scholarly journals Queerness of Hallyu 2.0: Negotiating Non-normative Identities in K-pop Music Videos

Res Rhetorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Agata Waszkiewicz ◽  
Anna Oleszczuk

This paper discusses the visual encodings of non-normativities in the selected K-pop music videos and seeks to establish them within the aesthetic of gendered desirability that deviates from what is considered a social norm in South Korean culture. The first part presents a short history and current boundaries of Korean pop music and the construct of gender and its (inter)relation with sex and rhetoric of desire are discussed. The next section maps out the changes in the understanding of normativity and the concept of queerness. The final part of the paper relates the theories and practices of non-normative identities to the visualities from post-2007 K-pop music videos, using examples to illustrate and contextualize them. The authors focus on the representations of masculinities and show how selected texts can be read as spaces of liminality defying normative cultural and social rules.

2020 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-63
Author(s):  
CedarBough T. Saeji
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Murali Balaji ◽  
Thomas Sigler

Over the past two decades, several musical genres have transcended their Caribbean origins to achieve global recognition and success. Among these are soca, dancehall and reggaeton, all forms that had been inextricably tied to native cultural expressions, but have become increasingly popular as global commodities, particularly as web-based streaming platforms (e.g. YouTube) enhance their global audiovisual mobility. Numerous artists within these genres have become internationally recognized superstars, and many of the most recent tracks reflect an increasing co-mingling with American ‘pop’ music, as record companies seek to invigorate mainstream sounds with these ‘exotic’, yet widely popular artists. This article explores representations of scalar territorial identity as articulated in music videos from within these genres so as to evaluate how identity intersects with profit-driven models applicable to the contemporary music industry. By evaluating imagery from a regionally representative sample of music videos, they identify the intimate relationship between identity, scale and cultural production. Ultimately, we interrogate how place-based identity is commodified in these representations and whether certain images are constructed more for transnational consumption than an articulation of a coherent local national, or regional identity.


2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 692-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
deborah davis

over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. in terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. at the same time, however, income distribution has become increasingly unequal. some scholars therefore emphasize the negative exclusionary and exploitative parameters of the new consumer culture seeing nothing more than a ruse of capitalism or marker of all that is negative about post-socialist city life. building on nearly a decade of fieldwork in shanghai, this article disputes such a linear interpretation of subordination and exclusion in favour of a more polyvalent and stratified reading that emphasizes individual narratives unfolding against memories of an impoverished personal past, and a consumer culture that simultaneously incorporates contradictory experiences of emancipation and disempowerment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
Christine Capetola

In 1986, Janet Jackson forever changed the direction of pop music and its music videos with the release of her third and breakthrough album, Control. Working with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, choreographer Paula Abdul, and director Mary Lambert, Jackson created songs and videos that conveyed a new kind of feminist affect that intertwined individual stories of endurance, the forcefulness of relatively new digital music technology, and Black and female collectivity. In this article, I chart how Jackson transmitted this feminist affect through what I call hyperaurality, or sounds and vibrations that work in excess of the limitations of visual representation. Through tracing the affective excesses of Jackson’s visuals, sounds, and movements, I unpack how hyperaurality both intensifies and reintegrates the senses of sight, hearing, and feeling. In the process, I posit that vibration, or sound’s materially felt oscillations, works as a point of connection across these three aspects of hyperaurality. By demonstrating its connective power, I assert that vibration is a source of affective politics within popular music, one with the power of repurposing capitalism's excesses.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Chan ◽  
Wang Xueli

In recent years, there has been a phenomenal rise in the popularity of South Korean television dramas, pop music, movies, fashion and celebrities in East and Southeast Asia. Korean television dramas are a significant component of this cultural diffusion known as the ‘Korean Wave’. Through focus group interviews with female viewers in Singapore, this study seeks to explore how Singaporean women make sense of Korean TV dramas (K-dramas) as female subjects living in the gender hierarchy of their society, and how K-dramas become resources for reflexivity for them.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jihee Hong

The period around 1900 marks the threshold from “not knowing” to “knowing” about Korea. During this time the first German-language travelogue appeared. The study is based on four selected travelogues written between 1880 and 1915 and analyzes the representational strategies of the text and pictures on their “knowledge of Korea”. The material has hardly been explored to date. It is examined against the background of the complex relationship between travel literature and the generation and transfer of knowledge about the “other culture”, as well as the cultural practices and power structures associated with it. The perspective of the South Korean Germanist on the writings of “the others”, the German-speaking Europeans, about her “own” heritage, the Korean Culture, is extraordinarily revealing.


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