Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity around the world in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. This book presents a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in Korea through the feminist politics of care, bringing together intersecting narratives of marginalization to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a … [Read More]
Booklist: Contemporary culture and society
City in a Future Tense: The Making of a Smart City in South Korea [forthcoming]
Songdo, South Korea, is one of the earliest and most ambitious smart city projects. Mythical narratives have painted it as a promised land of the future where the problems and struggles of the present have been efficiently transcended—or concealed—by technology. In City in a Future Tense, Chamee Yang interrogates these myths and traces Songdo’s story to show how it … [Read More]
Profits of Queerness: Media, Medicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980 [forthcoming]
This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study reassesses South Korea’s tumultuous period of authoritarian development (1950–1980) through obfuscated but illuminating histories of “queerness,” defined as gender variance, same-sex sexuality, and atypical anatomies, among other nonnormative expressions. Rather than primarily view these topics through minoritarian and/or liberal lenses, Todd Henry adopts a universalizing approach to examine how social conformity … [Read More]
The Promised Republic: Developmental Society and the Making of Modern Seoul, 1961-1979
In The Promised Republic, Russell Burge offers a bold new history of South Korea’s rapid development. By focusing on the experience of rural-to-urban migrants who built and lived in Seoul’s shantytowns, Burge historicizes national development as a site of struggle with the urban poor at its center. What would a society of postcolonial abundance look like? … [Read More]
How Korean Corn Dogs Changed My Life
An addictive, tell-all memoir about what happens when you try to make your dreams come true – as well as a love letter to Korea Aged twenty-one, fuelled by a love of K-dramas and a need to find herself, Alice Amelia moves to Seoul. She knows no one in her adopted country, doesn’t speak the … [Read More]
Migration and Cross-Border Marriage in South Korea: Brokering Nationhood and Wifehood
Rather than treating them as logistical intermediaries, this book reconceptualizes the role of cross-border marriage brokers in South Korea, facilitating mobility while also helping to shape narratives around gender, family, and national belonging in contemporary Asia. Drawing on multi-sited, qualitative research – including discourse analysis of brokers’ online videos, interviews, fieldwork at an NGO, and … [Read More]
Korean Newtro: Where Youth Meets Tradition
Korea has become cool. While long seen as a bastion of traditions and customs that go back millennia, the country has now emerged as a playground of hip, trendsetting movements. At the heart of this coolness is, of course, Hallyu, the “Korean Wave” that seems to have penetrated every corner of the planet by now. … [Read More]
Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race
Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Author Min Joo Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men, and the Korean nation converge to … [Read More]
Beyond the Sewol: Activist Theatre and Performance in South Korea and the Diaspora
On the evening of April 15, 2014, the Sewol ferry set sail on its overnight journey from Incheon, in northwestern South Korea, to Jeju Island, 240 miles to the south. There were 476 people on board. After receiving a distress call from a passenger onboard, Harbor Affairs at Jeju and at Jindo Island both urged … [Read More]
Imperial Entertainers: Korean Women Performers from Military to Global Stages, 1937–75
The book uncovers the untold stories of Korean women performers who navigated successive waves of conflict as cultural laborers in military entertainment, offering insight into the intersection of war, gender, and culture in East Asia. Imperial Entertainers: Korean Women Performers from Military to Global Stages, 1937-1975 uncovers the untold stories of Korean women performers who navigated … [Read More]
I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan
Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror meets Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings in a meditation that blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore how the author’s love affair with K-pop has shaped her sense of self, charting K-pop’s complex coming-of-age through some of its biggest idols. I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan is a … [Read More]
Opposing Desires: The Contentious Politics of the South Korean Anti-LGBT Movement
In times of right-wing populists gaining traction worldwide, conservative Christians engage in both continuous and dynamic action forms to gain societal and political hegemony. Hendrik Johannemann delves deeply into the contentious practices of the South Korean anti-LGBT movement, investigating its roots, framing strategies, transnational ties, and political endeavors. Sociologists, political scientists and practitioners alike will discover … [Read More]
Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea
Anyone genuinely curious about what makes South Korean pop culture tick should look no further than Gangnam. Celebrated in a song by an unlikely K-pop superstar named Psy in 2012, Gangnam is the epicenter of Hallyu, the Korean Wave. It is an exclusive zone of privilege and wealth that has lured pop culture industries since the 1980s … [Read More]
Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics
Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi’s transmedia analyses unearth people’s experiences of “wormification”—traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped … [Read More]
The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea
The State’s Sexuality uncovers how the lives and work of women engaged in prostitution, long considered the most abased members of society, have been strategically intertwined with the lofty purpose of building South Korea’s postcolonial nation-state. Through a complicated, contradictory patchwork of laws and regulations, which Park Jeong-Mi conceptualizes as a “toleration-regulation regime,” the South Korean … [Read More]
State, Rural Women, and Domestication in Korea: The Aspiring Middle Class
This book explores the dynamic interactions between the state and society during the industrialization of South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on rural women as a marginalized social group. By illuminating rural women’s interactions with the state and their aspirations for entering the middle class, it effectively reveals insights into the gender and … [Read More]