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UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IT IS ILLEGAL TO SHARE THIS PDF OR MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD PLEASE CONTACT [email protected] IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS PDF FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE Gender g&l (print) issn: 1747–6321 and g&l (online) issn: 1747–633x Language Article 1 ‘Where all my bad girls at?’: 2 cosmopolitan femininity through racialised 3 appropriations in K-pop 4 Joyhanna Yoo Garza 5 Abstract 6 This article examines the polyvalence of racial(ised) representations in K-pop 7 performances. The analysis of K-pop star CL’s (2013) song and video ‘Nappeun 8 gijibae’ (‘The bad girl’) demonstrates how the artist projects an assertive femi- 9 ninity by embodying and localising the Bad Bitch: a sexually agentive, polemi- 10 cal figure of womanhood from US hip hop. CL’s use of African American English 11 and conventionalised hip hop tropes helps resignify gijibae, a pejorative Korean 12 term for women. By shifting between decontextualised styles invoking a different 13 time and place, CL is able to build a kind of chronotopic capital that trans- 14 forms fragmented styles into an empowered cosmopolitan femininity. However, 15 although CL’s performance challenges Korean gendered norms in its use of local 16 linguistic resources, her selective appropriations of US Black and Chicanx cul- 17 tural signifiers reproduce narrow images of racialised femininities and reify a 18 hierarchy of valuation along lines of gender and race. 19 keywords: appropriation, embodiment, chronotope, Korean, performance 20 Affiliation 21 Joyhanna Yoo Garza 22 she/her/hers 23 Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA 24 email: [email protected] g&l vol 15.1 2021 1–31 https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.??? © 2021, equinox publishing UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IT IS ILLEGAL TO SHARE THIS PDF OR MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD PLEASE CONTACT [email protected] IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS PDF FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE 2 JOYHANNA YOO GARZA 1 Introduction 2 Since the early 1990s, Korean popular music, known as K-pop, has become 3 wildly popular, first making its way across various parts of Southeast and 4 East Asia and eventually achieving global reach. K-pop is widely consid- 5 ered the most palpable component of the so-called Korean Wave, a term 6 describing the visibility of South Korean culture around the world. The 7 transnational movement of K-pop artists since the ’90s, coupled with the 8 global circulation of music online facilitated by high-speed internet, has 9 dramatically increased the visibility of K-pop in recent years (Fuhr 2015). 10 Indeed, most scholars agree that Korean popular culture owes much of 11 its success to the coming of the digital age (Jin 2016). User-based media 12 such as YouTube have been particularly influential in crystallising K-pop’s 13 worldwide popularity (Ahn 2017). 14 With the rapid visibility of K-pop globally and its conspicuously mul- 15 tiracial fan base, the K-pop industry has come to occupy an ambivalent 16 position vis-à-vis racial(ised) representations. The issue of appropriation 17 usually arises with K-pop artists using historically and indexically linked 18 forms of embodied Blackness. The Korean fascination with Black cultural 19 forms is evidenced in the popularity and longevity of such reality compe- 20 tition shows as Show Me the Money and Unpretty Rapstar, which feature 21 Korean rappers who frequently sport Black cultural signifiers and may even 22 alter their skin colour and hair, often leading to controversy (Andy 2014; 23 Hydara 2017). Unsurprisingly, the interpretation and uptake of such K-pop 24 performances are often heatedly debated among fans, industry actors and 25 scholars, with some arguing that K-pop images reproduce painful racial 26 violence (Saleh 2019; Zeenah 2019; problematicidod 2020; Saeed 2020) 27 while others maintain K-pop provides a vision of (post)racial coexistence 28 (Oh 2014; General 2019). Suk-Young Kim (2020:90) succinctly summarises 29 this debate: 30 On the one hand, the performance of racial variants by K-pop idols and 31 fans has functioned as a visual means of deconstructing racial purity in 32 Koreans, but on the other hand, it has problematically internalized the view 33 that divides races into an imagined order. 34 Debates surrounding K-pop as a cultural phenomenon have tended to 35 bifurcate along an East-West distinction. For example, K-pop has been 36 described as a response to a long history of Western imperialist dominance 37 in the realm of pop cultural production (Hogarth 2013; Jin 2016). Others 38 claim such binary distinctions ignore the transnational roots of K-pop, 39 including the key influence of US Black musical genres in Korea’s music 40 industry dating back to the postwar era and continuing into the present UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IT IS ILLEGAL TO SHARE THIS PDF OR MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD PLEASE CONTACT [email protected] IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS PDF FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE ‘WHERE ALL MY BAD GIRLS AT?’ 3 1 day (Anderson 2020; Kim 2020). Furthermore, the East-West debates tend 2 to ignore the complex, global circuits of industry actors and fan networks 3 (Kim 2018). This perspective maintains K-pop has never been ‘purely’ 4 Korean in either its production or its consumer base. Thus, to treat it as 5 a cultural monolith or stable product misses the potentiality of examin- 6 ing K-pop as a multisited, contested nexus of complex, simultaneous pro- 7 cesses. K-pop represents a paradigmatic case of how mediatised images 8 are recruited for localised meaning-making and, conversely, how local 9 meaning is (re)signified within a global context (see also Hiramoto and 10 Park 2010; Hall 2014, 2019; Choi 2017; Hiramoto and Kang 2017; Kang 11 and Chen 2017). In other words, K-pop’s use of identifiably US Black (and, 12 increasingly, Latinx) cultural signifiers is not a matter of if appropriation 13 occurs, but how and to what effect. When considering scales of cultural 14 production and dissemination, scholarly inquiry must contend with the 15 ideological stakes of K-pop’s global circulation of racialising images; oth- 16 erwise, it may reify imagined racial orders if not reproduce epistemic and 17 ontological violence. 18 In this article, I analyse a K-pop performance that embodies the very 19 tensions highlighted by fans, industry actors and scholars. The perfor- 20 mance depends upon the racialised figure of the Bad Bitch, a sexually 21 agentive figure of womanhood originating in US hip hop. I demonstrate 22 the ways a globally recognised K-pop star named CL uses racialised lin- 23 guistic and nonlinguistic signifiers in her 2013 single ‘Nappeun gijibae’ as a 24 case study of the projection of the K-pop industry’s racialised imaginaries. 25 CL’s performance represents a simultaneity of seemingly incommensura- 26 ble semiotic processes, including both agentive femininity and problem- 27 atic racialising images. On one hand, CL’s transnational appropriation of 28 the Bad Bitch helps resignify gijibae ‘bad girl’, a pejorative gendered term 29 in Korean. By using linguistic and embodied practices linked to racialised 30 US street styles (e.g. b-girl style, chola aesthetics), CL projects a distinc- 31 tively cosmopolitan femininity. The Bad Bitch and its indexical qualities 32 are thereby mapped onto gijibae. However, as CL posits an agentive trans- 33 national femininity, she simultaneously reproduces reductive images of US 34 Black and Brown femininities. 35 The analysis thus demonstrates how K-pop performances may prolifer- 36 ate racialised personae while avoiding accusations of reductive mimicry. 37 The appropriated elements constitute what I call chronotopic capital: the 38 fragmented, decontextualised styles that invoke a different time and place 39 and thereby allow the performer – and by extension, the K-pop industry 40 – to profit from historically situated cultural signifiers. As I show, many 41 of the appropriated images in K-pop rely on earlier orders of indexical/ UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IT IS ILLEGAL TO SHARE THIS PDF OR MAKE IT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD PLEASE CONTACT [email protected] IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS PDF FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE 4 JOYHANNA YOO GARZA 1 chronotopic meaning that reproduce reductive scripts of personhood. This 2 movement of chronotopic capital results in a partial indexical bleaching, 3 a process by which semiotic markers become deracialised (Squires 2014). 4 These fragmented styles combine to produce the overall image in CL’s per- 5 formance – one of chronotopic futurity. 6 US Black influence in K-pop 7 In recent years, K-pop has become a globalised musical genre whose ori- 8 gins can be traced to the influence of US hip hop in South Korea in the 9 early 1990s. The first commercially visible traces of Korean hip hop orig- 10 inated with the band Seo Tae-ji and Boys (Fuhr 2015; Song 2019). Seo 11 Tae-ji’s unprecedented rap style and sound combined local and identifi- 12 ably US styles, a practice that would inform early K-pop’s success into the 13 present day. K-pop borrows not only from the various subgenres of hip 14 hop but also from Europop, R&B, dance music, dubstep and more. Part 15 of K-pop’s recent mass appeal is due to the wide range of music it encom- 16 passes and the Korean entertainment industry’s strategies for marketing 17 to ever-shifting patterns of global consumerism (Kim 2013). In addition to 18 its impressive visual aesthetics, part of K-pop’s global popularity is tied to 19 an early and sustained commodification of elements from US commercial 20 hip hop and R&B (Kim 2018; Anderson 2020).