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 analysing fans’ comments on YouTube, this article analyses 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 subjects of the gaze. Moreover, through active engagement online, fans transcend their status 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 behaviour, and masculinized gaze/feminized object – as embodiments of hybridized male femininity, which this article calls liminal masculinity.
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.
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 multiculturalism 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, multicultural discourses work to support the instrumental assimilation of the multiethnic other for the purposes of assimilating Korea within the ranks of “advanced” countries.
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.
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