- Cultural Theory, Audience and Reception Studies, Diasporas, Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, Critical Theory, and 15 moreKorean popular culture, Communication, Media Studies, Multiculturalism, Neoliberalism, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Reception Studies, Diaspora and transnationalism, Diaspora Studies, Korean American Studies, Model Minority, Racial hierarchy, Ethnic news, Korean Studies, and Media and Cultural Studiesedit
- My research interests are in the representations of Asian Americans in dominant media, Asian American representation ... moreMy research interests are in the representations of Asian Americans in dominant media, Asian American representation in ethnic media, Asian American identity & media, and the Korean diaspora in the U.S. and transnational media reception. My future work is increasingly moving me towards the ways these interests find expression in cyber spaces and towards Korean media texts & multiculturalism.edit
- Carol Liebleredit
Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the only academic book to examine the ways that racial identification and activation matters in their... more
Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the only academic book to examine the ways that racial identification and activation matters in their understanding of news. This adds to the existing literature on race and the sociology of news by examining intra-racial differences in the ways they navigate and understand White newsrooms. Employing in-depth interviews with twenty Asian American journalists who are actively working in large and small newsrooms across the United States, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work argues that Asian American reporters for whom racial identities are important questioned what counted as news, questioned the implicitly White perspective of objectivity, and actively worked toward providing more complex, substantive coverage of Asian American communities. For Asian American reporters for whom racial identity was not meaningful, they were more invested in existing professional norms. Regardless, all journalists understood that news is a predominantly and culturally White institution.
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From the web page: "Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and... more
From the web page: "Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship.
This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats."
This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats."
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Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian... more
Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha. The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of “whitewashing” in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.
Available at: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/whitewashing-the-movies/9781978808621
Available at: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/whitewashing-the-movies/9781978808621
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Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans and their uses and interpretations of Korean films and popular culture. The book combines intrapersonal processes of identification with their... more
Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans and their uses and interpretations of Korean films and popular culture. The book combines intrapersonal processes of identification with their social identities to understand how they use Korean popular culture to define “authenticity” and to construct inter-group and intragroup difference and hierarchy. The book also examines the ways social identities intersect with intrapersonal identification within Korean American youth communities to shape interpretation of Korean films. Finally, the book includes new findings on the ways second-generation Korean Americans construct intragroup difference as well as identity positions within Korean American youth communities. Overall, the manuscript is a comprehensive examination of second-generation Korean American ethnic identity, reception of transnational media, and social uses of transnational media.
Available at: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498508810/Second-Generation-Korean-Americans-and-Transnational-Media-Diasporic-Identifications
Available at: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498508810/Second-Generation-Korean-Americans-and-Transnational-Media-Diasporic-Identifications
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The purpose of this paper is to theorize cultural appropriation using a critical perspective that centers structural inequity and uneven global power by examining the case of South Korean media. This paper argues that cultural... more
The purpose of this paper is to theorize cultural appropriation using a critical perspective that centers structural inequity and uneven global power by examining the case of South Korean media. This paper argues that cultural appropriation is a particular form of intercultural borrowing that relies on structural inequities of power, whereby a more powerful culture takes from a less powerful culture in such a way that it causes structural and representational harm to the borrowed culture. To clarify cultural appropriation as a particular form of cultural borrowing, I provide a typology of different forms of cultural borrowing before positing six criteria of cultural appropriation in order to challenge and problematize binary notions of borrowing as appropriative or appreciative. This shifts the understanding of cultural appropriation toward one that is multifaceted and complicated by different relationships of power.
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For more than a century, Korea has been positioned as an inferior subject in the Japanese (post)colonial imagination (Fujitani, 2011), but Korea has grown in its economic, political, and cultural influence, which has produced surging... more
For more than a century, Korea has been positioned as an inferior subject in the Japanese (post)colonial imagination (Fujitani, 2011), but Korea has grown in its economic, political, and cultural influence, which has produced surging anti-Korean sen- timent in Japan (Iwabuchi, 2017). This chapter examines the intersection of these col- liding forces at the site of NiziU, an all-Japanese idol group collaboratively produced by Japanese and Korean entertainment companies. Because of NiziU’s Korean influences, many online Japanese-language users have expressed their resentments against Korea. Our analysis reveals that a postcolonial binary discourse of “us” versus “them” was articulated in reader comments to NiziU news articles. Users essentialized, trivialized, and demonized Korea/ns, and they presented Japan as a nation and a people as an aggrieved victim. At the same time, a discourse of hope was projected onto NiziU as a possible agent for cross-national reconciliation and change.
Co-authored with Min Wha Han
Co-authored with Min Wha Han
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This chapter argues that Greg Pak’s Totally Awesome Hulk, Agents of Atlas, and New Agents of Atlas construct Asian American identity through a “transpacific cultural repertoire.” A transpacific cultural repertoire demonstrates three... more
This chapter argues that Greg Pak’s Totally Awesome Hulk, Agents of Atlas, and New Agents of Atlas construct Asian American identity through a “transpacific cultural repertoire.” A transpacific cultural repertoire demonstrates three qualities: (1) an assertion of racial and ethnic identities within the diaspora that are locally and transnationally informed, (2) a grounding in US Americanness as diasporic texts, and (3) ambivalence that is produced from its creation in a White racial hegemonic system, in a predominantly White comics industry, and for a primarily White imagined audience. While doing so, the series puts forward a specific diasporic identity that is syncretically built with US and Asian cultures as building blocks. The moves, while largely counter-hegemonic, are not perfectly so as they center the Asian American man as the leader, counter stereotypes through rejection rather than reimagination, and understand racism at the interpersonal level. Despite the flaws, the texts allowed Asian Americans to see themselves by centering Asian American lives and imagining ourselves as heroes.
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Controversy followed news of an altercation in a Seoul bar between a group of women and men; this was later dubbed the “Isu Station incident.” Cellphone video complicated the women’s account, providing discursive space to air men’s... more
Controversy followed news of an altercation in a Seoul bar between a group of women and men; this was later dubbed the “Isu Station incident.” Cellphone video complicated the women’s account, providing discursive space to air men’s grievances and to discipline recent feminist challenges. The YouTube-distributed video and comments advanced an argument of “enlightened sexism” in which users argued for gender equality while demonizing feminism and claiming reverse sexism. Drawing on hegemonic masculine discourses in South Korea, they created an affective, androcentric, and misogynistic space in which they construct themselves as idealized, tolerant victims of feminist excess.
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On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself listening stoically to an irritated caller, who complained that Li was being ‘very Asian’ for mentioning that her family ate ‘dumpling soup’... more
On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself listening stoically to an irritated caller, who complained that Li was being ‘very Asian’ for mentioning that her family ate ‘dumpling soup’ on New Year’s Day. She claimed that a White person talking about White foods would be fired. The call and Li’s response resonated among Asian Americans and prompted a viral hashtag, #VeryAsian. The essay argues that users engaged in earnest accounts of their pride and lack of shame in pan-ethnic racial belonging as well as their ethnic heritage cultures. Notably, this meant eschewing memes, a common feature of Twitter discourse, and the racial humor of signifyin’, a feature of Black Twitter. As a networked counter-public, the posts were affirmative articulations of pride rather than explicit anti-racist critique. Even when anger was mobilized and anti-Asian hate was named, the systems or people that produce it were abstracted, demonstrating the liminality of Asian American experience and the context collapse of Twitter.
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This article introduces the special forum on representations and transnational reception of Squid Game. The purpose of the forum is to draw together two groups of scholars into dialogue. The first are Korea experts in communication and... more
This article introduces the special forum on representations and transnational reception of Squid Game. The purpose of the forum is to draw together two groups of scholars into dialogue. The first are Korea experts in communication and cognate fields, who consider the politics of representation in the show against the backdrop of neoliberal capitalist precarity, and the second are scholars of audience reception, who point to the ways Squid Game’s overseas reception is marked by power—hegemonic power that reifies dominant ideological meanings at the site of reception and resistive power for marginalized groups at the site of reception, who produce Squid Game-related paratexts to imagine inter-racial, affective connection.
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White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their... more
White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. 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.
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The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists' race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources.... more
The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists' race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources. Furthermore, this study examines whether such sourcing biases exist across commercial and public networks, namely ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Relying on a critical media effects approach, we drew connections between indexing theory and critical race and postcolonial studies to conduct a content analysis of more than 200 news stories and more than 600 sources in 2019 and 2020. The findings reveal significantly more sources from Western countries than non-Western countries in the coverage of international news stories with some variance with reporters, story type, and network type. Implications of the disproportionate presence of Western sources are further discussed.
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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... more
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.
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Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who faced unprecedented stresses due to the racist discourse of Asian Americans as carriers of disease during the coronavirus disease 2019... more
Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who faced unprecedented stresses due to the racist discourse of Asian Americans as carriers of disease during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Socialized to de-emphasize their vulnerabilities in their professional work, Asian American reporters generally claimed they did not experience racist harms, but further probing revealed indirect harms. Women reporters discussed internalized harms such as elevated anxiety and fear, whereas men reporters referenced only external harms such as racial microaggressions. Women reporters also manifested greater self-reflexivity. The importance of analyzing race and gender in White masculine newsrooms is discussed.
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Nike Japan's distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism presented through the narratives of three Japanese girls-ethnic Japanese, "hafu," and zainichi-who overcome bullying and discrimination through... more
Nike Japan's distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism presented through the narratives of three Japanese girls-ethnic Japanese, "hafu," and zainichi-who overcome bullying and discrimination through their shared love of football (soccer). The ad demonstrated a glocalized production to fit with the "You Can't Stop Us" global ad campaign of Nike, a transnational shoe and athletic apparel company. Thus, the ad reflects globalization from above. In response, some Japanese viewers expressed their anger at the ad to voice their grassroots resistance, reflecting globalization from below. The resistance was not against Nike for its transnational exploitation but for its alleged hypocrisy. Most substantially, the resistance was directed against generalized Koreans. Thus, the article argues that globalization from below is not necessarily, or perhaps not even usually counter-hegemonic or anti-transnational capitalism. Instead, grassroots activism takes advantage of moments to process and produce existing ideological meanings.
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The essay is a reflection on my experience of isolation on campus as my body was marked as a carrier of disease. Locating the essay in the literature about fears of Asian Americans as an alien, yellow peril threat and on the work on... more
The essay is a reflection on my experience of isolation on campus as my body was marked as a carrier of disease. Locating the essay in the literature about fears of Asian Americans as an alien, yellow peril threat and on the work on microaggressions in academia, I understand my colleagues' avoidance as rooted in racialized fears of COVID-19. This demonstrates the problems of colorblind racism and the limits of allyship. Through connecting the BLM protests and COVID-19, the shared risk to Black and Asian American bodies becomes highly salient, and it points to an opportunity for Black-Asian solidarity that can present a substantive challenge to White supremacy.
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The episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt titled “Kimmy Goes to a Play” is widely understood as Tina Fey’s unapologetic response to anti-racist criticism of the show’s first season. By satirically vilifying Asian American protesters as... more
The episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt titled “Kimmy Goes to a Play” is widely understood as Tina Fey’s unapologetic response to anti-racist criticism of the show’s first season. By satirically vilifying Asian American protesters as intolerant of Titus, a Black queer man, for performing a one-person play about his former life as a geisha, the show hides problems of White American appropriation and advances the racial politics of the model minority stereotype. Using Titus as a stand-in for herself as a show creator, Fey argues for her right to unapologetically culturally appropriate in her racial humor. As such, the message of the episode is consistent with “White feminism,” which advances superficial, postracial anti- racism as an ideological shield while wielding it as a conservative rhetorical weapon to demand White women’s access to the benefits of White men’s privilege. This helps reveal the contradictions of White feminism that allows its adherents to believe themselves to be progressive while opting out of progressive anti-racism.
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Airing on Joongang Tongyang Broadcasting Company (JTBC), a South Korean television network, Non Summit represents multiculturalism on the small screen through light-hearted, loosely structured debates between eleven men from different... more
Airing on Joongang Tongyang Broadcasting Company (JTBC), a South Korean television network, Non Summit represents multiculturalism on the small screen through light-hearted, loosely structured debates between eleven men from different nations that is moderated by three Korean hosts. This study approaches the show's representation of multinational, homosocial masculine friendship and commentary as a text that advances the goals of damunhwa, a locally specific articulation of multiculturalism. Non Summit does this by constructing a normative ideal of a cosmopolitan citizen who espouses liberal progressive values and appreciation for superficial multicultural difference. The ideal, which the show associates with the West, is occasionally ruptured through fleeting moments when non-Western members challenge Western superiority and Koreanness, however, the ruptures are patched through the show's policing of difference through shared, heteronormative masculinity and homosocial friendship.
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This study builds upon a nascent body of scholarship that examines the transnational movement of White Westerners. The purpose is to complicate the literature on multiculturalism and globalization by examining the “reverse” migration... more
This study builds upon a nascent body of scholarship that examines the transnational movement of White Westerners. The purpose is to complicate the literature on multiculturalism and globalization by examining the “reverse” migration from, rather than to, the West. Specifically, it examines White migrants’ mobilization of online social protest through a Facebook group that came together in response to a report broadcast on South Korea’s Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) that was interpreted as racist and xenophobic. In response, White residents in Korea organized dissent and engaged in symbolic protest that served a collective ego function, creating community around a perceived sense of shared oppression as racialized minorities. To do so, they drew on global hierarchies, White supremacy, and heteronormativity to challenge their lack of control over their own representations in the local culture.
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In 2016, Viki.com and Netflix added the web drama Dramaworld to their libraries. The move represents a digital and transnational shift in programming and production. Co-produced by China's Jetavana Entertainment, South Korea's EnterMedia,... more
In 2016, Viki.com and Netflix added the web drama Dramaworld to their libraries. The move represents a digital and transnational shift in programming and production. Co-produced by China's Jetavana Entertainment, South Korea's EnterMedia, and the US's Third Culture Content, Dramaworld signals the escalation of post-national television production. The show emerges where the splash of the ‘Korean Wave’ has flowed apart from and against flows of US-mediated domination, creating new possibilities for hybrid media. It simultaneously challenges cultural imperialism with the force of Korean soft power while also constructing the White female fan as the desired audience. This example of transnational co-production uses the global fan to mediate and reconfigure the shifting power relations between the US and Korea, thus providing a window into the ideological work performed by global media.
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This article analyzes YouTube comments about a Munhwa Broadcasting Company report that White “expatriates” in South Korea called xenophobic and racist. The research is important because there is a paucity of scholar- ship on White... more
This article analyzes YouTube comments about a Munhwa Broadcasting Company report that White “expatriates” in South Korea called xenophobic and racist. The research is important because there is a paucity of scholar- ship on White discourse outside the West and because there is limited work on YouTube as a space to articulate and negotiate discourses about racism. This is despite the increasingly complex flows of people and discourse around the globe. In this article, I argue that YouTube acted as a site of ideological negotiation in which Orientalist discourses were advanced under the cover of color-blind racism. Many of the YouTube comments framed Korea as xenophobic and racist, and even for self-identified White commenters sympathetic to the report, they did not challenge the con- struction of Korea as racist or the normative belief in postracism.
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Better Late than Never is a remake of a Korean reality T.V. travel show, which aired on N.B.C. in August 2016. The show’s premise features four elder celebrity men – Henry Winkler, William Shatner, Terry Bradshaw, and George Foreman –... more
Better Late than Never is a remake of a Korean reality T.V. travel show, which aired on N.B.C. in August 2016. The show’s premise features four elder celebrity men – Henry Winkler, William Shatner, Terry Bradshaw, and George Foreman – with their mid-30s companion Jeff Dye as they travel through the “exotic” lands of East Asia. Through the use of two popular narrative tropes, the bromance and the Western journey for self-discovery in Asia, the show argues that the interaction with the Asian other is beneficial primarily in masculine self-discovery and masculine homosocial bonding. Borrowing from Steeves’s use of the hybrid encounter, I argue that B.L.T.N. positions the strange Asian other as valuable only as a reference for becoming reacquainted with the U.S. American self and emotionally connected to his fraternal companions. Thus, B.L.T.N. rejects hybridity and reinforces U.S. American masculinity through the reification of ideologically preferred contact with the other that is shallow and that benefits the Western traveler.
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Through critical autoethnography, I explore memories with film that I have drawn upon to form hybrid diasporic identifications located in “new ethnicities” that are situated between dominant White racial meanings of home and... more
Through critical autoethnography, I explore memories with film that I have drawn upon to form hybrid diasporic identifications located in “new ethnicities” that are situated between dominant White racial meanings of home and transnationally informed meanings of homeland. Recalling my memory of watching Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, I recognize that my identification with Bruce Lee (Jason Scott Lee) and his relationship with Linda Lee Caldwell (Lauren Holly) was situated in my desire for White acceptance, which was manifest in my heterosexual romantic interests in White women. I unravel the ways in which racial isolation and a desire for acceptance and visibility created an internalized politics of desire rooted in dominant racial hierarchies. The second narrative examines my viewing of The Last Present, a Korean film, in a Seoul theater. Seeing a love story centered on a romantically involved Asian man in a relationship with an Asian woman, especially a Korean man and woman, was something I had never previously known, and its presence made visible its absence in my mediated life in the United States. This changed my sense of self, my relationship to dominant culture as part of the Korean diaspora, and my sexual and romantic interests. Because I am in the diaspora, my identification is found in what Hall refers to as new ethnicities, situated in the gaps between the local, dominant culture and transnationally received ethnic, homeland culture.
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The reaction video is an understudied area in YouTube and other online scholarship. Despite its limited scholarly attention, it is an influential site of meaning making, particularly for global youth cultures. Understanding... more
The reaction video is an understudied area in YouTube and other online scholarship. Despite its limited scholarly attention, it is an influential site of meaning making, particularly for global youth cultures. Understanding polyculturalism as the suturing of self into multiple lineages, this project argues that Black American fans self-represent their K-pop fan interests as being salient to their racial identities. The videos construct identities that are not confined to the Black–White paradigm. Instead, YouTubers engage in fan practices of production, represent conformity to values within the fan community, articulate racially specific fan participation, and express concern for racially specific marginalizing discourses. Thus, the YouTube response video becomes a complicated site with multiple negotiations that reveal the self-production of polycultural identities.
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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... more
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.
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Singers Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne are among the most recent White women per- formers to appropriate Japanese femininity. In Perry’s November 2013 performance of “Unconditionally,” she used Orientalist imagery of premodern Japan, and in... more
Singers Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne are among the most recent White women per- formers to appropriate Japanese femininity. In Perry’s November 2013 performance of “Unconditionally,” she used Orientalist imagery of premodern Japan, and in Lavigne’s 2014 single “Hello Kitty,” she used techno-Orientalist imagery of Harajuku street fash- ion, kawaii, and Japanese-as-cyborg. I argue that like White women performers, who performed Japanese femininity in the turn of the 20th century, Perry and Lavigne caricatured Japanese femininity as a hybrid costume to advance their own subjectivities. Yet, I also show through deconstructive criticism that their spectacular use of juxtapo- sition and excess creates “obtuse meanings” in which subversive meanings escape and opportunistically challenge the dominant meaning of the texts.
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Reaction videos by White celebrity-fans of K-pop reveal hybridity's formations in the global reception of K-pop in the West. A deeply understudied genre of YouTube, the reaction video needs scholarly attention. This article reveals that... more
Reaction videos by White celebrity-fans of K-pop reveal hybridity's formations in the global reception of K-pop in the West. A deeply understudied genre of YouTube, the reaction video needs scholarly attention. This article reveals that White celebrity-fans produce YouTube reaction texts that perform limited hybridity. Their hybridity is open to the symbolic meanings of K-pop texts and resistive practices demonstrated through deep commitments to non-White music and performers, but it is constrained by White racial logics that support postracism and gendered logics of their local spaces.
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In talnori (traditional Korean Mask Dance), men have worn masks to play female roles for centuries. Today, K-pop male singers put on symbolic masks to perform multiple queer identities. We locate K-pop queerness within specific historical... more
In talnori (traditional Korean Mask Dance), men have worn masks to play female roles for centuries. Today, K-pop male singers put on symbolic masks to perform multiple queer identities. We locate K-pop queerness within specific historical formations of talnori and transnational, neocolonial influences by closely reading two K-pop boy groups’ cross-dressing. While VIXX wears masks of humor to parody gender roles, Infinite wears masks of homoeroticism sustained by verisimilitude and physical androgyny. Their ambiguity of queerness challenges heteronormativity in Korea, and unmasks the mask of Western-centered gay subjects by blurring queer lines, decolonizing Asian queer aesthetics in a global context.
Suggested Citation:
Oh, Chuyun, and David C. Oh. “Unmasking Queerness: Blurring and Solidifying
Queer Lines through K-pop Cross-dressing.” The Journal of Popular Culture 50 (2017): 9–29. doi:10.1111/jpcu.12506
Suggested Citation:
Oh, Chuyun, and David C. Oh. “Unmasking Queerness: Blurring and Solidifying
Queer Lines through K-pop Cross-dressing.” The Journal of Popular Culture 50 (2017): 9–29. doi:10.1111/jpcu.12506
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Since Robert Park’s foundational work on the ethnic press, the assimilation-pluralism paradigm has dominated research. This article proposes a new framework that combines ethnic media and diasporic media literatures to advance future... more
Since Robert Park’s foundational work on the ethnic press, the assimilation-pluralism paradigm has dominated research. This article proposes a new framework that combines ethnic media and diasporic media literatures to advance future scholarship. Ethnic media research can provide direction in better conceptualizing media of ethnic groups/diasporas and can reinforce the importance of racial context, and diasporic media research can address the limitations of the assimilation-pluralism framework and its inability to incorporate globalization, transnationalism, and hybridity. This article submits that ethnic media be conceptualized as specific to media produced by a diasporic or indigenous ethnic population within the host society and that future textual research on ethnic media engage a diasporic identity framework. The framework would (a) call attention to transnationalism; (b) call attention to local/transnational, ethnic/race, and inter-generational tensions; (c) focus on race as a salient and important local context for diasporic meaning; and (d) consider the site of production.
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Immediately following news coverage of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, anti-Japanese users attributed the disasters to karmic “payback for Pearl Harbor.” As Klein notes, social media can legitimate White... more
Immediately following news coverage of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, anti-Japanese users attributed the disasters to karmic “payback for Pearl Harbor.” As Klein notes, social media can legitimate White supremacist discourses, “laundering” them into popular discourse. Likewise, this article argues that Facebook and Twitter were spaces that allowed the movement of White supremacist discourses into everyday culture by coding overt racism. Twitter and Facebook, however, also acted as a space in which White supremacist ideologies were challenged, yet the challenge was limited as it reified postracism. Indeed, both the “payback” posts and “pushback” responses constructed their arguments within postracial logics in order to garner support.
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My Little Hero (2013) is the first popular Korean film to focus on an immigrant narrative that features a non-Korean or biracial Korean-White lead. In the story of a young Filipino-Korean boy's " Korean dream " to be accepted by his... more
My Little Hero (2013) is the first popular Korean film to focus on an immigrant narrative that features a non-Korean or biracial Korean-White lead. In the story of a young Filipino-Korean boy's " Korean dream " to be accepted by his father/birth country and his reluctant and cynical teacher, the film reifies dominant Korean discourses of multicultural-ism that are situated within local and global hierarchies. Locally, Korean multiculturalism looks down, requiring the non-White multiethnic other to integrate into dominant culture. Globally, it looks up to seek the paternal acceptance of the United States. In the film, multi-cultural discourses work to support the instrumental assimilation of the multiethnic other for the purposes of assimilating Korea within the ranks of " advanced " countries.
Citation: Oh, David C., and Chuyun Oh. "“Until You Are Able”: South Korean Multiculturalism and Hierarchy in My Little Hero." Communication, Culture & Critique (2015).
Citation: Oh, David C., and Chuyun Oh. "“Until You Are Able”: South Korean Multiculturalism and Hierarchy in My Little Hero." Communication, Culture & Critique (2015).
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The film 300 tells a fictionalized account of 300 Spartans’ courageous stand against Xerxes’s Persian army that provided Greece a beacon of masculine strength, independence, and freedom. This study seeks to understand the racist and... more
The film 300 tells a fictionalized account of 300 Spartans’ courageous stand against Xerxes’s Persian army that provided Greece a beacon of masculine strength, independence, and freedom. This study seeks to understand the racist and sexist ideologies represented in the film’s characterization of the Spartan and the Persian armies. To uncover ideologies in the film, we conducted a textual analysis focusing on the intersecting constructions of nation, race, and gender. Our findings suggest that the film advances ideological support for the duty of Whiteness and masculinity in the U.S., specifically, and the West, generally, to protect itself from the external, invading forces of the Orientalized racial “other” and against the internal, corrosive forces of femininity.
It is an audience reception study of Asian Americans' viewing practices of dominant media. The chapter asserts that Asian Americans adopt "biased optimism" to believe they are only beneficially shaped by representation.
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Research on second-generation diasporic reception practices is rare, and it is the goal of this article to continue the nascent inquiry on multiple-generation diasporic audiences. The complicated ways in which diasporic identity is... more
Research on second-generation diasporic reception practices is rare, and it is the goal of this article to continue the nascent inquiry on multiple-generation diasporic audiences. The complicated ways in which diasporic identity is negotiated allows for greater under- standing of the border zones that multiple-generation diasporas inhabit. Fully acculturated but not fully included, second-genera- tion diasporas infuse their identities with meanings drawn in part through reception of transnational popular media and the devel- opment of fan communities. For Korean Americans, it is a way of identifying with a transnational home identity that allows for counterhegemonic identification. Boundaries of fan communities, however, exclude as well as include. Intraethnic taste hierarchies define what counts as authentically ethnic and who counts as sufficiently Korean.
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This study investigates the ideological construction of neoliberal multiculturalism in the National Broadcasting Company's series Outsourced, starring a White male lead that manages a call center in India. We argue that the show advances... more
This study investigates the ideological construction of neoliberal multiculturalism in the National Broadcasting Company's series Outsourced, starring a White male lead that manages a call center in India. We argue that the show advances global capitalism by co-opting multiculturalism to provide moral authority for Western neoliberal capitalism in the context of an inequitable global exchange. Neoliberalism benefits from postracialism by privatizing racism, thereby muting calls for antiracist structural reform. Relying on the ideological interests of neoliberal multiculturalism, Outsourced advances old racial logics by presenting unchallenged stereotypes of Indians and Indian culture and promotes a system of economic exchange that favors the global North while cloaking inequality with the veil of multiculturalism and the advancement of Whiteness as normative.
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This article builds on media use scholarship by focusing on an understudied population, second- generation Korean American adolescents and their use of transnational media. The primary findings are that second-generation Korean Americans... more
This article builds on media use scholarship by focusing on an understudied population, second- generation Korean American adolescents and their use of transnational media. The primary findings are that second-generation Korean Americans use transnational media as cultural resources through which they construct “new ethnicities” that are situated at the borders of their identities as members of the Korean diaspora whose everyday experiences are rooted in their status as marginalized racialized ethnic minorities in the U.S. Second-generation Korean Americans build inter-ethnic boundaries to create a unique identity that separates themselves from the controlling gaze of dominant culture and to build intra-ethnic boundaries to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic Korean Americans. To do so, they draw on knowledge of Korean popular culture as it comes to be known through transnational Korean media. Finally, their use of Korean media is also influenced by their local views of gender and, in particular, masculinity.
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The Rush Hour films disrupt the formula for the interracial buddy cop formula by largely erasing Whites from the films. Despite the unconventional casting, the franchise has achieved “mainstream” popularity, which I argue is at least... more
The Rush Hour films disrupt the formula for the interracial buddy cop formula by largely erasing Whites from the films. Despite the unconventional casting, the franchise has achieved “mainstream” popularity, which I argue is at least partly because the films construct Carter and Lee in an oppositional binary as a multiracial “odd couple,” converting Carter and Lee into physical embodiments of Blackness and Yellowness, fencing in the perimeters of Whiteness. Thus, Whiteness is able to remain protected and undetected in the normative center. Like a physical fence, however, the boundaries are semi-permeable, creating narrative openings to challenge Whiteness. Therefore, the Rush Hour franchise protects White normality but leaves it somewhat vulnerable at the margins.
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A thematic framing analysis of the coverage of the SARS health crisis in Toronto was conducted, comparing the World Journal, a Chinese-language ethnic newspaper, and the Toronto Star, an English-language popular newspaper. We found that... more
A thematic framing analysis of the coverage of the SARS health crisis in Toronto was conducted, comparing the World Journal, a Chinese-language ethnic newspaper, and the Toronto Star, an English-language popular newspaper. We found that the two papers used the economic consequences frame in similar proportions, that the World Journal used the responsibility frame only slightly less frequently, that the World Journal used the human interest frame substantially less frequently, the World Journal used the risk frame much more frequently, and the World Journal used the conflict frame less frequently. It is apparent that the Toronto Star avoided overt stereotyping and included more sympathetic framing with its human interest frames but was less careful in attributing blame to China or to ethnic Chinese and less careful in its focus on conflict. On the other hand, the World Journal did not provide explicit counter-ideologies but raised awareness of the risks of the disease both in Toronto and in the readers’ countries of origin. The similarities in coverage point to the role of news values in driving framing choices, and the differences are best explained by the combination of its target audience and the structural freedoms and limitations of the two papers.
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Despite the growing importance of transnational flows of heritage media for second-generation Asian Americans, there is little research that investigates this relationship. This study focuses on second-generation Korean American... more
Despite the growing importance of transnational flows of heritage media for second-generation Asian Americans, there is little research that investigates this relationship. This study focuses on second-generation Korean American adolescents' reception of transnational Korean media as influenced by their ethnic identity formation. It builds greater understanding of a specific Asian American ethnic group, informs ethnic identity formation research, furthers understanding of transnational Korean films, and furthers understanding of second-generation Asian Americans' reception of media. The primary finding of this study is that ethnic identity formation is a socializing force for second-generation Korean Americans that shapes their reception of transnational Korean films.
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Time's coverage of Michelle Rhee employs "complementary objectivity" to simultaneously support White capitalist values manifest in Rhee's pro-market educational reform proposals and to contain the person of Rhee evident in the use of... more
Time's coverage of Michelle Rhee employs "complementary objectivity" to simultaneously support White capitalist values manifest in Rhee's pro-market educational reform proposals and to contain the person of Rhee evident in the use of historical stereotypes of Asian Pacific Americans. This use of objectivity creates a sense of impartial coverage while hiding alternative, especially labor, critiques, maintaining racist hierarchies, and promoting White interests.
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This study attempts to determine whether 4 decades after the Kerner Commission, newspapers report more accurately on an increasingly diverse population. Specifically, it studied whether the size of the Asian American population covered by... more
This study attempts to determine whether 4 decades after the Kerner Commission, newspapers report more accurately on an increasingly diverse population. Specifically, it studied whether the size of the Asian American population covered by a newspaper influences the coverage of Asian Americans in newspaper articles. It appears that although newspapers situated within larger Asian American communities report more frequently, at more depth, and with more prominence on Asian Americans, the quality of that coverage is not influenced by the size of the Asian American community. In cities with larger Asian American populations, newspapers have responded with increased stories and length but not with increased quality of coverage. This is likely because of newspaper fears of alienating European American readers, leading to a “White flight” in circulation and because of news practices that lead to distorted reports of Asian Americans. These findings renew calls for the newspaper industry to more fairly represent the diverse range of its readership and not just its most favored demographic.
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A content analysis was conducted to determine whether portrayals of Arab Americans changed after 9/11, using hegemony theory as the theoretical framework. Under some dimensions, such as aggression and being an "other," there was no... more
A content analysis was conducted to determine whether portrayals of Arab Americans changed after 9/11, using hegemony theory as the theoretical framework. Under some dimensions, such as aggression and being an "other," there was no change. This could be because these images are prominently associated with Arabs in general. On the other hand, representations without clear links to Arabs, such as lack of productivity, resulted in increased negative coverage of Arab Americans under that dimension. To strengthen the hegemonic notion of a fair and just society, non-Arab American support for Arab American victims increased substantially after 9/11.