Korean Internet Freaks and Gender Politics Sunyoung Yang
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“Loser” aesthetics: Korean internet freaks and gender politics Item Type Article Authors Yang, Sunyoung Citation Sunyoung Yang (2018) “Loser” aesthetics: Korean internet freaks and gender politics, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1503191 DOI 10.1080/14680777.2018.1503191 Publisher Taylor & Francis Group Journal Feminist Media Studies Rights © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Download date 29/09/2021 10:20:05 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Version Final accepted manuscript Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/628345 “LOSER” AESTHETICS: Korean internet freaks and gender politics Sunyoung Yang Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA Email: [email protected] ARTICLE HISTORY Received 4 August 2017 / Revised 17 July 2018 / Accepted 18 July 2018 ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, a new Internet freak culture emerged in South Korea in response to the rapid development of the Internet as well as the country’s neoliberal reforms. At this time, images of losers, freaks, and other “surplus” populations circulated online. This article examines the gender politics of “Internet freaks” through an analysis of one online fan forum, the Lee Joon Gi gallery of DCinside.com. Lee’s fan forum acquired a reputation through sexually charged posts from its female-user base in the late 2000s and is still active today. By appropriating attributes of online male culture and forms of communication, such as absurd statements, rudeness, and aggressive sexual expression, the users of this fan community created a carnivalesque space for themselves and subverted rigid Korean gender ideologies. Such parodies have transformed the fear of misogyny and sexism in the offline world into laughter online and become fertile ground for changes in gender politics in online spaces. KEYWORDS Internet culture; female fandom; sexuality; politics of aesthetics; carnivalesque; South Korea 1 Introduction While subversive Internet user communities based on humor and trolling have been popular worldwide, one such group in South Korea (hereafter Korea) has been rewriting the rules for how digital nonconformists can have a measurable impact on real world politics. Adopting the moniker “Internet freaks” (int’ónet p’yein)1, this loosely organized group of online protesters, critics, satirists, and trolls have been active on Korea’s DCinside.com, a well-known, anonymous Internet user forum based on the image board system and composed of thousands of “galleries” or interest groups. DCinside became popular because of its posts delineating the poor and unpromising lives of Koreans through comical, and sometimes graphic, parodic images. Users of DCinside have created self-deprecating labels for themselves including “Internet freaks,” the “pathetic” (tchijili), “otaku” (ot’ak’u), “idiots” (pyŏngjin), and “surplus (human)” (ingyŏ). Because DCinside affords anonymity, it has developed an atmosphere in which “anything goes,” including explicit language, impoliteness, and sexually charged posts. By and large, DCinside galleries have been a male-dominated forum. However, one notable female-led gallery is centered around the actor Lee Joon Gi and called the Lee Joon Gi gallery (hereafter the Joon gallery or “Joon gall,” the short-form name given to the gallery by its users, who are also called “Joon gallers”; I use Lee for Joon Gi Lee when I refer to him, or Joon Gi when my interviewees refer to him). Lee’s own fandom exploded after the box-office, record-breaking success of the film, The King and the Clown (Wang ŭi namja: Kwŏn 2005). In this film, Lee stars as Konggil, a beautiful male jester who is a female impersonator in a troupe of entertainers, and therefore, experiences being an object of men’s sexual desire. Through his performance as Konggil, Lee established his reputation as a talented actor with his androgynous appearance giving him the nickname kkonminam, meaning “good-looking 2 man with feminine characteristics” (Shin 2013, 98). As Jeeyoung Shin points out, Lee’s feminine masculinity appealed a great deal to women “who counter traditional values by being active, aggressive, and independent” (2013, 99). Lee’s fandom is an ideal forum to examine the evolving dynamics as new roles for both men and women and their changing sexuality are observed. The Joon gallery has successfully grown into one of the most popular galleries since the late 2000s by employing the same tactics, culture, and style of the male-dominated fora.2 How has the Joon gallery created space for itself within the largely masculine culture of DCinside? What kind of gender politics have Joon gallers developed in this online space? I first noticed the gallery through Nunhwa images. When I saw a series of images with the Nunhwa mask, I wondered, “What the heck are these?” But soon I found myself addicted to those images. I found the Joon gallery and eventually came to live on DCinside and the gallery day and night. I found that the Joon gallery was the perfect place for me to inhabit. I had mainly visited fan websites where I had to be polite and nice. It was fascinating that I could say anything, even curse. Madeleine,3 one of my interviewees, recalled the first time she ever saw a movie featuring Lee and entered the Joon gallery. Like Madeleine, most of my interviewees were similarly drawn to the Joon gallery because of the funny images attracting them to DCinside. I, too, found myself drawn to the Joon gallery by those images long before I started my research on DCinside. Called a “series of Nunhwa mask” (nunhwa t’al sirijŭ literally meaning “a series of Older Sister mask”), these images are intriguing. They always feature two characters: the image of Lee and one or more of Lee’s fans, Joon 3 gallers. These characters wear the same style of the traditional Korean mask Lee wore in The King and the Clown (Kwŏn 2005). Many scenes present situations in which Lee and the other characters are sexually involved with each other and with the other characters coaxing, trying to seduce, and successfully taking advantage of Lee’s online depiction. I was fascinated by the emergence of the Joon gallery because of the conflicting conditions that have shaped the gallery: Korea’s long-standing gender inequality and women’s marginalization, lack of public space for women’s voices in the “real/physical” world, and naturalized ideologies of ideal women. Ironically, female Internet users found space for themselves and weapons to fight back against those conditions in the male-dominant, sexist, and anonymous DCinside where anything, including women’s subordination, goes. These female Internet users appropriate attributes of online male culture and forms of communication, such as absurd statements, rudeness, and aggressive sexual expression to empower and emancipate themselves from expected gender norms and conformity. The Joon gallery deserves scholarly attention since its culture and code of conduct have played a leading role in bringing about more recent and diverse gender politics into online spaces. With intensified neoliberalization over the decades, extreme right-wing users from Ilbe.com4 and radical feminists such as Megalians5 have grown in conjunction with Internet freak culture. Online misogyny and feminist counterattacks have grown together in user communities over the decades since their formations. Korea’s much more visible feminist movement of Megalia started on DCinside in 2015 while retaliating against the misogyny of DCinside and its offspring, Ilbe and more broadly Korean society in general, both online and real (also referred to as “offline”). Jeong and Lee (2018) call the convergence of online and offline worlds and experiences “augmented” realities and 4 politics (2). The realities and politics in online and offline worlds have been augmented over a long time as Korea’s active “Me too” movements can be traced to Myŏnsun Kim, a female writer and musician in the early twentieth century’s colonial period and more recently campus feminist movements in the 1990s (Yi 2018). The origin of the Joon gallery in the male-dominant culture of DCinside delineates the historical minutiae of augmented realities and politics. For this paper, I draw on my anthropological field research conducted in both the online and offline worlds in Korea from 2008 to 2009 and 2017, as well as my continued online research in the years since.6 In this study, I examine two manifestations of gender: the character “Nunhwa”, created by Joon gallers and posts containing aggressive sexual expressions featuring Lee and the Nunhwa character together. I interpret the Nunhwa character as a collective identity that Joon gallers create for the purposes of expressing self-referential mockery. The Nunhwa character and Joon gallers are apathetic, particularly in terms of conventional beauty and femininity. While infused with sexuality, the fandom of the Joon gallery is in line with other examples of fandom and current popular culture in Korea. However, traditional representations of popular culture emphasize physical appearance, whereas Joon gallers depict themselves as grotesque, unpleasant, and “pathetic.” To uncover the political meaning underlying this Internet freak culture, I find Jacques Rancière’s theory of “the politics of aesthetics” useful. The culture of DCinside and the Joon gallery show how previously powerless—from conventional perspectives— groups are able to make their voices audible by bringing about “new modes of sense perception and novel forms of political subjectivity” (Rancière 2004, 9) through the use of new information and communication technologies. Rancière’s work offers valuable conceptual tools to consider the implications of posts produced by 5 DCinside users. Even though Rancière’s work is instructive, it does not adequately explain the rationale behind Joon gallers’ use of social outcast characters and the deliberately shoddy styles that constitute “loser aesthetics” popular on DCinside (Yang 2017) instead of some other form of self-expression.