Major League Baseball and Racialized Masculinities in Korean Digital Media

Abstract

This study examines discursively produced racialized masculinities in today’s global era through mediated Korean-born sport celebrities playing in Major League Baseball. Resisting traditionally unknown, excluded, or falsely simplified Asian male subjects under a dominant White-centered Western gaze, this study aims to demonstrate relationally and mutationally constructed masculinities in complex cross-racial/ethnic interactions. Given that South Korea is a place in which gender, race, sexuality, and nationality are dynamically shaped by the country’s colonial history and national desire for a global visibility, I focused on this context and analyzed its media texts from online news articles and the following readers’ comments, considering the interactive features in today’s news consumption. As diverse morphologies among men of color demonstrated, this study contends that racial and gendered meanings are constructed according to particular conditions and connectivities; thus, there is no fixed hegemonic masculinity in men’s relations.

An “ethnically unique” athlete: An analysis of media representations of Jeremy Lin during the 2010–2011 and 2016–2017 NBA seasons

“…Despite Asian masculinities having been historically subordinated (Choi, 2020), some scholarly work attempted to provide different understandings of them. Using the cases of Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming, Chon-Smith (2014) elaborates how these Asian male athletes challenged the bodily emasculation images of Asian/Asian American men.…”

Guest editorial

“…Several scholars have also researched digital and medial discourse dealing with topics such as the protest movement of Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe (Schmidt et al , 2019) on other digital media platforms like fora or digital news platforms. Further digital media topics included racism (Choi, 2020), athlete transgressions such as unethical behavior (e.g. doping, drug use; Sassenberg et al , 2018), discussions on the long-term consequences of concussions in American football (Cassilo and Sanderson, 2018, 2019) and crisis communication (Knight et al , 2019).…”