the Danish K-pop (Korean pop) cover dance crew CODE9 as an example of the rapid cultural exchange on the Internet that reshapes the diffusion of dance styles and ideas. CODE9 demonstrates K-pop as a “migratory dance practice,” forming a transnational dancing community with modern technology at its center. By adapting and embodying K-pop, CODE9 creates a “Thirdspace” in between reality and fantasy, between being oneself and being a Korean idol. With CODE9, K-pop moves in and out of Denmark, through the practice of watching, learning, performing, and then circulating dance online.

Over several years, the YouTube channel Eat Your Kimchi, a White expatriate video log about South Korea, generated a sizeable audience. In the videos, Martina and Simon Stawski draw upon discourses that empower their identities as a privileged group of cultural outsiders—valued and othered for their White difference. To benefit from their global advantage, they essentialize differences between the West/themselves and Korea/ns in order to emphasize White and Western superiority. As a consequence, they reject hybridity by both mocking Korea/ns as an exotic other and by consuming it as an exotic delight. Their strategies reflect colonial-era discourses seen in the travel logs of White “adventurers” that are transformed to the current social, global, and technological conjuncture.

Korean pop (hereinafter K-pop) singers have become viral in East Asia recently as part of the “Korean Wave” or Hallyu. The term “Korean Wave” was coined in China to refer to the popularity of Korean drama in the 1990s and now refers to the regional popularity of Korean products such as drama, film, music, and fashion within Asia and visible in Western countries, including France, Canada, and United States. Currently, K-pop idols lead the global circulation of Korean pop culture, called “Second Wave,” which is often characterized as group performances driven by dance music and groomed by conglomerate music agents like S.M. Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment.1

Drawing on theories from performance studies, dance studies, and critical race studies, this paper explores the ways in which Korean pop (K-pop)'s appropriation of hip-hop reveals a complex moment of global cultural flow. Western audience reception of K-pop is likely limited to framing K-pop either as a form of contemporary minstrelsy or a postcolonial mimicry, e.g., making fun of African American culture or a bad copy of American pop. This perspective, however, understands K-pop through the lens of American culture and only considers external signs of the performances. It fails to capture the local context in Korea, such as how and why the performers appropriate hip-hop, such as the process of embodiment and training process to learn hip-hop movement, rhythm, and styles, etc. By analyzing K-pop singer G-Dragon's (GD) music videos, this paper argues that Koreans' appropriation of American culture is neither minstrelsy nor postcolonial mimicry. K-pop's chameleonic rac...

This article analyzes my six-year autoethnographic work in response to From Silence to Power in Austin, TX from 2013 to 2019. Performed by survivors of sexual abuse, the performance externalized trauma, recognized time via repetition, recontextualized their minded-bodies and transformed from silenced victims to survivors. Kinesthetic empathy moved me to work through my trauma as a co-performer. I have written performance reviews, given three conference presentations and performed an autoethnography Dancethnography in TX, NY, MD, PA, and CA. This project evolved from ethnography on others, to autoethnography and to reverse ethnography through which I witness (im)possibilities of dance in speaking trauma due to decorative virtuosity.

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counterhegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest "white-expat-fans" to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with Kpop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.

""By analyzing the film Madame Freedom 자유부인 (1956), the paper examines how a dancing body becomes a site of freedom and female agency. How did “사교춤" or social dance become the site where the South Korean government regulation experimented its disciplinary practice? How do historically contextualize this? In what ways were female bodies in motion intertwined with a desirable representation of nation-ness? At the same time, what were the ways in which female bodies in motion during that period of time resisted and undid the scriptedness - the scriptedness which curates the public space and how female bodies should be placed in such a space, all the while shaped by the framework of a healthy nation? Based on these questions, this presentation considers the 1956 South Korean film, Madame Freedom, as an important case study to investigate how the undoing of the scriptedness reveals itself in the screen. It employs textual analysis of the film and offers a close reading of the body and dance movement of the protagonists and the film narrative. "

The global phenomenon of K-pop cover dance indicates the rise of imitation in social media and its production value wherein identity passing is necessary. Employing performance ethnography, this article analyzes two female K-pop cover dancers in San Diego, CA and examines their embodied labour and (dis)privilege in their intercultural performance of K-pop. Their stories disclose discrepancy than solidarity within the racial and ethnic minority fandom and (in)ability of identity passing based on sociocultural and economic resources at the intersection of age, race, ethnicity, class, education, and family. Yet, a daunting reality further inspires fans’ dreams to be like K-pop idols.

KEYWORDS: Identity passing, performance Ethnography, K-pop Cover Dance, K-pop Dance Fandom, intercultural Performance

This article examines the practice of the Danish K-pop (Korean pop) cover dance crew CODE9 as an example of the rapid cultural exchange on the Internet that reshapes the diffusion of dance styles and ideas. CODE9 demonstrates K-pop as a “migratory dance practice,” forming a transnational dancing community with modern technology at its center. By adapting and embodying K-pop, CODE9 creates a “Thirdspace” in between reality and fantasy, between being oneself and being a Korean idol. With CODE9, K-pop moves in and out of Denmark, through the practice of watching, learning, performing, and then circulating dance online.

Link:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/platform-share-content/summary-pdf/41C952340CC3F146B475779255B14C03/e3027d6cc48e7b8b713b3d9d2ae5d3da9a36f8bf/cambridge-core-share-from-seoul-to-copenhagen-migrating-k-pop-cover-dance-and-performing-diasporic-y.pdf

In One Billion Rising (OBR), a global flash mob protest against sexual violence toward women, the dancing body becomes a political site for advocating freedom and self-defined agency. The flash mob provides a liberating space, allowing marginalized women to make their voices heard through their bodies and to transform their unspeakable trauma into a danceable pleasure for all to experience in a community of mutual support and empathy. This article focuses on my autoethnographic
participation/observation at OBR events from February 2013 to February 2019 and draws from interviews with seven participants in the United States, Zimbabwe, and
Hong Kong.

Intersecting performance studies and critical sports studies, this
article analyzes the North American media coverage of South
Korean figure skater and the gold medalist Yuna Kim at the 2010
Winter Olympics in Vancouver. While North American newspapers
and NBC (US) and CTV (Canada) broadcasts acclaim Kim’s athletic
achievements onstage, they also infantilize and Orientalize Kim as
an exotic, fragile, and dependent Asian girl. Contrarily, the media
highlights the role of her Canadian coach Brian Orser offstage as
a heroic white man. It dramatizes and sympathetically identifies
with him by nostalgically recalling the ‘Battle of the Brians’. When
Kim’s Koreanness is invisible and conflated as hypervisible ethnic
Other, Asian/Asian Americanness, her athletic competency is
negated under the name of Orientalism that fetishizes, romanticizes,
and thus, reinforces the racialized and gendered hierarchies
between the heroic white man and the fragile Asian girl.
Nevertheless, Asian/Asian American female athletes’ increased visibility
opens a liberatory space for re-visiting Asian and Asian
Americanness – Pan-Asian identity – at the glocal Olympic stage.

When South Korean female figure skater Yuna Kim won a gold medal in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, she became a source of national pride. Korean media praised her as “Queen Yuna” who “mesmerized” the world (SBS News, 2012). In the Olympics, she received a score of 228.56, the highest in ladies’ figure skating history (Yunakim, 2016). Kim has been referred to as “Queen” beyond South Korea (hereafter Korea) and called “one of the greatest women’s figure skaters of any era” (International Skating Union, 2016). With her athletic virtuosity, Kim has become a sports celebrity and also a symbol of the ideal woman in mainstream culture (Sports Seoul, 2014).

Previous works focused on media representations of Kim through nationalism, including Kim as a national hero in relation to Asada Mao, a Japanese competitive figure skater (Lee & Jung, 2011); Kim’s representation of conventional gender roles (J. W. Lee, 2009); and her asexualization as a single, competitive, subservient woman in the neoliberal nationalistic market (Nam, Kim, & Koh, 2010; H. J. Oh, 2014). In spite of the notable contributions of this previous research, there is no research on Kim’s stage performances and the theatrical dance-driven nature of figure skating in conjunction with classical ballet (Feder, 1994). It also does not pay attention to how nationalism per se is gendered and fueled through the consumption and representation of the athlete’s actual body in performance.

According to Robertson (1995), in glocalization, local desire is driven by global and vice versa, for the idea of local is already informed by global flows of cultures that are neither homogeneous nor heterogeneous (cited in Cho, 2009). Thus, drawing on theories from performance studies, critical dance studies, and cultural studies, this chapter focuses on both Kim’s physical performance and media coverage. I examine Kim’s body as a cultural text where domesticated gender, sexual, and national ideologies are negotiated and reconstructed in a glocal context.I closely read Kim’s free skating performance with George Gershwin’s music Concerto in F presented at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I pay particular attention to her body and movements using descriptive analysis. Employing discourse analysis, I also analyze media coverage, including Sports Chosun, Sports Seoul, and SBS television commentary, some of the major sports news and broadcasting companies in Korea.

I argue that the produced narrative of Kim at the Olympics demonstrates broader structural issues of gendered, racialized, and classed nationalism. Public discourse on Kim demonstrates how a female body is nationalized to serve local desire haunted by postcolonialism, and exhibits Korea’s desire for conforming to and/or resisting postcolonial anxiety shaped by local and global statuses in relation to the U.S. and Japan. Kim’s performance and her medal embody the “Korean dream” symbolized by upward class mobility and a hardworking as well as ethnic and national identity passing in a glocal frame through her silenced labor and subservient balletic body on the ice.

Oh, Chuyun. “Nationalizing the Balletic Body in Olympic Figure Skating.” (Re)-Discovering Sport in Korea: Guts Glory and Geurimja. Eds. Dae Hee Kwak, Inkyu Kang, Yong Jae Ko, and Mark Rosentraub. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 119-132.

Focusing on K-pop male singers’ dance practice videos on YouTube and fans’ comments, Oh provides a lively and insightful analysis on the intersection of female spectatorship and male sexuality. Examining the bodily labor of the male dancers and their harsh working conditions displayed in the videos, Oh explores why female viewers are drawn to these low-budget dance practice videos. Oh highlights the female desire that eroticizes sympathetically the physical and economic circumstances of the male dancers, which the author calls the Cinderella complex in reverse. The chapter guides readers on alternative ways of reading Asian masculinity and demystifying male sexuality in relation to issues of the body, class, and female spectatorship.

Citation: Oh, Chuyun. "“Cinderella” in Reverse: Eroticizing Bodily Labor of Sympathetic Men in K-Pop Dance Practice Video." East Asian Men: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Desire. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. 123-141.

Employing performance studies and queer studies, this article explores the subversive nature of western female fandom's consumption of male dancing bodies in Korean pop (K-pop) culture. By offering close readings of fan-made compilation videos and analyzing fans’ comments on YouTube, this article analyzes how K-pop male idols’ androgynous gender fluidity provides a space for queering female desire against normative white masculinity. Through video editing, fans “choreograph” their desire by fetishizing K-pop male dancers’ specific body parts and movements, and transform themselves from displayed objects to the subjects of the gaze. Moreover, through active engagement online, fans transcend their statuses from spectators to performers who actively enact alternative sexualities and gender roles in a public space. K-pop male singers’ gender performativity is significant, as it challenges rigid gender binaries in western culture – homosexuality/heterosexuality, masculine/feminine body and behavior, and masculinized gaze/feminized object — as embodiments of hybridized male femininity, which this article calls liminal masculinity.

This paper investigates ways in which the liminal identity of PSY and his music video Gangnam Style (2012) offer a site of post-racial neoconservative nationalisms are operating. While Korean media and fans often have framed PSY’s success as a source of “national pride,” I shall argue that PSY’s increased visibility does not solely promote the empowerment. PSY’s chubby, untrained, and “undesirable” body potentially reinforces the racist stereotype of the inferiority of the Asian man as an asexualized, dehumanized, and abnormal alien. His liminal position as a welcomed “foreigner,” who is familiar but remained as an outsider, however, allows a different reading from this racial stereotype. While some American viewers are fond of PSY’s English skills, Americanized satire, and American education, others project xenophobic abjection on his performance, oscillating between love and hatred toward the globalization led by the “Other.” This paper closely read the video text including the performer’s body and movements and consider the audience reception by looking at fans’ comments and journal reviews on the online social media. By employing critical race theories as well as performance studies, this project explores ways in which the diasporic audience on the Internet consumes Gangnam Style as a site of negotiating their racial/ethnic/national identities. This paper, thus, aims to illuminate sociopolitical ways of reading a K-pop music video in relation to the ideas of visibility politics and postcolonial nationalism within the era of transnational globalization.

"By analyzing the film Madame Freedom 자유부인 (1956), the paper examines how a dancing body becomes a site of freedom and female agency. How did “사교춤" or social dance become the site where the South Korean government regulation experimented its disciplinary practice? How do historically contextualize this? In what ways were female bodies in motion intertwined with a desirable representation of nation-ness? At the same time, what were the ways in which female bodies in motion during that period of time resisted and undid the scriptedness - the scriptedness which curates the public space and how female bodies should be placed in such a space, all the while shaped by the framework of a healthy nation? Based on these questions, this presentation considers the 1956 South Korean film, Madame Freedom, as an important case study to investigate how the undoing of the
scriptedness reveals itself in the screen. It employs textual analysis of the film and offers a close reading of the body and dance movement of the protagonists and the film narrative.

At the end of the oppressive military dictatorships (1960s-1980s), the post-colonial women’s movement reached its peak and the modern dance boom exploded in South Korea. I argue that the Martha Graham technique has been used to both empower and oppress women dancers in South Korea from the 1980s to the present. Victoria Thoms (2008) argues that the Graham technique has been identified as autobiographical “self-investment” (120). Yet Ewha Womans University, as the pioneer of dance studies and women’s studies in South Korea, has adopted this intensely personal Graham technique as a core program despite the racial, ethnic, geographical, and historical specificities of Korea. Graham has been regarded as a pioneer of feminine power in dance, which had been dominated by the male-centered hierarchy. Despite this, Graham maintains hierarchy and authority in her company. What particular elements, then, did the Graham technique give to Korean female dancers in the1980s? In order to develop my argument, I first consider the historical context of the post-colonial Korean women’s movement in the 1980s focusing on the role of Ewha Womans University. Then, I draw on the example of the Ewha Womans University modern dance education to look at how the Graham technique can empower feminine subjectivity. Next, this paper analyzes the ways in which the autobiographical Graham technique and its divinity have been used to justify the repressive authority and hierarchy of choreographers/professors in universities. Lastly, I analyze how Korean modern dance has reinterpreted the universalized white aesthetics of Graham dance in order to construct a new Korean modern dance identity during the post-colonial period. This analysis will allow us to look at the closeted and precarious historical and political layers of Korean modern dance identity in relation to the Graham technique and Korean women’s feminist her/story.