Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking to interrogate the role of popular media in establishing and shaping gendered common sense, this volume fosters cross-disciplinary conversations linked by the central thesis that gender discourse and representation are central to the politics, aesthetics, and economics of contemporary South Korea. In the post-authoritarian period (the late 1980s to the #MeToo present), media representation and popular discourse changed the gender conventions that are found at the core of civic, political, and cultural debates.

​Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea maps the ways in which popular media and public discourse make the social dynamics of gender visible and open them up for debate and dismantling. In presenting innovative new research on the ways in which popular ideas about gender gain concrete form and political substance through mass mediation, our contributors investigate the discursive production of gender in contemporary South Korea through trends, tropes, and thematics, as popular media become the domain in which new gendered subjectivities and relations transpire. The essays in this volume present cases and media objects that span multiple media and platforms, introducing new ways of thinking about gender as a platform and a conceptual infrastructure in the post-authoritarian era.

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Jesook Song is Professor of Anthropology, affiliated with Women and Gender Studies, Sexuality Diversity Studies, and Korean Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Contents

Introduction: Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea | Michelle Cho and Jesook Song

Section I: Historicization of Media: Gender as Platforms and Polemics | Jesook Song

1. Feminism Reboot: neoliberalism, Korean Movies, Misogyny, and Beyond | Hee-jeong Sohn
2. Intermedial Feminism: Megalia and Kangnam Station Exit 10 | HyeYoung Cho, translated by Aliju Kim
3. The Birth of “Korean Manhwa and the Discourse of Gendered Realism Since the 1990s | Dahye Kim
4. Gendered Violence, Crisis of Masculinity, and Regressive Transgression in Postmillennial South Korean Crime Thrillers | Miseong Woo

Section II: Consuming Gender: Gendered Consumerism and Consumption of Gendered Claims | Jesook Song

5. Female Pathology and the Marginal Humor in a Thrift Podcast: Kim Saengmin’s Receipts | Bohyeong Kim
6. Against Confinement: Degeneration, Mental Disability, and the Conditions of Nonviolence in The Vegetarian | Eunjung Kim
7. Gendered Mediation in Yun Sangho’s Saimdang: Memoir of Colors | Youngmin Choe
8. “I Can Speak Because I Am a Mother”: The Trope of Motherhood in Mothers’ Political Activism Relating to the Sewol Ferry Disaster | Jinsook Kim

Section III: Pop Remediation: Beyond Binary Gender Forms | Jesook Song

9. A Spunky Girl Meets a Queer Boy: Neoliberal Remediation of the Post-Authoritarian Period in the Korean Reply TV Series | Hyun Gyung Kim
10. The Emergence of “Daughter-Fools”: The Mediation of Masculinity via New Fatherhood After the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis | Yoon Heo
11. Discontent with Gender and Sexuality in Painter of the Wind | Sunyoung Yang
12. BL-ing Bromance, Bromancing Ŭiri: Investigating Inter-Male Intimacy in Contemporary Korean Cinema | Moonim Baek

Source: publisher’s website